May 5, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min · 17 segments
Hannah Smart, the noted David Foster Wallace scholar, returns to the show to discuss her debut novel, Meat Puppets. Smart writes metafictions anchored in the anxieties of the human heart. Meat Puppets…
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Are human beings fungible commodities? How much of our interpersonal lives are transactional? Are we actively inhabiting our social roles, or are we passively dissolving into the indiscernible sum of our social personae? In Hannah Smart's debut novel, Meat Puppets, these quandaries of personal identity and social value take center stage.
The plot of Meat Puppets concerns an amoral scheme involving the trading of human stocks based on the probability of future artistic success and celebrity.
The characters of Meat Puppets are hedonistic and duplicitous, with a knack for convincing performances.
There are ostensible serious and professional types like Hailey Duker, the financial manager and co-conspirator in the celebrity human stock trade, who is secretly titillated by indulging her sociopathic tendencies, but cares way more about being perceived as someone who is too practical to get mixed up in criminal, criminal enterprises.
And then there are the more volatile and vulnerable types like Sid Morris, a Christian anti-drug motivational speaker turned rising actor, whose preternatural gifts at realistic acting are surpassed only by his desperate search for a father figure.
All of these characters are deceptive and calculating, but are ironically blind to the key ways in which they are being duped by others.
The metafictional architecture of the novel further complicates the question of trust, and the thin barrier between the believability of a perception and the gullibility of the perceiver.
Meat Puppets analogizes the mendacity and falseness and paranoia-inducing quality of the most uncanny acting with the artifices of the novel and the exchangeability of social types.
We are asked to consider whether our best actors, when the aura of their celebrity and public image are stripped away, are anything more than vacant marionettes building up simulacra of human personalities from scratch.
More unsettling, we are by extension invited to consider what happens to the human psyche and our capacity for sincere relationships when the psyche never develops beyond the fledgling mimicry of a hollowed-out puppet.
It's my pleasure to welcome once again, completing her trio of appearances here on the podcast, Hannah Smart.
Hannah Smart is the founder and editor-in-chief of the experimental literary magazine, The Militant Grammarian, and sh- her debut novel, Meat Puppets, comes out on May 5th.
It's my pleasure to have her here to discuss her wonderful debut novel, Meat Puppets.
Are human beings fungible commodities? How much of our interpersonal lives are transactional? Are we actively inhabiting our social roles, or are we passively dissolving into the indiscernible sum of our social personae? In Hannah Smart's debut novel, Meat Puppets, these quandaries of personal identity and social value take center stage.
The plot of Meat Puppets concerns an amoral scheme involving the trading of human stocks based on the probability of future artistic success and celebrity.
The characters of Meat Puppets are hedonistic and duplicitous, with a knack for convincing performances.
There are ostensible serious and professional types like Hailey Duker, the financial manager and co-conspirator in the celebrity human stock trade, who is secretly titillated by indulging her sociopathic tendencies, but cares way more about being perceived as someone who is too practical to get mixed up in criminal, criminal enterprises.
And then there are the more volatile and vulnerable types like Sid Morris, a Christian anti-drug motivational speaker turned rising actor, whose preternatural gifts at realistic acting are surpassed only by his desperate search for a father figure.
All of these characters are deceptive and calculating, but are ironically blind to the key ways in which they are being duped by others.
The metafictional architecture of the novel further complicates the question of trust, and the thin barrier between the believability of a perception and the gullibility of the perceiver.
Meat Puppets analogizes the mendacity and falseness and paranoia-inducing quality of the most uncanny acting with the artifices of the novel and the exchangeability of social types.
We are asked to consider whether our best actors, when the aura of their celebrity and public image are stripped away, are anything more than vacant marionettes building up simulacra of human personalities from scratch.
More unsettling, we are by extension invited to consider what happens to the human psyche and our capacity for sincere relationships when the psyche never develops beyond the fledgling mimicry of a hollowed-out puppet.
It's my pleasure to welcome once again, completing her trio of appearances here on the podcast, Hannah Smart.
Hannah Smart is the founder and editor-in-chief of the experimental literary magazine, The Militant Grammarian, and sh- her debut novel, Meat Puppets, comes out on May 5th.
It's my pleasure to have her here to discuss her wonderful debut novel, Meat Puppets.
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