Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. Our culture vulture, April Wallace, who's an instructor at the University of Arkansas as well, is with us. Happy autumn.
Wallace: Happy autumn to you.
Kellams: It's time to get the pumpkins going. You've got pumpkins on your shirt.
Wallace: I do. This is the Afterlife Book Club because that is how I will look when I reach the end of my to-be-read list, is a skeleton leaning against my gravestone with a book.
Kellams: All right. You almost always give us recommendations of ways to spend our time with culture. What do you got for us this time?
Wallace: Well, I wouldn't be doing my millennial duty if I did not say that I am legally and morally obligated to watch some "Gilmore Girls" today.
Kellams: And "Gilmore Girls." Because it's autumn, because I've seen a few episodes, but not...
Wallace: I mean, it does autumn so well.
Kellams: Okay, it's in Stars Hollow, right?
Wallace: That's right. Which strangely looks a lot like Searcy, which is not my hometown, but very near my hometown. And I say Searcy because it is a tiny town, but it has the infrastructure that Rosewood does not. Stars Hollow has like the quintessential gazebo and the bed-and-breakfast. Not an Airbnb, mind you.
Kellams: Okay.
Wallace: Bed. Honest to goodness. Everybody walks everywhere. Everyone knows each other's name and business. It's just so super cute. And it's like in a New England town. So autumn is a whole character.
Kellams: There is a mother and her growing daughter. I think by the time she's in college, by the time the show ends, am I right?
Wallace: Yeah. Okay, so Lorelai is a single mom who comes from a wealthy family but has been estranged from her parents. And for most of Rory's growing up years, she managed to find like a little job at the bed-and-breakfast where they gave her an allotment of basically an apartment that kept her from having to rely on her parents while she was raising her daughter.
So when it starts, Rory is a teenager and we follow her through the falling in love for the first time and being an ambitious, very bright student in a very small town thinking about college, all the coming-of-age things. And this happened when me and my peers were teenagers. And she works for the student paper and she reads a lot and she's kind of popular, but kind of weird. And she's like, one day she's popular, one day she's just blight.
Her mother wants her very much to have a very successful chance at a good education and a great job, kind of normal things. But also she doesn't have the money for private school. So they make a deal with the grandparents. Grandparents are going to give you money to go to private school, and they are going to use their Yale connections to help you build some college contacts in exchange for, we have to go to their house once a week for dinner on Friday night.
Kellams: Oh, Friday night-
Wallace: As a teenager.
Kellams: So does this run through the length of the series?
Wallace: Yes.
Kellams: I like that kind of concept for kind of starting a series of adventures.
Wallace: Yeah. And so you very much see both Lorelai and Rory grow up together and you see them navigate the difficulties of family dynamics. I mean, it's obviously a very different relationship for the two of them. And they both date throughout it. And they both struggle with things and they are each other's best friends.
And now if these two are on my to-be-read list that I have not gotten to yet, but there are two books from "Gilmore Girls." One is "Talking as Fast as I Can" by Lauren Graham.
Kellams: Oh, yeah. The actor. Who is the mother?
Wallace: That's right. Yes. That's been out for some years now, and I haven't gotten to it, but I really need to. More recently is "The Third Gilmore Girl" by Kelly Bishop, who played the grandma.
Kellams: Oh, okay.
Wallace: And I hear it's fantastic.
Kellams: "Gilmore Girls," plus those books are recommendations. What else?
Wallace: I recently finished watching the second season of "The Gentlemen" on Netflix.
Kellams: I don't know what this is. Okay, this is great. I love it when you bring me a show I've never heard of.
Wallace: Fantastic. Eddie Horniman is a British guy who has been in the military, and he spent a good deal of his adult life trying to distance himself from his aristocratic family. He returns when his father dies, the patriarch of the family dies. He returns to this huge estate and learns that his dad is leaving him the estate, not his older brother.
His older brother has a lot of issues, including he just tends to get the family into a lot of things that they can't get out of. And it just seems like the logical choice, even though it's not the proper order. So dad dies, leaves him the estate, but also gives him the title Duke of Halstead. And so with it comes the responsibility of being a lower form of royalty. But also he's in charge of this multimillion-dollar place with servants and just responsibilities out the wazoo. And he quickly learns that beneath the estate is an enormous weed empire.
Kellams: Oh, okay.
Wallace: So needless to say, it is not even as complicated as he thinks. It is way more complicated. Freddy, his brother, is super reckless. And he, along with learning that there is the weed business as well, and what do we do about that? Freddy has gotten them into a situation of owing Tommy Dixon $8 million.
Kellams: That ain't good.
Wallace: And so he's got to find a way through that before he can even remotely decide, how am I going to either, like, probably squash this weed farm business, right? Because he's legitimate. Like, he's had a career. He has morals, right. So he plans to sell the estate to kingpin Stanley Johnston, who is, he's a big character in "Breaking Bad." The guy whose face falls off.
Kellams: I didn't watch "Breaking Bad."
Wallace: Well, "Breaking Bad" fans will know him. When you see him, you'll be like, that guy is so evil. He's still evil here. But in a similar, like, very educated, measured way where he doesn't appear dangerous, but he totally is very dangerous. And again, it's part of a drug empire storyline.
Kellams: All right. Let me ask you about this because, you know, I couldn't do the "Friends and Neighbors" with Jon Hamm about a guy who's robbing from his friends and gets in too deep. I couldn't do "Breaking Bad" after two and a half episodes because that was too much. I dropped "Ozark" after the first season because that was too much.
Wallace: Really?
Kellams: Yeah, really. I mean, it is. Yeah. So how, on the intense level, how is "The Gentlemen"? Because it sounds really intense.
Wallace: It is intense. And we haven't even made it to season two here, Kyle. It does get worse. I would say it's not quite "Ozark" level in season one.
Kellams: Okay. What else?
Wallace: Well, I am not finished with "James" by Percival Everett, but I am wildly enjoying it. And I enjoyed your conversation with him at the library so much.
Kellams: I enjoyed being up there on stage with him and talking with him. He was a delightful, delightful person.
Wallace: He was. I don't know why, but I didn't expect him to be so funny through the whole thing.
Kellams: And I think he just came off as so genuine, and there were so many people who, because he's had three dozen or so novels and many of them were asked about by audience members, like about this or about that. And he would just honestly say, "Well, I don't really remember why I wrote that," or "I don't remember writing that," but he was engaged and just a delight.
Wallace: Absolutely. I fully appreciated that so much time was given to the audience to ask questions. And my favorite was definitely the little girl who asked about "Dr. No," particular detail about a pickle or a fever dream. And his answer was just so gracious about his work not really meaning very much until a reader interprets it.
Kellams: Right.
Wallace: And how powerful that probably was for her to hear. That was so great.
Kellams: And he said that while he didn't mean to be brushing people off when he said he couldn't remember or he didn't know why he did that. He didn't really.
Wallace: Yeah.
Kellams: But he loved talking to readers. He loved it.
Wallace: Absolutely. I think it really showed that his writing process is not for the awards, as he said, and not for other types of recognition or for the active. It's more about him really investigating his topic of the moment. It was so funny to hear that. Like, he doesn't even know sometimes that he is beginning a book because he is simply off in the weeds.
Kellams: Right.
Wallace: Like the one about a geologist where he like read 25 or 26 geology books and then spent three months in the field.
Kellams: And everybody else around him knew he was going to write about that, but he didn't. And in fact, "James," telling the "Huckleberry Finn" story from the perspective of James, the enslaved man. He says he decided to write that while he was playing tennis. It just came to him. It is obviously a great book. I mean, it won the National Book Award. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It's a fantastic, fantastic book. I love "James." My favorite of Percival Everett's that I read so far, and I haven't read them all, is "The Trees."
Wallace: Mhm.
Kellams: And you're going to read, if you read "The Trees," and you'll come back to me and say, "Wait a second, you can't do these TV shows, but you can do, but you love this book." I don't know, there's something different about a novel than a television show. Okay, folks, "Gilmore Girls," all the way through the reboot, is recommended. "The Gentlemen," two seasons, and I'm sure there're going to be more.
Wallace: It sounds like, it seems like it.
Kellams: Okay. And where can you see the "Gilmore Girls"?
Wallace: Amazon Prime, Hulu or Disney? Not hard to see the "Gilmore Girls."
Kellams: "The Gentlemen."
Wallace: Netflix.
Kellams: Netflix. "James."
Wallace: At your library or your local bookstore.
Kellams: That's right. Thank you, April.
Wallace: Thank you.
Kellams: April Wallace, instructor at the University of Arkansas and our culture vulture.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
