Great American Novel

Few novels have had the cultural impact of Jack Kerouac's speed-fueled mad dash across the continent in search of kicks as On the Road. One doubts the 1960s ever would have happened had Kerouac's Beat Generation coterie not inspired a mass embrace (and mockery) of bohemian jazz culture rebelling against the conformity of Eisenhower-era conservatism and Atomic Age anxieties. This episodes explores the background of Kerouac's famous experiment in spontaneous prose, noting its affinities with both the picaresque and the roman a clef. We talk such pivotal influences as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady and the steep price of fame the increasingly embittered Kerouac paid as he became the guru to the hipsters and hippies. And we do it all while snapping our fingers, Daddio. 

A couple of weeks ago—after this episode was recorded, but before it was edited and posted—the famous author Stephen King posted online his top ten novels of all time—and among them was Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools.  This 1962 book was the first novel by Porter, a great American writer who had mostly worked in the short story genre and as a journalist and editor.  The novel tells of a German passenger liner traveling from Mexico to different ports of Europe in the 1930s.  It presents a multinational, highly varied cast of characters.  Ship of Fools received rave reviews at first, before then suffering through the obligatory critical backlash. The film rights sold for what at the time was a kaboodle of money and the movie was nominated for and received a number of Academy Awards. Hosts Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough wrestle with these questions: is this work a great American novel after all?  Are we all fools bound on an eternal quest for understanding or relevance or fares with inclusive food and drinks?  Why did the author take thirty years (almost) to finish the book? Come steam away with us as we sort it out. 

Listeners are warned as always: there be spoilers here!

The film audio clips are from the trailer to Ship of Fools, directed and produced in 1965 by Stanley Kramer and starring Vivien Leigh and Lee Marvin, among others.  Released by Columbia Pictures. 

The show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a singularly unique war novel: whereas most depictions of the horrors of combat and the trauma of the battlefield are naturalistic, attempting to inflict upon the reader the violence the prose describes and terrifying us with the prospect that humans do not rise to heroic occasions, Stephen Crane's novel is impressionistic, blurring detail at the edges and giving scattershot glimpses of confusion, guilt, regret, and even envy and resentment. Through the story of Private Henry Fleming (aka "The Youth"), Red Badge is arguably the novel that best encapsulates the phrase "the fog of war," a term credited to the 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. In this episode we explore how Crane---who was not yet born when the battle of Chancellorsville that is the setting occurred---managed to capture the experience so authentically that Union veterans assumed he had worn the blue alongside them. The novel launched its twenty-four-year-old author into the type of fame few writers experience: as a journalist, pulp writer, and celebrity observer of international conflagrations (not to mention fan of bordellos), Crane epitomized the image of the author as a globetrotting adventurer---an image only elevated to tragic irony when he died from tuberculosis in 1900.   

The Great American Novel Podcast episode 28 considers JD Salinger’s landmark 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye.  Your hosts discuss Salinger’s famous reclusiveness, the book’s continuing appeal, and its influence on both the genre of so-called “young adult literature” and post-breakdown lit.  We examine the novel in its role of the creation of the American teenager as a marketing sector and artistic project.  We don’t dodge the thorny issues of Salinger’s life while separating artist from the art, and perhaps we even disagree, just a little, on where we place this novel when all is said and done. 

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 which 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. 

Correction: in the episode Scott refers incorrectly to George Bush as an Army Air Force Pilot; he was a naval pilot.

Intro and outro music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.  

We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com.

Often hailed as the quintessential exemplum of Reagan-era postmodernism, Don DeLillo's eighth novel, White Noise (1985), is part academic satire, part media excoriation, and part exploration of the "simulacrum" or simulated feel of everyday life. With its absurdist asides on the iconicity of both Elvis and Hitler, the unrelenting stress of consumer choices (the supermarket is the site of modern neuroses), and the pharmacopic management of anxiety, the novel can sometimes feel a little smirky, a little too self-consciously zany, in its treatment of 1980s' suburban life. But readers interested in what DeLillo has to say about the emotional connections between husbands and wives and fathers and children will find a deeper, more somber effort to de-clutter the static of misinformation systems and chemical controls, whether in the blood or in the air, to forge organic bonds. To call White Noise the Babbitt of the "Greed is Good" era is no slight---DeLillo may have written better and more important books (including Libra, his treatment of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination) but this is the novel that best captures the weird unease of the second-to-last decade of the twentieth century.    

The 26th episode of the Great American Novel Podcast delves into Carson McCullers’ 1940 debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Published when the author was only 23, the novel tells the tale of a variety of misfits who don’t seem to belong in their small milltown in depression-era, 1930s Georgia.  Tackling race, disability, sexuality, classism, socialism, the novel catapulted McCullers to fame.  It’s been an Oprah book and it’s been adapted to film.  The Modern Library chose it for its list of 100 best novels in English of the 20th Century.  But the question asked by your intrepid hosts is this: is it truly a great American novel?

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. 

Intro and outro music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.  Clip from the trailer for the 1968 film The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, directed by Robert Ellis Miller, with lines spoken by Sondra Locke.

We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com.

Published in 1881, The Portrait of a Lady was Henry James's seventh novel and marked his transition away from the novel of manners that only three years earlier had made his novella Daisy Miller a succès de scandale toward the more meticulous, inward study of individual perception, or what would come to be known as psychological realism. The story of an independence-minded young woman named Isabelle Archer who visits distant relatives in England, the novel broadens James's trademark theme of American innocents confronting the corrupt sophistication of European cosmopolitans to explore the sussing out of hidden and deceptive motives. As Isabelle is drawn into a marital trap set for her by a conniving Madame Merle and the odious, controlling aesthete Gilbert Osmond, James questions not only the meaning of marriage, money, and friendship but how we read social signals. Only too late does Isabelle recognize that a gesture can be a guise, but her response to her predicament makes her one of the most compellingly ambiguous heroines in American literature.     

Great American Novel Podcast 24 considers Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, which shut the door on the 60s and sped down the freeway into the 70s, eyes on the rearview mirror all the while.  In a wide-ranging discussion which touches not only upon Didion and her screenwriter husband but also John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, the Manson cult, the Mamas and the Papas and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, we drive down the interstate with Didion and her Corvette as we consider Hollywood, Las Vegas, the desert, Hippies and Hipsters, and the legacy of the 1960s.  As always, listeners are warned, there be spoilers here.

 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. 

Intro and outro music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.  Clip from the trailer for the film Play It As It Lays, dir. 1972 by Frank Perry, monologue spoken by Tuesday Weld, written by Didion and John Gregory Dunne.  Excerpt from “Rattlesnakes” by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, on the album Rattlesnakes, 1984 Polydor/Geffen, prod. Paul Hardiman.

We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com.

William Faulkner's fifth published novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), is a self-described tour de force that the author cranked out in roughly two months while working as the night manager at the University of Mississippi power plant in his hometown of Oxford. This dark tragicomedy about a family on a quest to bury its matriarch helped win the author his early reputation for sadistically heaping woe and misfortune upon his Southern grotesques but has more recently come to be seen as a complex artistic effort to empathize with the often marginalized rural population in America whose supposed primitivism leads to the caricatures found in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, two contemporaneous novels. Telling the story of the Bundren family through fifteen different narrators and a tapestry of styles that weaves dialect with hypnotic poetry, Faulkner crafted a tightly plotted but expansively interiorized tale in which unforgettable characters such as Addie, Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman cope with grief, language, and understanding. If you've ever wondered why the phrase "My mother is a fish" is a meme, this podcast is for you. 

In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 22, we wrestle with the old Thoreau quote "The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation" as we delve into the soul-sapping mid-century suburbs in Richard Yates' 1961 novel Revolutionary Road.  Join the hosts for a  conversation that considers other suburban chroniclers such as Updike and Cheever and other  treatments from the film adaptation to Mad Men to Seinfeld.  Ultimately the hosts have to confront this essential question: not whether they should move to France, but whether we can call Revolutionary Road a Great American Novel?  Listeners are warned: there be spoilers here. 

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. 

All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.  Revolutionary Road film dir. Sam Mendes, 2008.

We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com.

Only thirty years old this year, Ernest J. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying (1993) is a powerful testament to social justice and to the search for individual dignity in an oppressive legal system. Set in the late 1940s in a small Louisiana community, the book tells the story of two men, one a convicted murderer on death's row (Jefferson) and the other his reluctant tutor (Grant) who is asked to teach the doomed man how to face death and injustice with a sense of self-worth. Almost instantly canonized upon publication, A Lesson Before Dying is a deceptively straightforward work. Although eminently accessible, it asks weighty questions about the complicity of state-sanctioned execution and the healing power of community. Electric with religious imagery, it challenges readers' sense of the purpose of faith and the elusiveness of truth. Most of all it makes a passionate plea for relinquishing personal bitterness and finding transcendence in serving others.

In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 20, your fearless (or is it feckless) hosts find themselves in the damp swamps and thick scrublands of north central Florida in the post-Reconstruction era as we struggle to survive with the settlers of the brush country in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Pulitzer Prize winning 1938 novel, The Yearling. We discuss how this Maryland native came to work with the editor of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, and how she came to love the Florida brush country she wrote about.  

As always, these discussions are operating according to the rules of literary criticism, or as Melville might have put it, there be spoilers here.

 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. 

All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.  The theme to "Rawhide" was written by Ned Washington and Dimitri Tiomkin, 1958, performed by Frankie Laine.  Trailer for The Yearling, 1946, dir. Clarence Brown, produced by Sidney Franklin, released by MGM. 

We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com.

Season three kicks off with a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist whirl-a-gig Gravity's Rainbow. Originally published on February 28, 1973, this encyclopedic inquiry into the systematicity of existence, power, and technology was just this week described by Esquire as "one of the weirdest, richest, most frustrating, inscrutable, brilliant, gorgeous, exhilarating, inexplicable, disgusting, hilarious, remarkable, and goddamn frustrating again novels ever published in America"---a novel so discombobulating, in fact, that the Pulitzer board refused to award it the fiction prize it assuredly deserved for its sheer display of ambition and erudition.  Ostensibly about an American Army lieutenant, Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual adventures in World War II-blasted London predict German V2 rocket bombings, Gravity's Rainbow encompasses so much more than a plot. With nearly 400 (often wackily named) characters and wild tangents into shadowy conspiracies hatched by secret organizations with names like ACHTUNG and PISCES, the narrative tries to find some natural humanism within the wide battery of political bureaucracies and regulatory bodies that administrate lives and minds. As we decide, Pychon's heart is always with the counterforce, with those who by letting their lives run counter to the machine transcend the inevitable rainbow's arc of precision that's meant to keep us all in our place and the trains running on time. Love it or hate it, Rainbow's Gravity feels like riding a rocket: we can only strap in and feel the G-force.   

In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 18, our final Season 2 episode, we plunge ourselves into New Orleans of the fin de siècle in Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening. Edna Pontellier wrestles with a life she never chose, beset by a bore of a husband, a flimsy excuse for a lover, and a patriarchal society which has tried to restrain her choices to almost nothing. One of the great early feminist novels, we discuss its slow but steady climb from obscurity to ubiquity.

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. 

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.

Saul Bellow's 1953 breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March is perhaps, of all the great American novels we've discussed, the one whose cultural imprint has faded the most. Even among Bellow fans this freewheeling exploration of American identity tends to take a backseat to subsequent classics such as Herzog (1964) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975).  Yet for readers who recognize the Whitmanesque strain within Bellow's insistently intellectual worldview, Augie March offers a garrulous, propulsive portrait of the representative American as a picaro, the rogue hero who lives by his wits. In this epic novel in which the journey itself is the destination, Bellow synthesizes a host of influences (Cervantes, Henry Fielding, Twain, Dickens) to celebrate the sheer gusto of American exuberance and the foundational belief that the self is one's clay to mold without rules to follow.  If as one original reviewer declared, Augie March is a rolling stone (a decade before that term became synonymous with rock 'n' roll), this rambling, swaggering embodiment of restless American energy is more Muddy Waters than Bob Dylan: perfectly happy to keep on keepin' on, Augie March doesn't need "no direction home."  

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.  

For this 16th episode we went a different route and discuss a smorgasbord of fine American Noir, novels about detectives and criminals and femme fatales and button men, gunsels and grifters, sharps and snakes.  We discuss works by Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy B. Hughes, Vera Caspary, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Jim Thompson,  and Horace McCoy. 

 Film audio clips are from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) and The Big Sleep (Howard Hawkes, 1946).  

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.  As always, the views of the hosts do not necessarily reflect the views of their home institutions. 

John's Steinbeck's 1939 tale of an "Oakie" family who crosses Route 66 seeking to escape the Dust Bowl only to discover California isn't the paradise it's been advertised as is one of the most iconic Great American Novels in our literary history. Its impact was profound and immediate: rarely has a novel been so viciously denounced simply for promoting the belief that all Americans deserve to make a living. But the novel has also been celebrated as a testament to democratic protest, inspiring folks songs by Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen that have in turn been covered by later generations of musicians such as Rage Against the Machine. This episode explores what makes the novel such a fan favorite, as well as the pros and cons of tackling politics in literature. We examine the curious role of Steinbeck's intercalary chapters, which, alternating with the story of the displaced Joad family, raise their plight to mythic levels. We also dig deep into the journalistic inspiration for the novel as well as its Hollywood legacy with John Ford's classic 1940 adaptation. 

The 14th episode is a ride into the evening redness in the west as your hosts consider one of the more notorious books on our short list: Cormac McCarthy’s epic subversive western, BLOOD MERIDIAN, or, The Evening Redness in the West.  This 1985 tome of McCarthy’s has engaged constant discussion and speculation due to the high poetry of its language and the stark horror of its violence.  Saddle up and touch your heels to your horse to hear our wide-ranging discussion of this novel.

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 those of the hosts and do not reflect the views of their home institutions. 

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.

Willa Cather's most famous novel was published only two months before the Armistice ended the bloodshed of the Great War, and in its powerfully imagistic portrait of Midwestern homesteading, it offered readers an emotional connection to the nation's founding myth of pioneer fortitude. Yet My Ántonia wasn't just a story about pilgrims' progress across the prairies: it was a story of immigrants struggling to realize the American Dream that appeared in an era of extreme xenophobia that will feel painfully resonant to contemporary readers. In telling the story of the resilient Ántonia Shimerda and other "hired girls" from Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic) and other Eastern European states, Cather paid tribute to real-life migrants she had grown up with in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a small but artistically vibrant train depot that today does a thriving business in Cather tourism. In addition to Cather's powerful style and her warm memories of farming struggles, we focus on the friendship between Ántonia and the orphaned narrator, Jim Burden. At the end of the day, My Ántonia is possibly the greatest story about a platonic friendship between a woman and a man in American literature.    

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.  

In Episode 12 our intrepid profcasters lay into the most controversial novel of the 20th Century, Vladimir Nabokov’s LOLITA.  Is it Great?  Is it American?  What do we make of the controversies, the films?  We tackle the book and try to search for the real Dolores Haze within the text, and consider the best way to read Humbert Humbert, much less how we should pronounce his name (not to mention the author's). 

Film trailer clips are from the Kubrick 1962 film and the 1997 film by Adrian Lyne.  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.