Episode 81: McTeague

Hey comrades! We’re back with more swears, random Frankfurt School references, and messy book takes. In our Season 5 opener, UChicago PhD candidate, friend of the pod, and union organizer Josh Stadtner talks with us about Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), which is about an amateur dentist and his obsession with a concertina. We establish that Frank Norris was a frat douche and social Darwinist (yeesh), and that his having written in the late 19th/early 20th century is still not the slightest excuse for this. We talk about the scene in which a lady has some steamy naked times with a pile of money. This really happens in the novel and we did not make it up.

We talk about teeth, money, the terrifying desert, and Freudian forms. We read the Norton Critical Edition with an introduction by Donald Pizer. We recommend you go back to a classic and read Georg Lukács’s 1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?” to bone up on your “is naturalism good?” takes.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Josh on Twitter @joshstadtner, Tristan @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.