Great American Novel

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934) has always sparked great debate about whether it is a noble botch or a modernist classic because its non-chronological form, confounding character motivation, and intrusive narrative voice all seem so compellingly imperfect. In 1951 the literary critic Malcolm Cowley even published a "corrected" edition in which he reordered the novel so it unfolded in sequence---to no avail in critical estimantion. In this story of the talented psychologist Dr Dick Diver and his traumatized wife Nicole we find modernism writ large with events that symbolize the dissipation and diminution of talent and "repose," despite the Divers' surface glamour that makes Americans abroad flock to them in fashionable seasons. And can contemporary readers empathize with the fatal flaw of Dick, whose need for female approval leads him to pursue an adulterous flirtation with ingenue actress Rosemary Hoyt? Ultimately, Tender is a book about falling apart and recognizing that the pieces won't go back together again, not even if you're a rich expatriate living on the French Riviera in the mid-1920s.  
Canon Fodder: Kirk recommends Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin.
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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Episode 40 of the Great American Novel Podcasts discusses one of the great American novels of the Twentieth Century, one that is perhaps more significant and relevant now than it has been in quite some time.  In this episode your feckless hosts discuss All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize winning novel.  Warren tells the story of Willie Stark, a country boy turned crusading attorney turned backroom deal-making, power-wielding governor of a southern state during the Depression era, whose integrity is battered by the prevailing winds of need and corruption and ambition. Stark is inspired by and associated with Louisiana Governor and US Senator Huey “Kingfish” Long.  One of the questions asked by your hosts is whether or not readers are better served by casting aside the real life inspiration and focusing instead on the stories of Stark as well as of Jack Burden, the former reporter turned fixer, and his longtime friends Adam and Anne Stanton. Warren is the only writer who has received the Pulitzer for both fiction and poetry; he was also a winner of the National Book Award and was a Rhodes Scholar as well as a winner of both the Guggenheim Genius Grant and the MacArthur Fellowship. 
 Mini-clips of trailers from All the King’s Men, 1949, dir. Robert Rossen, and All the King’s Men, 2006, Steven Zallian.  
Canon fodder for this episode Is Inman Majors’ 2009 novel, The Millionaires.  
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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In 1997 Philip Roth entered a brilliant late phrase of a career that no one really saw coming. While certainly one of the greats of later twentieth century American fiction, he was widely seen as spinning variations on his favorite fixations, sex and women (not necessarily in that order). But with American Pastoral he took on history and into the lives of solid citizens a force of violent disorder he called "the berserk." For most of his life Seymour "Swede" Levov seems gifted by God: a handsome, celebrated athlete, a proverbial hero to New Jersey Jewish communities seeking mainstream assimilation. But then one day in 1968 his teenage daughter Merry commits an act of violence reminiscent of those fabled homegrown terrorist bombers the Weathermen, and suddenly the lives of the Swede and his dreamboat wife Dawn are sucked into the maelstrom of the radical 1960s. Widely considered one of Roth's greatest accomplishments---despite some persistent questions about narrative form and the digressive lack of dramatizing---American Pastoral finds Roth poking at that national myth of self-making, the American Dream (a term we hate!), and asking where such a thing as the American idyll truly exists. 
Canon Fodder: Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document .
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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And now for something completely different.  In its 38th episode, the Great American Novel Podcast throws away its foundational genre with no more regard for decorum than cats and dogs shacking up in sheer defiance of the apocalypse. In this episode we instead consider a host of short story collections held to be so coherent, so cohesive, and so excellent that they are often considered as novels. 
 We ponder: are these books novels?  Are they greater than the sum of their parts?  Are they worthy of their places in the canon?
 Your hosts consider and discuss Wineberg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson; In Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway; Cane, by Jean Toomer; Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Catherine Anne Porter; Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner; Love Medicine, by Louise Erdich; and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. 
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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Walker Percy's 1961 debut novel The Moviegoer---which shocked the literary world when it came out of nowhere to win the National Book Award against some stiff competition---may strike contemporary readers as an elusive novel. The first-person, present-tense voice feels contemporary enough, but the narrator, the New Orleans stockbroker John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling, isn't a rebel without a cause, a Bohemian adventurer, or an angry young man like many heroes of the Eisenhower/Kennedy era. Instead, he's a thirty-year-old Korean War vet in a state of ennui, living life without a sense of engagement, not necessarily adrift (he's successful enough at his job), but without a driving sense of purpose or meaning. The Moviegoer is perhaps the quintessential philosophical novel of the mid-20th century: it's about Binx and his cousin Kate's parallel quest to understand what it means to be alive. In this regard, it's an existential novel, a term that needs some defining: Percy was one of our great dramatists of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who insisted that the struggle for authenticity through lived experience was the closest path to God. The result can feel episodic and abstract, and maybe even frustrating since the New Orleans setting feels like a backdrop and not a social scene. (How exactly this novel is "Southern" is one of the great critical debates surrounding it). But Percy, a graduate of medical school, was a supreme diagnostician of the soul sickness that arose from postwar prosperity and consumerism. The Moviegoer isn't as much about popular culture but about the work it takes to feel you are the author of the movie of your life, and not the audience.   
Canon Fodder: Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
 All opinions are the hosts' own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.