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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 year 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/.

Send us a text

Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms is probably the most famous war novel in American literary history. Inspired by his own wounding on the Italian front shortly before his nineteenth birthday, Hemingway tells the story of a disillusioned American serving in a foreign army, Frederic Henry, who falls in love with a Red Cross nurse, Catherine Barkley, shortly before the disastrous rout the Italians suffered at Caporetto in late 1917, which Frederic barely survives. In an epic tale that explores the tragedy of love amid combat, Hemingway offers a brutally naturalistic portrait of the Great War that somehow manages to be stylistically beautiful. In this episode we explore the biographical background of the plot, the Italian history that Hemingway managed to cull from his studies (the novel takes place before his own time in Italy), and the question of whether love and war hasn't become one of the hoarier cliches in the literature of soldiers in battle.