Tag: franzen

Franzen’s Freedom

Finished!

I liked it well enough, despite its cover and its title. I mean: I really, really liked it, though I’d like also for Franzen to write his next novel about something other than a midwestern family. Sure, his book expands to somewhat of a national/global scale at one point, but this one felt at times stuck in the rut of its characters. I don’t know how The Corrections avoided this, but maybe it was in its far superior title.

I don’t think I’ll ever get over this title.

Here’s J. Picoult’s complaint about the media hullabaloo descending on this book:

I think the New York Times reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you’re a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink.

Which brings to mind that line from Lorrie Moore’s excellent (and a superior post-9/11 novel than Franzen’s) A Gate at the Stairs, which I don’t have in front of me right now, and so I have to paraphrase:

“Those people who claim they don’t care about a person whether he’s black, white, green, or purple. As if black were a nonsense color like green or purple.”

Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Franzen

Sigh:

A raft of sea otters are at play in a narrow estuary at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz, Calif. There are 41 of them, says a guy in a baseball cap. He counted. They dive and surface and float around on their backs with their little paws poking up out of the water, munching sea urchins or thinking about munching sea urchins.

The humans admiring them from the shore don’t make them self-conscious. Otters are congenitally happy beasts. They don’t worry about their future, even though they’re legally a threatened species and their little estuary is literally in the shadow of the massive 500-ft. stacks of a power plant.

One of the humans admiring them is Jonathan Franzen. Franzen is a member of another perennially threatened species, the American literary novelist.

Does JF court this kind of wretched coverage that makes him look always like America’s Greatest Living Twit, or is this just the way we can characterize those writers, reporters, and critics who like him a lot?

I like him a lot. I’m really excited about his new novel due out this month, though I’m wary of that title: Freedom. But I think I’d like JF a lot more if he never, ever appeared in the media. I guess what I’m saying is that “Jonathan Franzen” has done more damage to JF’s career than anyone. I’m no image consultant, but how hard could it be in this case to do a better job?

“JF, don’t let this reporter watch you fawn over otters.”

“JF, don’t demand Oprah’s logo be removed from your book’s otherwise uninteresting but perfectly fine cover.”

“No, no, JF, don’t write those personal narratives for The New Yorker!”

I Used to Have a Blog

Another one. It still exists. For a time, the most popular post was about Roger Scruton’s “A Carnivore’s Credo”, which you are welcome to Google. Now, this most popular post, by which I mean the post that is read based on the greatest number of Google searches, by which I mean the relevant thing on the blog people are most often searching for, is Jonathan Franzen’s “Perchance to Dream” a.k.a. “The Harper’s Essay”. Here, in the interest of complicating those search results, is what I ages ago had to say about it:
Continue reading I Used to Have a Blog