Episode 22: Rambling Along the REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

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."