Latest / The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast / Episode 78: The Great American Novel

Transcript

Episode 78: The Great American Novel · The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast

• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: this is the mooks and the gripes podcast hello everybody this is trevor and you don't know about him without you have been listening to the mooks and the gripes podcast for some time paul paul how are you doing i am doing great i am i've got spring fever i'm loving you know the warm weather and
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: just you feel that buzz in the air.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: I always love the transition between seasons and I'm feeling it strongly today.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is a particular, particularly fun one to transition into for me.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's, it's, it's your favorite, right?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like it is.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: So it must, I mean, isn't that what, I guess that's what favorite means, right?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: I, I go back and forth.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think for me, it's either spring or fall.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I love both, but yeah, I don't know.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to beat this time of year, especially if like,
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: This wasn't a particularly dreary winter or anything, but sometimes when you've had a long winter, it's especially nice.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: But either way, it's always nice to see all the birds coming out and the leaves and everything.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, it's great.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: For some reason, this one just feels like I mean, this morning I woke up early because there was just some beautiful birds singing outside like 530.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: In the morning.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: That made me happy.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that would not happen.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Most other times when I woke up that early.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Birds are one of the few who can get away with it.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Especially if you see them.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: They look so happy when they're singing.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm definitely leaning into the old man bird watcher kind of thing.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: I am too.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Bird feeders in our backyard.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: And nothing makes me smile more than when you see one of them just sitting on the tree.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Just letting it all out.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, all right.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we are here today for our next episode.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: As we kind of mentioned in the last episode, we will be talking about the great American novel.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: But before we do that, just a little bit of business.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: We do want to thank one of our most recent Patreon supporters.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Josh, I know that there's an email associated with this and that I can see, but no other way for me to know the last name.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I will just want to say thank you, Josh.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: That was so nice.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So nice to see you.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we appreciate your support.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And hope that you enjoy the early episodes.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hope that you enjoy the periodic bonus episodes.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: We've got one coming up that we're going to probably be recording next weekend.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've all confirmed.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: As we mentioned in the last episode, we'll be rejoining Anthony Garrett to talk about...
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: uh, poetry, not necessarily talk further about poetry, but more, I think to share some of our favorite poems.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Just for a little bit.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Cause that was so fun, that conversation.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that'll be coming out, uh, shortly on Patreon and sub stack for, uh, for those who are lending their support that way.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And as I mentioned, you know, love to figure out a way, maybe someday to make that one more readily available.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, uh,
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: We'll figure something out like that.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: But we do also want to make sure that we're showing our support in some way other than, you know, thank you, which I know, you know, I know, I think people are supporting for multiple reasons, but we also want to give back in ways that are unique, I guess.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: For sure.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you, Josh.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what have you been reading, Paul?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: You teased me on Instagram.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: You let me know a book you were finishing.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then since you're starting something new, I wasn't sure if that was because you didn't know what you were starting or because you were like...
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Legitimately teasing.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: No, it was actually probably more of the former, but a little bit.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've talked about this from time to time.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in that delicious spot where I've had a lot of books going and a lot of them are ending all around the same time, which is kind of sad, but it also makes you realize, oh,
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: My options are very open right now.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a few that I'm thinking about.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: I can, you know, I'm still looking at Ben-Hameen Labatout's The Maniac, which I got right away and have not yet read.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I know we talk about Mark Haber all the time, but.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: his new one that we each got a little sneak peek at.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: I've dipped into it, but I'm thinking it might be time to kind of dive all the way in.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So those are the teasers of what I'm thinking.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: But the one that I just finished last night, I wanted to talk a little bit more about.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned it on our last episode just briefly, and it's Border by Kasabova.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I just loved it so much that I wanted to make sure that I spent a little more time talking about it.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's just such a great book.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: It does such a wonderful job of blending, you know, history, travel, nature, and then especially the personal profiles of the different people in the regions.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so I forget, you've read it or you haven't?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: I have.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I read it last year.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Really, really, really, really enjoyed it.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Didn't it remind you quite a bit of Patrick Lee Fermer?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Just the style.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, which I was it made me want to go back and read more of his stuff, too.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I was just going to read a couple of quick excerpts since I didn't get a chance to do that last time.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the first one comes from the introduction and it says history is written by the victors, they say.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: But it seems to me that history is written above all by those who weren't there, which may be the same thing.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: i had a hunger to look into the faces of those who are there hear their stories eat with them learn new words what does it take to dwell in a borderland so infused with ancient and modern myth so psychically magnetized none of us can escape boundaries between self and other intention and action dreaming and waking living and dying perhaps the people of the border can tell us something about the liminal spaces
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I read that, I was just like right away, I could tell both the beautiful style of writing, but I love that she, you know, is looking at it through the faces of the people who are living it.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I really loved that introduction.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then just a couple more quick excerpts, just to give you a glimpse of both the personal profiles I was talking about, but also just, she is such a wonderful writer.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: So here's one more excerpt.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: It says,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: A utopia that has gone wrong in exactly the ways in which it should have gone right deserves a minute of silence and a lot of reflection.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And here, it had gone even more wrong than elsewhere, which is why the locals had an insight into something usually experienced in war, collective heartbreak.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: There were no champagne socialists in the valley in the valley, no anti-globalists, no anti-communists, no anti-capitalists, just survivors.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: The women were old, the men were lonely, and the children were gone.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Forgotten by justice, the survivors celebrated small successes, and life in the village in the valley was sweet and broken.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in charge of a dying village, a death foretold, the mayor said.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: He had joined us at the outside table for a coffee.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: As my great aunt would say when the ember reading wasn't good, all I can do is make people's lives as good as possible, which isn't difficult, they're happy with so little.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: His great-aunt had been a fortune reader, but the mayor was a pragmatist, a car mechanic who'd spend his life in Burgess with grease up to his elbows.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: He went around in flip-flops and shorts, fixing everybody's car for free.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: But even a pragmatist couldn't help having the odd dream, and he loved his village so much that he had built a playground for the absent children.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was just like a snippet of one of the many examples like that where she does such a beautiful job of capturing the heartache, but also the optimism of this region where there's just been decades of conflicts and wars and controversies and things like that.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: But I love how she doesn't shy away from the sadness.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like that line, the women were old, the men were lonely, and the children were gone.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: well to me that was just such a gut punch but then to hear the mayor like still voicing this optimism and walking around fixing people's cars for free and building playgrounds for all the children who aren't even there anymore i thought it was just really poignant and beautiful so anyway i just wanted to give that a little bit more of a spotlight because um like i said i loved it and as we mentioned last time there's
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: two more out and another one beyond that that's publishing very soon here so i can't wait to just continue to dive in further have you read any of her other ones to the river or any of the others i haven't yet i have the the next two elixir and to the river um and then i'm definitely going to be getting anima the a wild pastoral that comes out in august and they're they're such great additions from gray wolf that we have here the the
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: paper feels great the outs you know i don't know the art on the on the cover i was noticing really really love them no i agree that's a great point because they are they they're just there's a quality there that you don't always find in every book and like you said the cover art alone is just absolutely gorgeous it has a nice texture but just i was looking at the the cover of border and it's just that beautiful it almost looks like a watercolor um and it has such beautiful colors and everything so yeah just everything about these books
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: is wonderful.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: So if there's anybody out there who, like me, had it sitting on their shelf for months or years and hasn't picked it up yet, or if somebody wants to look for it at the bookstore, I would highly recommend it.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's wonderful.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just second that.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is excellent.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it does make me want to, I mean, I've wanted to for a time, but finally dig into the next two.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: In anticipation of the fourth, you know.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: And revisit Patrick Lee Furmer.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, as always.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: What about you?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: What have you been reading?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So for Poetry Month, I've been reading a lot of poetry, but in particular, kind of digging into Ada Limon.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Just loving her poetry.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Just loving it.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: I can't, you know...
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Again, that sense of wonder that we talked about last time, it's so good.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: But I also decided to, do you remember a couple of years ago, I was reading Purgatorio, Dante's Purgatorio, and then that new translation that NYRB Classics put out.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of thought, well, I want to go back and read Inferno.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: I've read it since I was in college.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: But what's the best translations?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: How do I do it?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a really good scholarly edition out there by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, his wife.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: He was the scholar.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: She was the poet.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really good.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I went, I've been reading Inferno, a canto a day of their edition.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been really, really fun.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: I get it so much more.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if it's because of their clarity or because I'm, you know,
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: more along where you know that mid my middle of midway through my my life and you know walking along the pathway kind of thing or you know it is a very clear clear translation in in terms of the writing and such but then they have um really i think helpful notes that i'm enjoying um i went out oh sorry just real fast do you know off the top of your head
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Off the top of my head, I don't remember.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I picked up recently the, is it the, I think it's the Library of America.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's the Everyman's is the one I picked up recently.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: It certainly isn't them.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is, I'm just opening it up here.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: These came out about 20, 22 years ago.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the ones I have are vintage now.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: So they, you know, somewhere along the line there, but they're, they're paperback.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if they're,
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: if they've been put into other editions, but I had the every man, or at least one of them, I have the, the divine comedy of every minute.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's not theirs that I had.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: So nice.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's really, I'm excited.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's been, it's been fun.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then they do have the next two as well in their own editions, but that's big, but you get through it pretty quick because it's dual language and,
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: But it's like 700 pages.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then we go on to the next one.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: You already filled out War of Peace.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: You were talking about how you needed a giant book to fill your life.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it needs something else to make me contemplate all of this stuff.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Gaze into the abyss.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's awesome.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: I have mentioned this before, but one of my very fondest memories of college is being in the tippy top of this really old building with the pipes running overhead and reading Dante's Inferno.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, you know how the rooms were too hot, but it was just...
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like I was right at the middle of like, I didn't think about the, yeah.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: The room was hazy.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to see through the dim light.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Weird students kept popping up with impertinent questions.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's funny.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's, that's amazing.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: I also just finished yesterday, Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's the second book of the Palliser sextet or whatever.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, six books of the Palliser series.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And anxious to move on.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: The next one is the Eustace Diamonds, which Backlisted did an episode on a while back and seems to be a favorite of these six novels.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm excited about that.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then the one after that is called Phineas Redux.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I have read that Phineas,
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Phineas Finn is almost seen as part one and Phineas Redux part two.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: it does read a little bit like that, like a, you know, a 600 page prologue.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, but I did enjoy it.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't put it up on the same tier as my absolute favorite trollops that have made my best of the year list for the last few years.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: But still enjoyable, still looking forward to the next one and getting through, through these because there's just, you know, even in the ones that I'm not like, Oh, I love everything about this.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: There is still much to love in them.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the one that I'm about to finish is McDonald Harris's Mortal Leap.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: This just came out from Boiler House Press in their Recovered Books line that we've talked about a time or two in the past.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: These are really...
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Nicely curated books that are, you know, kind of, you know, undiscovered gems.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say they're out of print for a long time.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And McDonald Harris, this one was published, I think, in the 60s.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I should have all this right in front of me.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: It really hasn't been in print since, but it is really good.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's about a young man.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: It starts with him at his home in Utah.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And he leaves in the first chapter and kind of puts off everything of his past, looking for something new.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: clean.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: He almost wants a negative existence, it seems, for a long time.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's during World War II, or at least the start of it, and he ends up being on a ship at sea that is sunk, and he's the only survivor, badly burned.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And a woman shows up and says, oh, that's my husband.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: So he goes with it.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Really interesting book about existence and identity and what makes us who we are.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this is from the very first, you know, there are a lot of passages.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is really well written, this book.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, you know, it's long to get to like even the ship scene and the wife coming, like I'm almost to the end of it.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And this is kind of a new development, but it is the main point of the book in terms of the blurb and all of that.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: but always well written and always kind of examining the question, who am I?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then it says, because the secret is that I don't know the answer to that question any more than you.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Behind the scars, behind the swimmer's tan, is something that even I myself have half forgotten.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Elusive, shadowy, the ghost of an old identity.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: There are times when for weeks on end I don't think of it, when everything is familiar and reassuring and I imagine I have always been as I am now, but the shadows are still there and then I ask myself, why not?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't it possible to carry shadows inside you and still live, love, sleep, be happy or bored like ordinary people who are the same all the way through like cheese?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Besides, who's made out of cheese?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then it just kind of goes on to this little digression in a way.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a good one.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's been intriguing throughout.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'll finish it probably here in the next couple of days and post some more thoughts on it on Instagram and such next week.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, one that I would recommend for sure.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: We keep talking about, I love the resurgence of just all these books that keep coming out from different publishers that could have been lost to time and they're getting some extra
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: spotlight it's nice and that press in particular is doing a great job of that too like we've said before and always a reminder that you know our topic today is on the great american novel there are probably many that would be candidates if only they were remembered or even read in the first place there are probably many candidates that have never been published and many that have
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then published, but then disappeared without anybody really knowing about them.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's very true.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: But let's get into that.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Are you ready for this?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm ready.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even think we ever put this topic on our big list of potential topics because for me, it's very unwieldy.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit maybe even though I know that people consider this topic a lot, maybe it's considered so often that I don't know if there's a whole lot to say about it.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Also, our listeners are all over the world and might not be interested in a podcast episode on the great American novel.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, while I'm interested in the conversation, I don't necessarily care too much about all of the answers in terms of being an answer or the answer, rather.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just never put it on our list.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: But we decided to do this because on March 14th, The Atlantic published an article on the great American novel with a big list of like 134, I believe, candidates.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a pretty diverse list.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I probably have only read a third of them.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the others, some of them I hadn't even heard of before.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's true.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: I know they did a really good, interesting job with it.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we decided let's go for it.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: But what are some of your general thoughts?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: We'll cover the list more in detail here in a minute.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: But is there a reason you never were like, Trevor, we have got...
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: to cover this topic I am so passionate about.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think, yeah, for probably a lot of the same reasons you did.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: For one thing, I feel like it's something that comes up a lot and there's always that, like, what can we really add to the conversation that hasn't been said before?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think you and I both
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: you know, tend to read pretty widely as far as around the world.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so with both film and books, I read still a lot of American stuff, but I think there's something kind of limiting sometimes to that idea of only focusing on that.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: And some of the hubris of, you know, America is like, it even came up like,
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: other countries probably do have something they consider, you know, obviously like Ulysses or something would qualify, but I don't think any other country that I know of spends as much time like building its own myths as much as we do.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so sometimes I kind of roll my eyes at that a little bit, but despite all that, I really think it is fun.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: And as I was looking through the list and thinking about it, I mean, so many of my favorite books were on this list.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there's still a lot of value there.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: you know, not only for Americans, but, you know, talking to our international friends.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: I know that a lot of these books are ones that they love or that resonate with them too.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just like when I read something like Ulysses, you know, I've never been to Ireland, but it doesn't take away from my joy in reading it.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there is some value there and
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: specifically this list or these types of lists because, you know, like Easton Press puts out the hundred greatest books ever written, or, you know, there's all these lists floating around that make these rankings of, of the greatest and the best.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of love them, even though I know a lot of people hate them because they're,
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think I just go into them accepting that they're going to be controversial and flawed and impartial.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, there's no such thing as this definitive list.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I really like the idea of just somebody takes a big swing at it.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: They get some right, some wrong.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then it fuels all this conversation about books.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what it's all about.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, like you said, I really like this list in particular because I feel like they they tried to do some different things with it.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things they did that I think is kind of interesting is they only looked at the last 100 years.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: because one of the first things I did was scanning through.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, are you kidding me?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's no Moby Dick.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's the stupidest thing I've ever seen.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'm like, oh, maybe I should actually read the intro and see.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the last century, 1924, a year in which there are no books on their list.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: They actually start with 1925 with three books.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Again, we'll get into particulars, but yeah, it's 1924 to 2023.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I do just enjoy the conversation.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the things that I like about it now, and this has always been true, but I think it's more talked about now, is just the audacity of even saying something like the Great American Novel because...
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: the American experience or any experience of any country is so diverse that there's no one book that would ever be able to capture anything close to the experience of everyone.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, but what I like about this is just to me, the idea of the great American novel isn't about capturing everyone's experiences perfectly.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's more about the idea of like,
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: you know, some of the things that people think about when they think about America, you know, like audacity and energy and risk and, you know, change and all these things.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I think to me, that is like, if I was considering what would make a great American novel, it wouldn't be that it represents every American's experience.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's more of like, does it capture some of these things that you think of as, as American qualities?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: So those are my, my general thoughts on kind of the idea of it.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: But what about you?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I think some of the I have the same same thoughts, of course.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: But you mentioned hubris and there is maybe something that of that that makes this a little bit more of a distasteful topic to me.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited for our topic.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone should know.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're going to have a lot to say.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all about books.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm in.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: But when you look at something that can be this hubristic or nationalistic, I have a tendency, especially, you know, these days of pushing back on that because it's there's dehumanization in that as well.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: And there is an arrogance there.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some people might say, oh, this is there's the audacity and it's like, well, and also the arrogance.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's the energy.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's also the bullying.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's the the self-confidence.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's the the the blindness and the the self-righteousness that can be in these.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, these lists also, you know, even though.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: The original article published in The Nation by John William DeForest says the closest candidate is Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: It does tend over the past century in particular that when this topic comes out, it's usually very limited to white male authors, American male authors, of course.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so it can also feel...
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's all those other qualities, you know, just rather than being an American quality, but just the general privileged quality of that.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so realizing that when you're building a canon and when you're talking about the great American novel, there'll be so many candidates that it makes a canon that there's the negative reverse side of all of that that is exclusionary and problematic and
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I said dehumanizing, but but also can lead to a tendency to, you know, at best be dismissive, but at worst be downright destructive.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think those are some of the reasons why maybe this hasn't been like, oh, I just can't wait.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is my favorite thing to talk about.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it is a fun topic because like you said, probably never going to be the great American novel.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know what that would even possibly look at, look like.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, books, books are culture because they spur conversation and they make us, um, have these, these thoughts and feelings.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: and conversations that become part of those books.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was, you know, Percival Everett's James came out recently and,
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: fantastic book and his conversations about the book have been fantastic.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there is also a great piece of criticism, uh, by a Twain scholar.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put it in the show notes because I right now don't have it pulled up and didn't write down the name of the critic, but that talks about that for a long time, it's pretty much been known that Mark Twain is more than the book or sorry, Huckleberry Finn is more than the book Huckleberry Finn.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's the conversation that has, um,
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: It has spurred over the last 150 years.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the critical commentary is part of the text in many ways.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And James becomes that.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a fascinating thing because, again, when you talk about the great American novel and you start creating these canons, there's also the plus side of that.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: which is starting to address the problems, the blind spots, all of these things.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you can be hurt by things that you realize when you first thought this is such a great thing.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you realize, whoa, you know, you get that little bit of existential poking that says, oh, wait a minute.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: Your assumptions are flawed and you are flawed.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so I do love it for that.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's not necessarily where I'm going with all my other thoughts in this conversation.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like...
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: you know, to make it all, all of a downer kind of conversation in that way.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that's why I love it so much because it is a, it is about the, it's more of a multi-vocal conversation that goes back and forth.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when you, when you address it at the beginning, you know, post civil war, there's going to be certain views of America that then get addressed in, in other books and novels and the commentary about them.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: that are critical both in terms of, you know, maybe a negative criticism, but also just the criticism that is thoughtful and mindful and reiterating criticism over the next while.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then another book comes out that addresses that.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's why I do enjoy this so much is that there's just this, again, this big conversation.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: go read Percival Everett's James to see how fruitful that can be.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure someday, who knows, but there might be another readdressing of even that.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what I like to be a part of and read about and see.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the lists are part of that.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: They spur that conversation.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's notable that
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know, while there is an introduction in the Atlantic article, otherwise it's just a list and it's a pretty great website that you can click on each book and there'll be various critics and authors, um, who are, who talk about the book there, but they're just little paragraphs.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they, they recognize that it's just a, a making a claim for why this could be a candidate.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um,
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: And speaking of that list, I mean, I like when I was reading the short intro that they make, some of the things that they were looking at were kind of interesting because they said, our goal was not to single out those classics that stand the test of time, but also to make the case for the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten, and the recently published works that already feel indelible.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's interesting because I think there's a tension there and I both appreciate it, but also push back a little bit against it because I would argue that standing the test of time, if you're really looking at the great American novel, is one of the main criteria.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that what's fascinating about the conversation is that
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: every decade, every 50 years, there's these conversations going on and many of these books could fade away.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: But it doesn't make them less of a great American novel in that time.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's kind of like interesting, like it's a tension for me because I guess like the classicist or like the,
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Old school part of me is like, well, if it doesn't stand the test of time, then it doesn't belong in the conversation.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I think what shapes this is the idea that there are all these contenders that keep coming up and some of them fall by the wayside over time and some don't.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's pretty fascinating.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think there's definitely some recency bias that pops up in a lot of these conversations.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like, even if you look back at like, you know, the great books that were mentioned back in the 1920s and you look at a list of like the bestsellers or whatever, and it's like you haven't heard of 90 percent of them.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I guarantee you that some of that will happen with the books of today, of course.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's just kind of an interesting tension to me, you know.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: let me address that tension just a little bit.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty, it is interesting because I agree, you know, we often talk about standing the test of time, but there are so many reasons a book can't stand the test of time, not always due to what the book is saying.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, maybe it has a bad publisher, publicist, maybe it just didn't catch on.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make a book that is now considered a great novel and,
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: not a great novel in its time, you know, Moby Dick, it took what, 50 years before that became, um, considered even a book worth reading, let alone an American classic.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: Does that mean it wasn't when it first was written?
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um, or if it goes the opposite direction, um, is it no longer a, you know, was it never a great American novel or a great book, um,
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: for the first 50 years.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: If after 50 years, no one's reading it anymore.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, yeah, cause we change.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's part of what's so fascinating about this.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Any conversation, you know, it's, there are a lot of articles about the great American novel, um, published over, you know, the last 160 years since this article, um, by, uh, John William DeForest first appeared in the nation in night or in 1868, right after the civil war.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um,
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: There have been a lot of conversations about this and the conversations themselves are like just moments, you know, they themselves reflect their time, just like ours will, you know, the things that we're going to talk, this list in the Atlantic with its, with its interests and the books that it's pushing forward are very reflective of something today that probably wouldn't
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of these wouldn't be on this list 10 years ago.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, not just because they weren't written yet.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: But just because the things that we've learned over the last 10 years or have decided to focus on
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: have, have opened up our eyes to these things and maybe shut our eyes to other things that in another 10 years will be different.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's so, so fun and so interesting.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, I do too.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely agree.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's just, it's interesting to see on the list, certain authors that are represented like three times and not to say they're not worthy of it.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's just very fascinating the way that they went through this list and
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: created you know like i think we can get into the details at any point that you want to but i do want to did you mind if we take one quick little step back though no for for our listeners i do want to and and you if we're not quite there yet for you either let me know but i think it's worth looking a little bit at the 1868 essay to see what spurred the thoughts of what a great with the great american novel is you know because i'm sitting here thinking
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a great novel written by an American?
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a great novel written by an American about America?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a great novel written by anybody about America?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or can it even be a novel that can just be interpreted as about America?
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking of like John Williams' Augustus.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: None of his books are on this list, by the way, not Butcher's Crossing, you know, things like that, that I would say are viable in the conversation mix.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: But Augustus takes place in Rome in the very early days of the Roman Empire with Caesar Augustus.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: but he wrote it during the Vietnam war and it is, it's there, you know, but does that make it not the, the great American novel, which is different from a great American novel, you know, not even a candidate just because it's not explicitly in America.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think all of that's interesting, but even then, if we're talking about written about America, what does that mean?
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is where maybe just looking at John William DeForest's article is interesting because,
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just going to read a little bit of it here.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's a short article.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'll link to it in the show notes.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: But it says, This is after he says there is no possibility whatsoever of writing the great American poem.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: But he says,
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Easy, right?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, exactly.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he thinks that it's possible to do that sometime.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Is it time?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: The benighted people in the earthen jars or commonplace life are asking.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: And with no intention of being disagreeable, but rather with sympathetic sorrow, we answer.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: Wait.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: At least we fear that such ought to be our answer.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: This task of painting the American soul, I think that's another part that's interesting.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I pulled that part out too.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Within the framework of a novel has seldom been attempted and has never been accomplished further than very partially in the production of a few outlines.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Washington Irving was too cautious to make the trial.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: He went back to fictions of Knickerbockers and Rip Van Winkle's and Nicobaud Crane's.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: These he did well, and we may thank him for not attempting more and failing in the attempt.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: With the same consciousness of incapacity, Cooper shirked the experiment.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: He devoted himself to Indians, of whom he knew next to nothing, and to back woodsmen and sailors whom he idealized.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: Or where he attempted civilized groups, he produced something less natural than the wax figures of Barnum's old museums.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: If all Americans were like the heroes and heroines of Cooper, Carlyle might well enough call us 18 millions of boars.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: As for a tableau of American society, as for anything resembling the tableau of English society by Thackeray and Trollope, or the tableau of French society by Balzac and George Sand, we had better not trouble ourselves with looking for it in Cooper.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: but he goes through and, uh, you know, to kind of keep on hitting on this idea of the great American novel.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I think, you know, if we're looking at it, I think most people capture that moment of the ordinary emotions and manners of Americans existence.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then the part of painting the American soul, um, which I don't even think my soul is really capable of being painted, you know, exactly.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um,
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the American soul is.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: I know that's a very broad brush you'd need to paint with or a very specific one.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know which, but yeah, I, I'm glad you did that.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I was going to mention too, like, did you come across AO Scott, the film or the literary critic, his thoughts on it?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: I know some of the articles I read quoted from it, but I didn't go back and look at the originals.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I'll just read this excerpt.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: It says the great American novel, while also a hybrid crossbred of romance and reportage, high philosophy and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard nose skepticism, may be more like the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster or Sasquatch if we want to keep things homegrown.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: It is, in other words, a creature that quite a few people, not all of them certifiably crazy, some of them bearing impressive documentation, claim to have seen.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of like that.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: They're not all certifiably crazy, but it's just this idea of there is a mythos to it and it's something that you want to exist.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so you will kind of like, you know, depending on where you fall in the argument, you will find something to justify your stance.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that goes for so many other things.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: But again, I got a question.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to cut you off.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: Could there be a spectrum of this?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because aren't there some novels that are more along the lines of the great American novel than others?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if it's a spectrum, can't you go beyond where we've already been and maybe reach that end?
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't know.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Or is it not even a spectrum?
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: I just kind of like that because when we talk about this, it is true that I like how he talks about it.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you've glimpsed it.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: You've caught sightings, which it is mythical.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: but it also reflects something that could possibly be there or that we get a whiff of it.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: That means there is a soul to this thing of looking at the soul.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I think is so fascinating about the whole conversation is, again, you can't paint America with a broad brush, but the idea of myth-making and all these, he mentions these legends and
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: You have Paul Bunyan, and I know every country has their own things.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think what I like about this idea is that this is a myth.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it is like this, you're kind of creating your own myths by even thinking of it in the first place and calling it the Great American Novel.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think that some of it just happens organically.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's plenty of people before this article came out back in the 1800s.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: and sense that were just writing what they were feeling.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it got defined as a potentially a great American novel.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think there are people who very purposefully set out with the idea of trying to write the great American novel.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's kind of a tongue in cheek thing of like, you know, like all these English majors that want to grow up and write the great American novel.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there's something that does capture kind of that audacity.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: And depending on how pessimistic you are, it could be like an optimism and a,
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: of bravado of some of the American culture, or it could be kind of this like, again, you kind of roll your eyes because somebody sets out to write the great American novel.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: It depends where you're coming from.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that just the idea that the very task itself is kind of this American bravado is kind of fascinating too.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, I do.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, you know, part of it and part of the problem, but also part of why it is a thing.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: And kind of thinking of what I was saying earlier about a spectrum, just recalibrating a little bit to think of it, maybe not as a spectrum, but as certain, you know, like a starry sky, right?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: If we have this sky of the great American novel, we get little bits of illumination as people put their... It's the conversation again.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's not something that can ever be fully embodied.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually the conversation about the great American novel more than any of these novels could ever be the great American novel.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them might shine a little brighter.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them will be dimmer.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them will create their little constellations that are worth looking at and figuring out while also being independent.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if we really look at them, those relationships might in many ways be meaningless or illusory.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe that's a better way of thinking than a spectrum, but is the next one that's written...
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: will likely just be another iteration that's worth being reiterated upon as well later on.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so just as you were talking and saying some of those words about the bravado, I thought, well,
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: let's, let's go a little farther and say, yes, this, this great, this firmament of the great American novel with each book being just an individual little spot.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: I really like that.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: I like that idea of constellations because it's so easy and often accurate, but like just taking like one of the most obvious things, like the old white men, you know, that, that,
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: has been a criticism a lot of times of a lot of like the canon and justifiably so because there are so many other lives out there to be represented but if you really wanted to look at like you know updike or you know whoever choose your your person like even within their
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: group of books, there is a diversity of experience among the old white guys.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: There are very many different things that are represented or in some of the newer books that are coming out that are just representing all these voices that have not been given the platform that they deserve for
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: decades or hundreds of years.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: What I like about it is each one of these books is someone's perspective of the American experience.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: And even if you lump them together under certain criteria or categories that may or may not be accurate,
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: I like what you said.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like with the constellation we see from Earth, they all look like they're right next to each other.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: But in reality, they're nowhere near each other.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: I like that idea because I do think it's so easy with the classics or with some of these new ones that come out that people are so quick to try to lump things together.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: And some of it's just the nature of book selling and things like that.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's important to realize that
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: Just like there's so many, there's a different American experience for every single person who lives in America.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think that that's kind of represented in these books, which I really like too.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is, I, I am, I am, I am enjoying this as a whole often with our conversation.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I come into him thinking, I don't know exactly what I'm going to say, but, and I think I'm kind of preambling on this, but I think it's just cause it's kind of a fun topic where it's just, it leads you certain places, but I mean, turning it a little bit back towards this, this specific list, I think I liked one of the things they said in the introduction where they said, um,
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: 12 of these books were published before the introduction of the mass market paperback to America and 24 after the release of the Kindle.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then they also go into some other things.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: They have children's books, they have graphic novels.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I really respect the fact that they did include a lot of what you would think of as the great American novel in the standard traditional sense.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: But they also are like pushing at the edges, which is something we've talked about a lot where, you know,
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: it's just kind of fun to continue to make people uncomfortable.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: And some of this may not even be, again, it may not stand the test of time or maybe it will, but I just like the idea of, of not letting it just sit and become stagnant.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's, that's fun.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: And notably, the Atlantic article is kind of part of a of a bigger project.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they have expanded, you know, isn't that amazing now rather than than shrunk their book section.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this is kind of part of that.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: But they also had a bit of a of a launch at the New Orleans Book Festival.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: back in March.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then in April already, you know, but too late for us to go.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: On April 3rd at The Strand, they did an in-house or an in-person event with the Atlantic editors to discuss this topic.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think it's really cool that they didn't just, let's print an article, but that they made it a bit of an event because it's a discussion.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think they recognize this.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have a lot of...
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, when the list came out, I thought, oh, here we go.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I always do look.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: I got a peek, and I always enjoy them, but it was also like, oh, okay, everyone's got to do this every two or three years.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: But this one just felt a little bit different, a little bit more fresh and worth discussing.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to go into...
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: How do we want to address the books?
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've got it pulled up on my thing.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: I do too.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it might be kind of fun and this may be too time consuming, but we could at least try.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: We could even go, they have it divided by decades.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like we could just look at them and just say like what... There aren't very many relative to our normal episode.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: There are 134 books on here.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we talk about that in our first 10 minutes usually.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think this will be, if anything, a downgrade.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: No, I was just thinking it might be interesting to look at each decade and just kind of like at the very least, what is the most interesting or intriguing or one you would like to read?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like we could just...
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: skip through it and just talk generally like for example I was thrilled and not surprised but Absalom Absalom was one of the books listed in the 1920s yeah 1930s I guess I skipped over the 20s but I loved seeing that there because I read that a couple years ago and it's just it feels like it'll just always stand the test of time but then I thought it was kind of interesting like again I accidentally jumped into the 30s but like 1929 Passing by Nella Larson which is a book that we've both read fairly recently and
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: Not to say that it was ignored, but I feel like it's had a real resurgence and I was thrilled to see that one.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's the readdressing things, right?
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like it would probably never have been on this list during the 20th century.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like I could be wrong, but even 10 years ago, I don't know if it would have been.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: And for multiple reasons, some because it might not have been very well known, but others because...
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: it didn't address, you know, these other parts of these other themes or it wasn't as epic, you know, in, in these ways.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so, or, or simply it, it was by a black woman.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we're, you know, just people, the, the blind spots, um, would, would have, um,
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: prevented it probably from real consideration in the past.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, me too.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the kinds of things that made this list interesting to me is there's a lot of, a lot of different ones.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think, I think we can do that though.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's, and we can start in the, in the twenties.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it starts with the great Gatsby.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: 1925 book.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: Another book that wasn't really the thing until apparently the,
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is the story that I see everywhere now.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I wasn't there, but not really a thing until World War Two, when it was one of the books passed around to servicemen and then they came home.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, so it was a couple of decades before this became popular.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: The book.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, that's sometimes the way these books become part of the foundation is just that they do become readily available through forces that aren't just the book's merits.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: But, oh, let's hand this out to, you know, tens of thousands of servicemen.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then they come home and it's one of their favorite books because it might have been the only book they lived with for the last while.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then it becomes a book that's in schools.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: But there's the great Gatsby to start the list off, which is probably frustrating for some people, but also expected.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that's where, again, that tension comes up.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's whether it is frustrating or not, it is kind of there are some of these realities of that book.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's why this is important, right?
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: Got to address even the reasons we might be frustrated.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: My son just ended up reading that one, you know, in school.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it's definitely obviously still very much.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I've mentioned this book before, but Maureen Corrigan wrote a wonderful book about the Great Gatsby called So We Read On.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I would recommend anybody who's interested in kind of the history, but also why it continues to persist.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: You should pick that book up because I think she did a really nice job.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then another one that just keeps that I am very intrigued by is The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: I keep seeing it come up more and more, and I know that it's a big, difficult book.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I really liked that that was on there.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one, if I was making a list of books from this that I might be inspired to pick up, that one is definitely pretty high on the list for me.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, on that, the Wikipedia article on the Great American Novel is actually a really good one that goes through a whole lot.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it does talk about Gertrude Stein and her thoughts on the Great American Novel.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: She certainly never thought she would be a candidate because she was a woman and because she was LGBTQ.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the reasons she just didn't think she'd ever be considered.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: And here she is.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: in the first year of this particular list with the making of Americans, I guess, you know, that does the first three books, the great Gatsby and American tragedy and the making of Americans.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: It is helpful, I think, to put the word America USA in, in your title.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean it's going to make it, but it does, I think help.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: If there are anybody, if there's anybody out there aspiring to write the great American novel, that's like the first step maybe to consider.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: Any others in this first batch?
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: I will note the two Falkners are two that I have not read.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: And Anthony Garrett, you know, our prior guest was just talking about them on Twitter and has made me want to finally read the three, some of the three big ones, Light and August, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom and Absalom that I have not read.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: I have them.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've had them for, I think my parents got them for me for Christmas last
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: 25 years ago.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you absolutely should.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: I need to read The Sound and the Fury, but the other two are absolutely wonderful.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: Again, that's the fascinating thing about this, of some of these that probably would have been on that list for most of the time that they've been out, but I think some of them, it's just they deserve to be there.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: They continue to make their way.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting to see the newcomers, but then there are some that just...
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: Plug along.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: Just being great.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_00: In the 30s, there's also Nightwood by Juna Barnes.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_00: I have not read this one.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't either.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: I just bought it within the last probably year or so.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, that's one that, again, it continues to catch my eye.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: And everything I hear about it just sounds so fascinating.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and have you seen that we're getting a collection of her stories from McNally Editions later on this year?
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I'll pull it up and Merve Emre, you know, another guest that we've had on the past and she, at the time that we were
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: Having her as a guest, she said that this is what she was working on.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: I do remember that.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: And let's see here.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's I Am Alien to Life, Selected Stories.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: I do have the digital arc, but I have the hardest time reading those.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that they're sending over a physical arc sometime.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: But certainly that's one that I'm going to be getting because I do want to get to know Juna Barnes' work better.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_00: She sounds fascinating, but I haven't read any of it.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: let alone Nightwood, the great American novel.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: I know, I haven't either.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: The 30s is fascinating because there are several on there that I would expect to see and deserve to be there.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, which is amazing.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's interesting that they put on a noir book because that's where some of the stigmas may or may not have impacted whether that would be included.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I do like that.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it was considered really a genre change
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: piece at the time but it could be you know stuck in that box but i like the fact that they included things like that um ask the dust by john fonte is a wonderful book have you read that one i have i do at that one that and wait until spring bandini or two books from a i don't know 15 years ago that i would have put on my best of the year list yeah me too but then like usa that trilogy by john dos passos that's one that i've i've owned it for
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: 20 years and I've never quite gone for it, but.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the same way.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: And people sometimes will promote it or, you know, encourage.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, oh yeah, I've never quite gotten the spark of that one.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like one of those that, and this is my, it could be, I probably am completely speaking out of turn, but like, it feels like one that was very groundbreaking with things that tried to do, like introducing headlines and stuff into the text.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I would be curious to see if you're coming to it fresh, does it still feel innovative and fresh or has it been like it, it broke the ground so well that now it almost seems passe as can sometimes happen, but.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: Until we read it, we won't know, right?
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then the 30s ends with The Grapes of Wrath, 1939, John Steinbeck.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: Getting into the 40s, a lot of these...
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: Our books, I've probably read half of them.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: In a Lonely Place, another noir.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: Love that book.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: I know, me too.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad it's on there.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a long time since I read that one.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: But again, that was a book that I really loved.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Street by Anne Petrie is a book that I have in the Library of America editions, but I have not read it.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: But that one, I think, is one that I would like to read sooner rather than later.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's this book called The Mountain Lion, which I've never heard anyone talk about or recommend.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to say, you can only imagine how excited I was when I saw that one pop up because I don't know.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: Again, some of this, you come to it only through your own lens.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would never have dreamed, despite thinking that it very much deserved to be there, I would not necessarily have dreamed that it would have been on there.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that that potentially could be one of those, either that I was undervaluing and not realizing how big it was, or that they did a really great job of looking kind of beyond the obvious, because I think it absolutely deserves a place on here.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, undervalued might be a good word because in his write-up for it, Garth Greenwell says, Stafford is one of the 20th century's most undervalued writers.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, interesting.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_00: Too often remembered only as Robert Lowell's first wife, the one he disfigured in a car crash while driving drunk, instead of as the top-tier fiction writer she was.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's a book on NYRB women 24 list.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I will be reading it this year, Paul, I promise you.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I might reread it when that time comes.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I will be very excited to hear the conversation because, as I've said many times, it blew me away.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_00: Don Powell's A Time to be Born from 1942 is another one I have in the Library of America that I haven't read yet.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: But those are ones that are really kind of calling to me, ones that I don't hear people talking about ever.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, The Street by Anne Petrie, A Time to Be Born by Don Powell.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, they kind of pop up still as little, you know, they're like the twinkling star.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to see and then it kind of disappears.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: But those are two from the 40s that I would say are my ones that I might read next, other than The Mountain Lion, which is already on my schedule.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: yeah i love that the 50s gets interesting too because there's some very you know ones that you would absolutely expect to be there the catcher in the rye fahrenheit 451 the invisible man ralph ellison's invisible man is is a masterpiece and one that i might if i were if i were forced to start picking the great american novel
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: that one would be on on the the candidates list for me i'm ashamed to say i own it but have not read it so maybe that's one that needs to go up to the top of my list because i think you'll like it yeah i'm sure i will it made me happy to see charlotte's web on there i'd really love that they did that because for many reasons i mean it's just a great book
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: But talk about an integral part of so many people's lives and childhoods.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, if you're talking about the great American novel, it could be argued that one of the things that should do is produce a love of reading.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that has done that for generation after generation.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I really think that that was just an interesting.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: choice yeah yeah for sure uh we got a sol bello i think the only one on the list right the adventures of agi march is on here we got nabokov's lolita which again i know that that will be controversial but i really like the fact that they included it not only because it's just a masterpiece but i think you have to address some of the problematic parts of america if you're really going to do this right
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't think it's, if you're going to just make myths and only focus on the positives, I don't think that's a very good representation of America.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I think for many reasons, that one deserves to be there.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and kind of also, here's a book by an outsider, at least for much of his life.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he wrote this one in English, and it was intended to be published in America first.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: It is in America.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's, in a way, a road novel set in America.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: Especially the second half.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: When I reread it, I didn't realize...
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like lots of little motels along the route 66 and stuff.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, for sure.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I say it was intended to be published in America because it wasn't first, you know, it was first published in France in 55, but it was intended.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it took some time before it, it, it came out.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I, I always love when you read other books that like the bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, where like the arrival of Lolita in the,
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: town is part of the action of the book.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, one that I think deserves mention on here.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_00: An author I want to read a lot more of, but I'm always like, okay, I just want to buy a big collection of his books.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is like the I want to be complete in owning all of his books and also read them, but it's James Baldwin.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: Giovanni's Room is on this list.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's a big blind spot for me is his work.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's amazing.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: That book in particular is a great place to start.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, it's yeah, very deserving for many reasons.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: And talk about, you know, just
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_01: showing how America does continue to change and grow.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that a gay black man would be, you know, in the fifties on this list is, you know, very deserving and fascinating and not to skip ahead, but he also makes other appearances, which is.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: In the sixties.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: But before we get there, how do you feel about the haunting of Hill house?
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: Shirley Jackson, 1959 on the, on the list.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's interesting.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it,
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: as a work of art of course it deserves to be there and I really like I think maybe I'm reading too much into this but like the fact that there's that horror representation I think is really important because that beyond the 50s but in the 50s horror
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, all the cheesy horror movies that were popping up in America, for example.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think, you know, that was a big part of what was going on in the zeitgeist at the time.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think obviously since then it has continued to be a huge part of it.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, I think it's a very interesting choice.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_01: I really like that they went there.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: I like that you put that as, you know, when you talk about this, not just talking about the big themes of America, but also recognizing the zeitgeist.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: um i i do like that it is interesting jane who is who wrote the little blurb for that and it doesn't ever really make a case for it being about american themes particularly it actually is like this is just one of the greatest best american novels ever written yeah um
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I have not read it.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: I've only seen the Netflix adaptation, thanks to your recommendation a while back.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: I would like to read it.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think I will soon.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: And when I do, though, I kind of am excited to read it, wondering about this from this framework.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think it's a really fascinating choice.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: What about books that...
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: like you're just completely unfamiliar with or you didn't expect because they're starting to pop up.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know anything about no, no boy by John Okada.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: Do you?
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_00: Nope.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: 1957, uh, angry and raw gut punch of a novel takes place in 1946 as Japanese Americans are reeling from the joint traumas of internment and war.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's a, it's a, it's a book about a Japanese, uh, I think, uh, you know, American, um,
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: who has just come back to Seattle after the war.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_00: So again, one of these that, yes, I very much would like to read because this is one, it's not just that I had not ever really thought about it.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I've ever heard of this book.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: I have not either, no.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_01: Which is, again, one of the things that I respect about this list that they did.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty cool that they could come up with some books like that that just are completely, to me, out of left field.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_01: I really like that.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you're right.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot more of them as they come up.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_00: Another Peyton Place by Grace Metallius.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how to say her last name.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen the movie.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_00: I love the movie.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even know it was a book.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one I would like to read.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: If it's a really great novel in its own right, it's a great movie.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I can totally see why it would be a candidate for this list.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_01: As we get into the 60s, I see starting to get a couple of repeat authors.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: We mentioned James Baldwin.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: Nabokov is back on there for Pale Fire.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_00: Which is another country.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_00: Just to mention the books they're on there for.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_01: Some you would expect, you know, Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_01: But, again, they do some interesting things.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_01: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: I really like that that's on there because, again, it's kind of like, you know, when we're talking about the children's books, that's like another one that many, many, many Americans, it was very formative in their reading.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that's just a different type of criteria you can use, I think.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_00: Another couple that I got to know from the Library of America, they do deserve to be in this conversation.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: I keep bringing them up.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't really, it wasn't deliberate, but as I look at this, I realized that often I am, this is where I've learned about them or heard people talk about them.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: The Zebra Striped Hearse by Ross McDonald.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: that's a really great detective novel.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to say, I know his name, but I didn't know anything.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_00: A crime fiction novel with, with, I guess, similar to, you know, get getting up in, into the, into the thirties where we got Raymond Chandler's, the big sleep.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_00: The zebra striped hearse is another crime novel.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's more of like what you might expect to be on the pulp shells.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's, it's a,
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_00: a frequently recurring private eye named Lou Archer.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this was the debut of Lou, you know, Lou Archer.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's really good.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: I re and again, I got it from the library of American and a collection of multiple of, of those books.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but also that's where I first read the group by Mary McCarthy, 1963.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's on this list.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: I love, love, love this book.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'd never, I,
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I ever would have brought it up in this conversation, but it, it, I see it, you know, I definitely, definitely see it here.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's what I see all the time in bookshelves or in bookstores that I, I'm, I know that it has this place, but I couldn't really pinpoint.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: So to hear you say that, I'm off to pick it up.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: I also had not ever before recognized until you see them right next to each other on this list, but they were, that the group was published the same year as Sylvia Plath, the bell jar in 1963.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: Just really interesting to me.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: Those, those two,
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: that, that pairing.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that is interesting.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: Then we have, of course, some Thomas Pinchon makes the list with the crying of lot 49, which is another one I have not yet read.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: I did read that one a couple of years ago.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: I, I don't know.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: I, I, I need to, I need to do that one with someone who just reads and tells me what things mean, like the Inferno, you know, I need, I need the interpreter.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's happy to see James Salter on there.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_01: I, I,
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_01: Beyond everything else, he is just... I think there's even quotes out there, sentence for sentence, one of the best writers to ever come out of America.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it would be hard to argue that.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think he has some of the most beautiful sentences that I've ever read.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm happy to see him on there.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is our first appearance of John Updike with Couples, 1968.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also the only appearance of John Updike on this list.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_00: Paul, what are your thoughts on that?
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: No rabbit books?
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_01: I...
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_01: that's where it gets tricky because I understand.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where you get into that idea of there's plenty of representation of white males and like, yeah, I don't think he's like, I don't care, but it is.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, I do care, I guess, because I only, because when I read those, the rabbit quartet, despite all the problems.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I just think,
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_01: if you're looking at just the quality of the work and the representation of a certain type of person who was alive at that time, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anything more powerful.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying that like this, this white man who was privileged deserves a platform over anybody else.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_01: Cause of course that's not true, but,
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's how I took it.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but if that, you know me.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_01: No, but as far as like, I mean, man, those books to me, that was one of the most powerful reading experiences of my life.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he is super flawed and I do not relate to him in many, many ways.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: But Updike's ability to show his life as it was, I think was just amazing.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I would argue that at least the first one.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and I think 10 years ago, there would be 10 of his books on this list.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_00: Same with Philip Roth, who does show up in 69 with Portnoy's Complaint, of all books.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: Again, probably a zeitgeist kind of thing, but it's pretty... I can get that it's...
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_00: Quite the watershed book in many ways.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_00: He shows up later on with Sabbath Theater in the 90s, but no American pastoral, no The Human Stain.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Even the great American novel might just because he called it that, you know, right?
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: The not on the list.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there's a reason that over the last decade, those books that would be on here have been shed, but not gone.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you, even in my own mind, I've not read Updake in a long time, and there's still plenty of his I have to read, including, I don't know if I've told you this before, all of the Rabbit books.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it was Elisa Gabbert a couple of years ago who either read or reread them and wrote about them in a way that I'm like,
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here's someone who's engaging with them, recognizing their problems, but also engaging with them in a way that still finds a way for them to be worthwhile.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_00: reading and grappling with even today and i thought that was that was neat but but yeah those two those two pop up here in the late 60s for sure as well as divorcing susan told you just sent out to a lucky listener this past week exactly it's nice to see some of those popping up that again maybe this is where it comes into that category of rediscovered gems or ones that potentially did not get as much publicity so i love seeing that yeah
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess really quick, before we go into the 70s, we do end with Vonnegut's only title, Slaughterhouse-Five, which it's been a long time since I read it, but I still think about that book quite often.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_00: I like that too.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Moving into the 70s.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we get Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays, which is, you know.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Some that you would expect.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is our first Toni Morrison, right?
• 1:11:39
  Yeah.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, the first of quite a few.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Three.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be curious to see.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's the most of any author on here?
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't actually count.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if anybody gets more than three.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know if anyone else that I've been paying attention to gets three.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_00: So she may be the only one.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I like what this does because it creates these conversations where she absolutely...
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_01: She doesn't need me to say this, but like very deserving to be on here.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: But no matter how many times I try, I still struggle to connect completely with her books.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting that there's three of them.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_01: But for what they represent and for who she represents and for how many people absolutely love these books, it's very well deserved.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just it's so interesting to see the way some of this breaks out.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Were you surprised to see Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret?
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Judy Blume's 1970 book?
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was surprised.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I ever read the book, but the movie that came out last year or maybe the year before, I loved that.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I love... I should read the book, but not to digress.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I can see why that's an important piece of art for many people.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if I'm interpreting this the right way, but I really like that...
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_01: some of the books that might be considered kids' books or children's books or young adult books, I like that there's a progression here where you can, there are some different books that have meant so much to many Americans and represent like some very important reading milestones that I really like that, that they're kind of including those as well.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_00: I will say of all the decades so far, and maybe of all the decades period, this one has a ton of books I don't, I've never heard of.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was just thinking the same thing.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Desperate Characters, Paula Fox, 1970.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Log of the SS, the Mrs. Ungunting, Stanley Crawford.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_00: People are out there being like, I know.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_00: We read that one in high school.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_00: The Revolt of the Cockroach People.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Oscar Zeta Acosta, 1973.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_00: I have heard of Fran Ross's Oreo because I remember when it was reissued a few years ago, but I didn't read it.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that one I would not have heard of but for that.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_00: There is an Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, which I have not read but do at least know of.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_00: But then we get back to Winter in the Blood, James Welch, 1974.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Corregidora, Gail Jones, 1975.
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Speedboat, Renata Adler from 1976, which I have read.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_00: But again, I don't...
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_00: think I'd heard of these until NYRB classics reissued them.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's been, you know, over a decade since that happened.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_00: So they've been part of my life for a little while, but you know, yeah, uh, they're, they're just many of them.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's this one dancer from the dance, Andrew Hollerman, 78, uh, don't know anything about that.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then probably, uh,
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_00: This one called The Stand by Stephen King.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm actually surprised.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_00: That one, I was surprised to see it on this list, but then in doing the research for this episode, it shows up on a lot of these lists.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I surprises me.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_01: It surprises me, but I also think it deserves it in some ways because it is very epic.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_01: It does represent like very vividly a certain time period.
• 1:15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And also just not like it's a lifetime achievement award, but if you want to talk about American authors, I mean, it would be hard to leave Stephen King off the list, despite any criticisms you might have, like,
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_01: The word great is so vague that there's a lot of ways it can be taken.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that he deserves to be on here.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in some ways, this is maybe could be argued to be his magnum opus.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_00: So or even the only one that might apply, at least it's a road novel about that takes place in multiple parts of America and kind of deals with vices and and all of that.
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_00: I would I would have a hard time of any of his other ones thinking how they could.
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're so much more intimate.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Mm hmm.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like Pet Sematary.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's my favorite of his, but I wouldn't put it as the great American novel or even dealing with a lot of those themes.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I can see where this one is there.
• 1:16:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that audacity we talked about, like writing a whatever it is, $1,200, $1,300 book.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_01: word or a page book about you know just talk about taking a big swing he definitely did with that one i was just going to briefly mention the winter in the blood by james welsh and ceremony by leslie marmon silco 1974 and 77 those are two that came up and i bought them i think maybe together and i think it's partially because they are two books written about and by native american yeah
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_01: American.
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that that's interesting, the pairing.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_01: I've read Ceremony.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_01: I have not yet read Winter in the Blood, but I know that that I know that Louise Erdrich writes the intro for Winter in the Blood.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I do think it's worth mentioning just in the 70s, you start to see like different people who were underrepresented in the past.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_01: You're starting to get some representation there.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the books are very deserving, obviously.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, in her introduction, Louise Erdrich writes, in 1974, no fiction award was given for the Pulitzer Prize.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_00: but it should have gone to the book you're holding.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's yeah.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_00: 1980s housekeeping is the work that starts at Marilyn Robinson, 1980.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then we get into like several I've never heard of, including one by one of my favorite authors, Jane Ann Phillips, machine dreams, 1984.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_00: I've never read it.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: I have heard of it.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Cause I've read the list.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've seen the lists of her books, but I've never like seen it in the stores.
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_00: I've never like thought, Oh, I need to get that.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like, Oh, one of her early novels.
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Which books of hers are the ones that make her one of your favorites?
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't actually think I know her.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Lark and Termite is the first one that I ever read by her.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_00: But let's see.
• 1:18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Shelter is another one of hers that I really like.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Just kind of looking at her books.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that one was from 94.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I read Lark and Termite, and then I went back and read Motherkind and Shelter.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_00: but I didn't go all the way back and read Machine Dreams.
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Probably part of me thinking, oh, that's her debut.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, not to get controversial here, but are there any books on this list?
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking at one in particular that kind of surprised you that they're on the list because I...
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to make some people angry here, but Little Big by John Crowley.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_01: People rave about this book.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_01: I know that it has what I always thought of as a cult following, but maybe not if it's on this list.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_01: I've tried it several times and I just cannot connect with it.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_01: And not to say that I need to connect with every book on here, but it's very fascinating to me that some of these books that clearly resonate and mean so much to so many people.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_01: And when you try and multiple times and you just can't make it work.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that one just was very interesting for me to see on there.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_01: And what year is that one?
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_01: That is 1981.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_00: I've never read that one.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't say that that one is one that I am on your side with or not, but I'll stand in solidarity and not make that the next book I read.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_01: I just lost a third of our listeners, but no, I know people who love it.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_01: They feel very strongly and I love that.
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Whether I agree or not, I really like those.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Again, that's why these conversations are so fun.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Blood Meridian.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, sorry.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:33
  SPEAKER_00: As you can say, a lot of books that both we've heard of and that are main candidates, Beloved and Blood Meridian, as well as some that I am surprised, not surprised in a bad way, but like, yes, that's great.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like Dawn, Octavia Butler.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I love Geek Love by Catherine Dunn.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've not read it.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_00: That surprises me.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's an interesting thing.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Or Watchmen to have a graphic novel.
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Watchmen.
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_01: I continue to try to, I aspire to be a better reader of graphic novels.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I will admit that's not one, despite it being one of the, you know, I don't know about original, but like when people talk about graphic novels, that one comes up.
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Have you read it?
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't.
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_00: I did read that one.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it is enjoyable.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_00: It has some really interesting elements.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_00: I particularly like the...
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_00: the comic book within the comic book and how that plays out.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I, I, I think you should, uh, should find a copy and go through it.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Looking at the nineties now, again, honestly, I I've heard of, I probably, well, I don't know.
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_00: I probably haven't heard of maybe a half of the books in the nineties.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I, I don't know.
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_00: What did you think of American psycho being on there?
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so I've never read it.
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I've never seen the film.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's never been something I've wanted to.
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_00: But again, that's one like The Stand where I'm like, oh, you know, I guess they're being a little bit out there and putting this on there.
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_00: But then it shows up on tons of the other lists.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, I've read it and it's, ooh, it is...
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know if problematic is the right word, but I think I could maybe see it being lumped with something like Lolita where it's representing a part.
• 1:21:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that it's been argued that it's satire and I'm sure that's true, but I mean, it is absolutely brutal.
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_01: It'd be hard to find a more reprehensible main character, but I think that it's interesting.
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of like that again, like Lolita where you're looking at not just certain aspects of American society, but also other, you know, like, like the noir or some of the crime and the nastiness that goes on too.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_00: But there are a lot of diverse voices, I think, in the 90s.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_00: People should go and find the list.
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 1:21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because a lot of them I've never heard of.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm more just knowing that because of the titles and the names of the authors.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_00: One of your books that I think you did not like, House of Leaves, shows up at the start of 2000, the new time period there.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_00: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I, again, I know that this is very divisive and a lot of people love it.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like there, I mean, it's, I guess it is 25 years old, so this may not hold water, but I feel like there's some recency bias there.
• 1:22:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe that'll be one where I just history will prove me wrong and that will continue to hang around because it's hung around a lot longer than I would have thought it would have, to be honest.
• 1:22:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, as much as I loved that book.
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of wonder if that's another one that over the course of 100 years may not stick around.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_01: But again, that's where it's hard to predict these things, whether they're a little bit... It's a Pulitzer winner.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_00: So in a way, it'll stay on that list and maybe stay in print because of that.
• 1:22:50
  SPEAKER_00: But will it be one that people are like, what is that one?
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was glad to see that one on there in 2000.
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_00: The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams.
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's one I have, but I have not read.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I've read several of her books, but I've not read that one.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is this the first appearance of Mr. Percival Everett?
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's the first and the only.
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_00: First and only.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is the only one on here of his erasure.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_01: You wonder if this list is redone in 20 or 30 years, if he will have... I'll just be very curious to see how he ends up playing out over time.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_01: We can't predict these things.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hard to imagine that more of his books wouldn't be on your list.
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I was thinking.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, let's see the corrections.
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to bring up, you know, talk about controversial Jonathan Franz and he is so divisive, but I think that this, the book, the corrections is so deserving of being on here just for what it represents of that, that part of he's engaging history, engaging with it.
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you don't love the book, he is engaging with it.
• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Others, Gary Steingart shows up with the Russian debutante's handbook, Jumper Lahiri with the namesake.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_01: That one, I'm so glad because I think that that was such an important book of representing second generation immigrant experiences and kind of the tension.
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I was, of course, thrilled to see that one on there.
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a book I get why it's on here, but I did not like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wilde, Junot Diaz.
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting, too, just not that you want to lump the artist in with the work, but there's been controversies with him and Sherman Alexie recently where it's interesting to see that he still did make the list.
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, I get what you're saying there.
• 1:24:36
  SPEAKER_00: A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan.
• 1:24:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're getting into books that many of the rest of these I have read because they came out while I was getting into blogging and all of that.
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And yet I don't think I... Let's see, Nevada, Imogen Binney, 2013.
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen that cover, but I've never read about it or really...
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_00: you know, thought too much about it.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't either, but Open City by Teju Cole.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was so glad that was on there.
• 1:25:03
  SPEAKER_01: Cause again, that's a very unique, not unique, a very underrepresented perspective that I think is very important.
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I love that that was included.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_00: We've got the fifth season by N.K.
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Jemisin.
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't read it yet, but doesn't that not take place?
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of a sci-fi fantasy.
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Is it post-apocalyptic U.S.?
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I did read it, and now that I'm saying that, I don't remember.
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:25:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm speaking without knowing.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_00: I've always thought that must be another world or something like that.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember the setting, honestly, but I know... I don't know.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_01: That one would be one where I...
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I like the list being big and interesting, so I don't mind it from that perspective, but it's an interesting choice.
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_00: We'll just leave it at that.
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and here's another one that doesn't take place in the U.S.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln and the Bardo.
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that takes place in the Bardo, folks.
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_00: That one.
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_01: I will defend that book.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Not that he needs me to defend it, but I am so glad.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_01: That is such a great book.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And right next to it on the list, Sabrina, that graphic novel by Nick Darnozzo, I think.
• 1:26:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's not one that I've read, but I've seen it.
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_01: That is another graphic novel.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, talk about books that make a lasting impact.
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not very many books I've read in the last 10 years have stuck with me and made me as unsettled as that book.
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's one of the most powerful books I've read in a long time.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm really happy to see that one on there.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's jump into the last.
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_00: There are from 2019.
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going 2019 to 2023.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, the last five years.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_00: There are actually six books on here that are from that period of time.
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think let's address each of them.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_00: The Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli.
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think that one is a great one to have on here.
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know much about Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson.
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_00: And The Old Drift, same thing, by Namwali Serpell.
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_00: All three of those are from 2019.
• 1:27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it does make me look at it and say, wow, that's interesting.
• 1:27:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many relatively from one year on here.
• 1:27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I've seen all of them on bookshelves, but I don't actually know anything about any of them.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, no one is talking about this Patricia Lockwood.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't read it, but I read some parts of it that were in the New Yorker and enjoyed that.
• 1:27:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's from 2021.
• 1:27:35
  SPEAKER_00: So there's no books from 2020.
• 1:27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then we get to 2021 with no one is talking about this and the love songs of WB Dubois, uh, by Honoré Fanon Jeffers, which, uh, you know, won a lot of awards, but it is big and I see a lot of people love it, but I've not read it.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_01: Believe it or not, before I looked at this list, I actually just started listening to the audio book of that one a few days ago.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll report back.
• 1:28:01
  SPEAKER_01: But I like you said, it kept popping up and I kept seeing it on shelves and I kept hearing people rave about it.
• 1:28:07
  SPEAKER_01: And as far as just from what I understand and what I'm seeing so far, I think it's very deserving to be on the list because it's representative of a multigenerational outlook of, you know,
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_01: the life of this black family and dating back to like the early times of America up to modern day.
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_01: So it definitely ticks a lot of the boxes of what I think should be on a list like this.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last one on the list, again, we skipped 2022, but get into 2023 with Catherine Lacey's The Biography of X, which I have.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_00: I bought it when I was with Dorian and Anthony, but I have not read it yet, but I'm excited about this one.
• 1:28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've read that one, and I think it's an interesting choice.
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_01: I would have to think about it a little more, but I do like it.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_01: I like the way this list is, like I said, continuing to poke at the edges of what the Great American Novel means, and it's doing it in a number of ways.
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's important and really fascinating.
• 1:29:05
  SPEAKER_01: Kudos to the group of people who put this together, because I just think it's so interesting, and I love the conversations that it sparks.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we've almost got to go, but...
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_00: I do have a couple of questions.
• 1:29:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you'll have an answer.
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_00: One that I'll say is not on the list that might never be on the list because it's so unwieldy is one that I'm reading right now and that you just got.
• 1:29:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling.
• 1:29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Road, Mid-America, tons of time, but also kind of out of time.
• 1:29:44
  SPEAKER_00: I am loving, loving, loving my times when I sit down and read Miss McIntosh, My Darling.
• 1:29:51
  SPEAKER_00: But again, I don't know if it would ever find its way on this list, even though it might actually be the great American novel, Paul.
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_01: I know, I know.
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 1:30:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's, yeah.
• 1:30:04
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder if this resurgence of, you know, interest in it will potentially boost it onto people's radars where it could appear on a list like this down the road.
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because everything I hear, it definitely deserves to be there.
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other question beyond, you know, other ones you might put on this list.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Are there any from before, you know, this list started in 1924?
• 1:30:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you said Moby Dick.
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_00: But unfortunately, with that date, we also miss out on Edith Wharton and the Age of Innocence and the House of Mirth.
• 1:30:39
  SPEAKER_01: which I just can't I can't talk about this topic without at least mentioning those books I know no I agree I was trying to think I mean obviously you know Mark Twain like we said for all the reasons that we've talked about would would probably be on this list for sure you know it deservedly so I don't know I'm trying to go down the list of potential other ones like
• 1:31:05
  SPEAKER_01: A newer book that I thought might be on there that isn't is Americana by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Was that not on here?
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_01: Or was it?
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it was.
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_01: On a list this big, I think it's possible that... It is on here.
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_00: It is on.
• 1:31:19
  2013.
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it was.
• 1:31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah, because that one definitely deserves to be on there.
• 1:31:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a really amazing book.
• 1:31:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, as far as older ones, I don't know.
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to think.
• 1:31:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure there's a million that I'll kick myself for not remembering.
• 1:31:32
  SPEAKER_01: Are there any other ones that jump out to you?
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, not necessarily.
• 1:31:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I brought up Butcher's Crossing, which, you know, I kind of am surprised it's not just because it has had a bit more of a resurgence.
• 1:31:45
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, whatever.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_01: What about something like Lonesome Dove?
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if they're... Oh, yeah.
• 1:31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Books on there that could be considered by some.
• 1:31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Bingo!
• 1:31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Someone yelled bingo.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_00: They heard my dog earlier.
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:31:59
  SPEAKER_00: All these different things.
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_00: We're ticking all the squares.
• 1:32:01
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, I would argue that that one absolutely deserves to be on here because, you know, it's easy to poo-poo it or like to categorize it, but...
• 1:32:11
  SPEAKER_01: for one thing, there's other books on here that could be considered genre.
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I would also argue that Lonesome Dove far exceeds that.
• 1:32:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm with you.
• 1:32:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:32:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm, I'm with you.
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think that it deserves to be on the, on the list.
• 1:32:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit, it is, it's one that I'm actually surprised.
• 1:32:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm not as surprised Butcher's Crossing isn't.
• 1:32:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not surprised at all.
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_00: Miss Macintosh, my darling isn't.
• 1:32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um,
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_00: but I am surprised Lonesome Dove isn't.
• 1:32:33
  SPEAKER_00: I am too.
• 1:32:35
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, that's okay.
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Any other thoughts?
• 1:32:41
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to let listeners know what's coming.
• 1:32:42
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, we could talk about it all day, but I would just love to hear, yeah, generally people's thoughts.
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_01: What books, if you get a chance to look at this list, what books weren't on there that you think should be?
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: What books were on there that you don't think should be?
• 1:32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Or just generally speaking,
• 1:32:58
  SPEAKER_01: Or if you're from another country, I would love to hear your thoughts on this whole idea of the great American novel,
• 1:33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Does your country have anything like that?
• 1:33:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be curious what the rest of the world thinks of this whole idea, if they kind of roll their eyes.
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_00: And we can take it.
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I know.
• 1:33:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like we said, I'm kind of embarrassed sometimes by the audacity of America, but maybe sometimes we get overly defensive and other people don't think it's as embarrassing as we do.
• 1:33:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:33:25
  SPEAKER_01: But I would just love to hear from people in general about this topic because it's such an interesting discussion.
• 1:33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:33:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:33:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for saying that.
• 1:33:34
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:33:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listeners, our next episode, again, we know that we've got the Savage Detectives read along.
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that the last discussion post was posted while we've been talking because it was scheduled to go up.
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_00: We just finished that.
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_00: Both of us are done.
• 1:33:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've read all of Bolaño, Paul.
• 1:33:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's impressive.
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the conversation on that has been pushed back and we haven't quite gotten around to rescheduling it yet.
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm starting to think maybe we just try and do that one as episode 85 and focus on Bolaño with a big healthy portion on the Savage Detectives.
• 1:34:09
  SPEAKER_00: We'll have to talk to our guests who are slated for that to see if that works.
• 1:34:12
  SPEAKER_00: But that might be the best place for us to slot that at this point.
• 1:34:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I think people will be excited to know that our next episode will have a guest, Jackie, who joined us for the Hotel Novels episode a while back, is coming back to discuss rediscovered gems in the context of publishers who help with this so much.
• 1:34:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I talked about the
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_00: uh, recovered, recovered, uh, books series that boiler house is doing.
• 1:34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll be talking about how you find these books and that, so there'll be a little bit different from the episode that we did with Sean on, um, you know, just a little bit ago about hidden gems where we particularly tried to focus on books that haven't been out there.
• 1:34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is a pretty appreciation and maybe books we've re of, uh,
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_00: uncovered that have been gems.
• 1:35:05
  SPEAKER_00: Many of the books on this list are probably there because some publisher republished them, you know, in the last little bit.
• 1:35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:35:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be so much fun.
• 1:35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Looking forward to that one.
• 1:35:17
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Paul, you've got a big day today.
• 1:35:19
  SPEAKER_00: You'll have to, you'll have to share with listeners what you're doing next time, maybe because you got to get to work.
• 1:35:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_00: I will.
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_00: I will share more later, but yeah, got a new job.
• 1:35:27
  SPEAKER_01: Got a new job.
• 1:35:29
  SPEAKER_00: Exciting.
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks everybody.
• 1:35:31
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk to you soon.
• 1:35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks everybody.
• 1:35:39
  SPEAKER_00: on our Patreon.
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to donate to the show, anything and everything, even a dollar a month helps and is deeply appreciated.
• 1:36:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can become a Patreon at patreon.com slash mooks.
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time.