Great American Novel

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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. 
 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.   
 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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It’s 1976. A woman named Reno in leather motorcycle gear descends upon the Bonneville Salt Flats on a state of the art Moto Valera motorcycle. Is speed her goal?  Is it the land art created by her tracks across the flats?  Is her rolling crash meant to serve as a metaphor for the next two years of her life?
 In this episode your intrepid hosts return to an era and setting that at least one of them never particularly wanted to visit: the art scene of New York in the 1970s. Join us for this rousing discussion of Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethowers, which juxtaposes the avant garde art scene of the late seventies with motorcycle speed races, land art, and the Italian Red Brigade Movement of 1977.  When is it the message and when is it the medium? Where are the dividing lines between style and substance? Is it revolution or posture?  The Flamethrowers was a National Book Award Finalist; Kushner is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.  
 The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter.  All opinions are their own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. 
Audio from the trailer for Girl on a Motorcycle, 1968, dir. Jack Cardiff, starring Marianne Faithfull. Produced by Adel Productions / Mid-Atlantic Film (Holdings).
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/.
We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com.
 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/.