![]() He disdains social media: "Twitter is unspeakably irritating. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator") that result in other authors responding with "I have broken every single one of these rules" and "ignore this nonsense", which I don't think happened when cuddly Kurt Vonnegut did the same. He gives interviews where he talks about how "I don't have very many black friends", or mulls adopting an Iraqi orphan. And others, like his arch-nemesis Jennifer Weiner abhor the media coverage he hoovers up (while contributing to it themselves).īut as those last points suggest, increasingly it's not Franzen’s books that get people's backs up, but what he gets up to off the page. Some, like Emily Gould in Vanity Fair, see Franzen's books as representative of a gilded white male literary presence – "the Jonathans" – to be deplored, and speak darkly of Franzen's "primal sin". ![]() On Purity, Curtis Sittenfeld criticised the "tedious stereotypes embodied by the female characters" and the number (six) of male characters who "experience homicidal urges toward their mothers, wives and paramours". Those fat family epics, the multi-level social novel, especially when written by middle-aged white men, were a thing of the past: from the era of Updike, Wolfe and peak-period Irving.īut more than this, some critics were saying not (just) that the books were bad fiction, but that they were bad in essence or spirit, consumed with a corruption that could not be fixed. Why should this be? Well, the later books were more of a mixed bag, to be sure, but Franzen was also starting to look not like a writer "for our time", but a man out of time. Nonetheless, for The Corrections, and its successors Freedom (2010) and Purity (2015), the media coverage rolled in: though while the reviews for The Corrections were mostly raves, enthusiasm seemed to decline with the later books. Oprah Winfrey, one of the twin peaks of celebrity literary endorsement in the US along with Barack Obama, had added The Corrections to her book club, guaranteeing many more sales, but Franzen whisked it away, fearful that Oprah's sticker on his cover would deter male readers. The Corrections was a big, ambitious book: a family saga and a critique of modern America in one, but even as he rose into the light, Franzen was making trouble for himself. A new Franzen book wasn't always a big deal, and by the mid-1990s he had published two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, to what he called, in his essay Why Bother? from his collection How to Be Alone, "the silence of irrelevance".Īll that changed with his third novel, The Corrections, which had built up such juggernaut momentum in industry buzz and publicity that even publication a week before the US terror attacks on Septemcouldn't halt it. The truth, perhaps, is that he was never that cool in the first place, or, at least, that his time in the unshadowed sun was brief. When did the balance tip against him? When did Jonathan Franzen lose his cool? If Oyler is right that it's young people who disdain Franzen and all his works, then the trend is set, and his days are numbered. The world where, if Zadie Smith really did find The Corrections "impossible to dislike", she wasn't trying hard enough? Among young writers online, this is more controversial than any sex thing you can come up with". ![]() ![]() Or do you live in the world where Jonathan Franzen is not just a bad writer (" the plot here seems contrived and the characters fail to engage" – Kirkus) but a benchmark for everything that is wrong with modern literature? That is, the world critic Lauren Oyler evoked when, in a review of Torrey Peters' novel Detransition, Baby for the London Review of Books in May, she said: "The naughtiest thought I had while reading it is that the book recalls the work of Jonathan Franzen. Which world do you live in? The one where Franzen is a striding colossus of contemporary fiction, "a literary genius for our time" (The Guardian), "the novelist for our times" (Time), author of books such as Freedom, "a Great American Novel for our time" (Daily Telegraph) and The Corrections, "a moving epic for our time" (New York Magazine)? (Everyone agrees, it seems, that he is for our time.) As his new novel Crossroads is published, the battle is on once more. This can be the only explanation for why he polarises otherwise like-minded people – that gentle subset of humanity we call readers – in a way that even Donald Trump or Meghan Markle can't. ![]() Sometimes it seems like there are two people called Jonathan Franzen: the successful, acclaimed novelist, and his evil twin. ![]()
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