Move Over Holden Caulfield

Nerdette Recaps With Peter Sagal

WBEZ

Tv & Film, Books, Self, Improvement, Pop, Tv, Wbez, Culture, Technology, Society & Culture, Nerds, Nerd, Nerdette

4.6 • 924 Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2019

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dana Czapnik has always been drawn to wanderers and wonderers, the kind of fictional characters who are always contemplating who they are and the world around them. But aside from the work of Virginia Woolf, Czapnik said she hasn’t come across many female characters who get those kind of opportunities.

“That was one of the things that I was thinking of when I was working on this,” Czapnik says of her new novel, The Falconer. “That I wanted to write a female character who has the space to just be and wonder.”

Salman Rushdie called The Falconer "a deeply affecting tale of a young woman coming of age in a man’s world." The book has been favorably compared to The Catcher in the Rye. And the main character, 17-year-old Lucy Adler, is "a much better person than Holden Caulfield," according to Nerdette's own Greta Johnsen.

Czapnik talks with Greta all about the book, the nuances of feminism, and nostalgia for the 1990s.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still
0:06.1	watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,
0:12.7	soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,
0:18.0	Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.
0:25.7	Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.
0:28.3	Listen, wherever you get your podcast.
0:34.9	Hey, y'all, before this episode starts, I just want to warn you, there are some curse words.
0:40.4	They are all for the sake of feminism, but there's also another F word involved. So just be warned at this moment.
0:55.8	From WVEZ Chicago, this is NERD. I'm Greta Johnson. And NERDette is a podcast where we talk to your favorite or soon-to-be favorite people, sometimes about your favorite or soon-to-be favorite books. And this week, we are talking with a debut author about her novel, The Falconer, which I so wish had existed when I was a
1:01.6	17-year-old. A book review magazine recently compared this book to one of the most famous
1:07.3	coming-of-age novels of all time. Here's exactly what the Kirkus Review said.
1:12.9	Coming of age in Manhattan may not have been done this brilliantly since Catcher in the Rye.
1:17.9	That comparison has been made before, but this time it's true. Get ready to fall in love, unquote.
1:24.4	I don't know about y'all, but when I was about 14, I loved Catcher in the Rye so much. And even at that point, it was already over 50 years old. I couldn't believe I was reading something that had that much age to it that I could still find so utterly relatable. But Holden Caulfield, the main character of Catcher in the Rye, is kind of snarky, right? Like, he's pretty pessimistic.
1:45.1	He has a tendency even to be cruel at times. And I have to tell you, Lucy, the 17-year-old
1:50.2	protagonist of the Falconer, is so curious and open-hearted and willing to learn things, that it is
1:56.5	just such a thrill to see a book that is this good that exists in the world now.
2:02.6	In addition to that amazing praise from Kirkus, Booker Prize-winning author, Salman Rushdie, called
2:08.3	The Falconer a deeply affecting tale of a young woman coming of age in a man's world.
2:14.1	And Anne Patchett, one of my favorite authors ever, who also just happens to own an independent bookstore in Nashville, said the Falconer has restored my faith in pretty much everything.
2:26.0	So, with all that high praise out of the way, the Falconer is about a teenage girl who's super good at basketball in 1990s, New York.
2:36.3	It's also about first love and privilege and feminism and art and space. And it's kind of about when trying to fit in is
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WBEZ, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WBEZ and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.