Jonathan Franzen is the great American novelist reborn, a literary genius for our time. Only recently, a critic was lamenting the decline of the American novel, the passing of the age of Updike, Roth and Bellow. But there is no excuse for pessimism about the future of serious fiction when a writer such as Franzen is coming into his prime. His hit The Corrections won him an army of readers, then he published a set of provocative cultural essays – and this autumn, Freedom, his first novel since The Corrections, will be finally be published. It is an extraordinary work, which develops and deepens the immense talent so evident in The Corrections in a way that is at first troubling, then addictive – and then, with mounting satisfaction, convinces you this is simply on a different plane from other contemporary fiction.
Freedom has the same seductive narrative impulse that made Franzen's previous family drama so engaging. This book, too, is an intimate and profoundly realistic novel of family life and close relationships, with a triangle of characters at its heart who compare themselves with the characters in Tolstoy's War and Peace. In fact, War and Peace is the only "high" reference point in a novel whose inhabitants mostly speak and think in terms of popular culture – one character even comes from Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of Bob Dylan, and he and his friends are conscious of this connection, sharing a love of the film Don't Look Back. Elsewhere, a mother and son argue about the qualities of Married With Children. As the plot traverses the last wretched decade – it is, very precisely, a novel of our time – communications technology keeps updating, with a daughter telling the older characters that young people text, they don't email, and blogs becoming part of the comedy.
Well, comedy or tragedy. The Russian literary allusions are no joke: this is a formidable and harrowing work. So was The Corrections, but in this book there is a moral grandeur and a relentlessness that burned its way that much deeper into my imagination. To put it bluntly, The Corrections made it plausible to speak of Franzen in the company of Philip Roth. This new book demands comparison rather with Saul Bellow's Herzog or something loftier – it is self-evidently a modern classic.
Franzen's daring has been to take on soap operas and HBO mini-series, demonstrating that if you want modern emotional dramas, the novel can provide them today as effectively as it did in the 19th century. But, he also offers something no HBO series can – the solitude and moral introspection of the novel, the beauty of prose, the imaginative love affair you form with characters you alone see in the way you see them. Freedom is the novel of the year, and the century.
NYT raved about Franzen's new book. Is anyone shocked? Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren't white male literary darlings.She continued speaking about this here.
"It is my personal opinion that yes, the Times favors white male authors. That isn't to say someone else might get a good review- only that if you are white and male and living in Brooklyn you have better odds, or so it seems. The NYT has long made it clear that they value literary fiction and disdain commercial fiction - and they disparage it regardless of race or gender of the author. I'm not commenting on one specific critic or even on my own reviews (which are few and far between because I write commercial fiction). How else can the Times explain the fact that white male authors are ROUTINELY assigned reviews in both the Sunday review section AND the daily book review section (often both raves) while so many other writers go unnoticed by their critics?"From the HuffPost article:
Weiner: However, I think it's irrefutable that when it comes to picking favorites - those lucky few writers who get the double reviews AND the fawning magazine profile AND the back-page essay space AND the op-ed, or the Q and A edited and condensed by Deborah Solomon - the Times tends to pick white guys. Usually white guys living in Brooklyn or Manhattan, white guys who either have MFAs or teach at MFA programs...white guys who, I suspect, remind the Times' powers-that-be of themselves, minus twenty years and plus some hair.NPR's story about this also focused on both the Times Book Review's alleged racial and gender biases.
War and Peace is the only "high" reference point in a novel whose inhabitants mostly speak and think in terms of popular culture – one character even comes from Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of Bob Dylan, and he and his friends are conscious of this connection, sharing a love of the film Don't Look Back. Elsewhere, a mother and son argue about the qualities of Married With Children. As the plot traverses the last wretched decade – it is, very precisely, a novel of our time – communications technology keeps updating, with a daughter telling the older characters that young people text, they don't email, and blogs becoming part of the comedy.Are you kidding me? Sounds absurdly boring. I don't understand how people can read this stuff. Can't they sit around and talk about Married with Children with their own parents? I don't get it. Picoult's novel about an angsty arsonista sounds more interesting, frankly. Even if it's bad.
I'd like to see literary supplements do genre fiction more often, because there are some really great novels that get overlooked because they're filed on the wrong shelf in the bookstore or library.The New York Times has that bi-weekly crime column, right? For the most part, crime novels aren't considered serious enough to merit full reviews, but they're included in the book review. I think the idea is that, although crime novels aren't serious literature, serious people might read crime novels. Whereas the NYT Book Review would probably not admit that their readers might be slumming in chick lit or romance or anything like that. And I do think that crime as a genre is gendered male, even though a lot of really good crime novelists are women. Similarly, you can say that you enjoy reading spy novels without killing your credibility.
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I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed
So, she's pissed that the Times Book Review, which when it comes to fiction reviews only literary fiction, doesn't review your self-described non-literary fiction works?
posted by spicynuts at 7:47 AM on August 26, 2010 [6 favorites]