Franger

March 11, 2023 4:15 PM

Throughout Franzen’s life in public, he has figured himself as embattled, enemy-beset. The metaphors he uses are powerful; most conversations about him enter their universe—accept, even in disagreement, their terms. The oppositional framing of Franzen’s career—the opinions Franzen holds, his means of expressing them, the positions they invite others to take with respect to his work and persona—flatten nuance, entrench stances, limit exchange. They “leave little room for ambiguity or contradiction” and, over time, stand to “incrementally entomb” many conversations about Franzen and—perhaps most of all—the author himself. from Franzen’s Anger by L. Gibson (excerpted from their book Freedom Reread)
posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

I have never read a Franzen novel, in part because I get the strong impression that his books focus on people exactly like this:

 “I wonder if he was so angry,” Franzen hazards, of Kraus, “because he was so privileged.” The essayist’s “anger,” in Franzen’s diagnosis, “relieved some of the discomfort of his own privilege, by reassuring him that he was also a victim,” satisfying his yearning, “like any artist . . . to be an individual” via “a violent shrugging-off of categories that threatened his individual integrity,” of which “his privilege” was “just one.”
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 7:37 PM on March 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

just so you know, ‘franger’ is Australian/NZ slang for a condom
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:18 PM on March 11, 2023 [21 favorites]

just so you know, ‘franger’ is Australian/NZ slang for a condom

Apparently a gradual mutation of "French letter". Language is so weird!
posted by srboisvert at 12:53 AM on March 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

just so you know, ‘franger’ is Australian/NZ slang for a condom

TIL, as they say...
posted by chavenet at 4:18 AM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read The Corrections. I liked and loved about 2/3rds of it. The stories of the mother and father and the daughter were amazing and mesmerizing and painful. But I mostly remember a ponderous, tedious third of the novel about one of the siblings working for a pharmaceutical company—marketing some kind of anti-depressant. Not a real-world drug, something kept vague, but spelled out as marketed in the fiction as a sort of "happy pill."

It was long winded satirical hand-wringing moral-panic commentary and it felt tired and dated even when I read it in the mid-2000s.
posted by SoberHighland at 10:40 AM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I believe the happy drug is called Aslan, and is simultaneously a party drug that some younger character takes at a party?

I loved The Corrections back in 2001, right when I had just graduated college. I suppose I connected with its zippy depiction of fast moving lives spinning out of control. I'd be scared to pick it up again now.
posted by HeroZero at 1:47 PM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I enjoy hating Franzen far too much to sully my animosity with facts. He writes pretty well but he's so far up his own ass that when he thinks about "The Great American Novel" he thinks about all the white guys before him. Not the writers. The white guys who wrote books. He's not Bellow/Updike/Roth level lamentable but he (I imagine) wishes he could be like them. Probably believes he's "At Their Level"
posted by From Bklyn at 4:23 PM on March 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've read some of the usual Franzen books, the corrections, how to be alone, freedom - they were fine. I remember this all seemed to start back when Franzen turned his nose up at the Oprah book club selection. And yea, he was totally right, it was schmaltzy books. But what an asshole.

Of course he turned heel, and maybe you can separate the villain from the art, but that is not my issue with Franzen. My issue is that I only hear one voice in my head when Franzen comes up: Patricia Lockwood:

Dad always orders the mixed grill in restaurants....soon he was making mixed grill two or three times a week....braving all but the foulest weather and loving it"

posted by zenon at 10:16 PM on March 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

not to derail too hard, but on the topic of Patricia Lockwood, she also wrote the only essay you need to read about John Updike. Franzen wishes this essay were about him.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:51 PM on March 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have never read a Franzen novel, in part because I get the strong impression that his books focus on people exactly like this

I enjoy reading Franzen books. I find them compelling and diverting. But I often don't finish, perhaps out of some sort of exhaustion. Halfway through Crossroads last year I decided that his entire body of work could be summarized as:

the interior lives of assholes

and now I can't get it out of my head. I mean we're all interior assholes, really, and I guess you've got to hand it to him for putting his own on the page, over and over.
posted by pjenks at 3:10 AM on March 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

From Bklyn, I want to thank you for the link to that Lockwood piece. Having never read a word of Updike, I will save myself the trouble.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:15 AM on March 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

"I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling." Ha ha ha
non-paywall
posted by mecran01 at 10:06 AM on March 13, 2023 [5 favorites]