Great American Novel

In this, our 34th episode of the Great American Novel podcast, the hosts tackle Colson Whitehead’s intriguing, interesting, and in some surprising ways challenging award-winning 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad.  This novel works with the premise that the antebellum freedom trail to the north for escaped slaves was not a series of safe houses and hiding spaces with the occasional guide, but instead an actual underground railway. How can something be in some plays completely and purposefully historically inaccurate yet also completely true at the same time?  How does our knowledge of real life slavery chronicles by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs complement and contradict the narrative here?  Why does Whitehead choose this meta-historical method rather than a straightforward narrative?   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. As always...there be spoilers here!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 trailer clip is from the streaming 10 episode mini-series film adaptation, The Underground Railroad, dir. Barry Jenkins for Amazon Prime Video, 2021.We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com. 

More celebrated for her dark, satirical short stories, Flannery O'Connor nevertheless burst on the literary scene in 1952 in her mid-twenties with her debut novel, Wise Blood. The story of a would-be preacher resistant to God's grace, the plot features some of the most bizarre and twisted left turns in American literature: self-blindings with lye, underaged ingenues named Sabbath, stolen mummies and gorilla suits, and enough vehicular homicides and car wreckage to make one renew one's AAA membership. For most readers, Hazel Motes's struggle to reconcile divine providence with the desire for free will is a tough conservative theology lesson to swallow. In this episode we explore how O'Connor employed the trope of the grotesque in Southern fiction to make her dogmatic point, asking whether the sheer weirdness of her characters distracts from her message.  

In Episode 32 of the Great American Novel podcast, we slip through time with Billy Pilgrim as we shuffle between the character’s experiences as a prisoner of war and first hand witness to the Dresden firebombing in World War II and then trip the light fantastic to the far flung planet Tralfamadore.  Or…do we?  Yes, this episode has your intrepid explorers hiding in Kurt Vonnegut’s masterful 1969 post-modern novel SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. We ponder the author’s central questions: are all war novels doomed to sensationalize war?  Can you capture such a horrific experience realistically? Must we become automatons to survive wars?  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. Brief correction: in the episode Scott states that the protagonist of The Forever War is frozen cryogenically; this is incorrect.  He is sent to places at relativistic speed and upon returning a great deal of time has passed.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 trailer clips are from the film adaptation, Slaughterhouse-Five, adapted in a screenplay by Stephen Geller, dir. George Roy Hill.We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com.

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.   

Dive into the depths of J.D. Salinger’s iconic work, where the complexities of adolescence take center stage. Explore the lasting cultural impact of 'The Catcher in the Rye' and its themes of teenage angst and rebellion. Discover how Salinger's reclusiveness and the novel’s legacy intertwine with societal issues and youth culture. The discussion examines deep emotional traumas, innocence, and the evolution of the coming-of-age narrative, while providing fresh perspectives on Salinger’s influence in literature and beyond.

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.