Franzen: s/d

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/books/201012/jonathan-franzen-profile-chuck-klosterman-freedom

Could Walter's using the example of the Dave Matthews Band as the epitome of bad music be a sub-textual reference to ILX?

I find it difficult to believe Franzen has never stumbled briefly into ilx, while searching the net, due to its roots in Pitchfork. That he would stay and tourist around in it seems only very remote and unlikely to me. He'd never escape and his output would fall to zero.

on the other hand, i think a lot of people just dislike the dave matthews band

also he took like ten years to write freedom, right? that's like nine and a half days per page. p much zero

In Freedom, the portrayal of Patty is intriguing because her awakening is never proclaimed, is muffled and almost denied (I haven't read her postscript yet), and in her section -- "written by her" -- she is defenseless and naive. So overall, Franzen keeps her distance and seems to be saying that some things can't be known and are the domain of fiction.

The kitchen sink quality is odd because my guess is that Franzen is reticent, but in a weird way, it seems he aspires to be frantic and popular, but in Freedom it plays out in a more controlled, 4th album way (than in the Corrections). This is not a judgment upon him or his writing.

I'm about 1/3 of the way into Strong Motion. Enjoying it, possibly more than the later two

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Maybe I need to read this new essay again but I was really searching for the point.

Jonathan Franzen is the author, most recently, of “Freedom.” This essay is adapted from a commencement speech he delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College.

Hey, that's my alma mater. My year, though, instead of Franzen or Wallace, we had a certain Republican presidential candidate as commencement speaker whose son was supposed to graduate with us but did not :-(.

should I bother reading Freedom? I don't care for Updike.

I love Updike and I loved Freedom, so...no.

Freedom made me feel gross. Franzen is a good writer in terms of his language but every character was just awful, even the ones with which you're supposed to sympathize.

yeah he can't wipe this sheen of disdain from the characters, and I HATE his narrative voice: this pseudo-cute smart informality.

That combined with his awful sex scenes made it a queasy reading experience.

i actually kinda liked the corrections as i was reading it, even if the flaws were plentiful and obvious, like here is a dude who came out of one tradition and is now pushing himself hard in the opposite direction, even if the ball is bouncing off the backboard 50 percent of the time. but freedom was just junk. whoever said "tv melodramas" up thread was otm, but it's more like someone turned one of those not-even-melodramatic-enough-to-be-oscar-bait indie flicks into an hbo miniseries. except instead of coddling and putting a halo around the gently fucked-up middle-class characters the way most of those filmmakers do, you get, as alfred said, a constant and not always subliminal disdain. i don't mind unlikable protagonists or even author-contempt for same but the style's gotta be a LOT better than franzen's and the stakes have gotta be higher. or it's at least got to be funny.

franzen the person, at least as expressed through his writing-about-himself since it's not like i know the dude, strikes me as one of the more deeply unpleasant literary personas of "our" generation.

that new yorker article he wrote recently (robinson crusoe/dfw/etc) mostly made me feel bad for him. so bitter.

i love 'the corrections' fwiw.

"etc" there = "jonathan fucking franzen" and it was as usual the primary subject of the essay iirc

yeah that essay was the first that actually made me want to put sugar in his gas tank or something. and it's not like there's been a shortage of irritating j. franzen essays over the last 15 years.

One of my favorite horrors: "The kitchen area was a nauseating, never-cleaned sty that smelled like a mental illness."

HOW DOES ANYTHING SMELL LIKE A MENTAL ILLNESS?

jars of pee iirc

freedom is what happens when a meanspirited and successful novelist who lives in brooklyn decides that he can write authoritatively about all sorts of things and people that have very little to do with the daily lives of meanspirited, successful novelists who live in brooklyn.

like his disdain and his lack of curiosity make it impossible for him to accurately or convincingly portray how someone like joey would see or feel about the world so he ends up being this ridiculous, hateful figure. & w/ the exception of the bird stuff most of the 'detail' in the novel came across like half-remembered takes on old new yorker and atlantic articles with a bit of the sunday style section thrown in.

difficult listening hour helpfully provided several examples of sparkling prose from the Crusoe article:

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.

It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool.

the stuff about dfw was so weirdly full of unexamined or apparently unconscious rage.

i get where he's coming from (as a close colleague of dfw's reading the avalanche of posthumous press), but the part where he's imagining/projecting dfw's thoughts about how famous and loved he'll be after killing himself is so jaw-droppingly self-centered.

anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool.

this guy is an asshole. NOBODY thinks this way except maybe Ethan Hawke's character in Reality Bites.

Don't read the book.

No worries. I put it down at pg. 12, which I haven't done with a book in years. It didn't even deserve throwing it across the room.

i feel weird criticizing someone's reminiscence of their dead friend but the part in that article where he says something about how DFW's problem was that he couldn't appreciate the wonders of things like BIRD-WATCHING was maybe the most cringe-inducing franzen moment ever.

you know, one thing i will give freedom, is that all this time after reading it, i still get irked when i think of it. which is not something i can say for many contemporary novels ive read and disliked (even intensely at the time) over the last few years.

i know some people on ilb had problems with it (i couldnt bear to read the thread through when i saw p.f. doing his "robot trying to understand the humans" thing), but goon squad taking the pulitzer over this gave me the same schafenfreude-y high that bigelow spanking cameron on oscar night a few years ago did.

ooooh i hate this guy.

can't stand him either. thought my dislike when I read is essay on Gaddis in the NYer. . . nope, he tops it years later with that weird/gross DFW island essay

thought my dislike had reached it's peak that is

i knd of admire his complete shamelessness about intellectually showing his ass in public. (see: the gaddis essay.) admire in a very abstract way, mind you.

the dfw/island essay is something i hope he'll feel a certain shame for later in his life. given who we're talking about, i wouldnt put money on it, though.

(my secret shame is my gross addiction to the naturalist middle-class family/social novel. it's like the lit equivalent of really digging that bon iver album or something. so in a weird way i *want* to like franzen, or wanted *to* like him. but it's like he's hellbent on doing everything, as a writer and a person, to make me loathe him. and i figure if i'm gonna waste time on this sort of b.s. there are stil a raft of philip roth novels i've yet to read.)

i avoided it for a long time, until after i read the pale king--not because the essay and the book had much to do with one another, but because i knew the essay would be tough to read. (either cringeworthy or well-put together and sad). i thought maybe it would be touching, but instead i just felt embarrassed for the guy. i kind of want to read it again, someday, if that makes sense, because it creeped me out so much.

i don't think it should be shameful to read middle-class family/social novels, at all. i want to like the guy too. i'm still on his team. but i haven't read freedom and i doubt i will. the corrections was enough. you know who i really hate along with franzen is rick moody. that guy is terrible. hadn't thought about that guy in ages, but i was at a bankrupt borders sale today and there were tons of moody's last book (ha, along with lots of pale kings and freedoms.)

heh rick moody makes me equally angry for both similar and completely different reasons as j-franz.

i think there's a lot about both of them that they think is subtly self-deprecating but actually comes off as a blanket contempt for anyone of a similar class/education/social background as them who just doesn't happen to *be* them.

(not that this is exclusive to them as feted white upper-middle-class chroniclers of the angst of their millieu, of course.)

no you're right they just have this chip on their shoulders (especially franzy pants). i have a soft spot for moody because he's a musician. i haven't heard any of the music, but i dunno, it brings the guy down to earth somehow and makes me forget about his horrible prose. franzy just seems like an A+ prick, totally contemptuous of all human life, etc

ill kinda rep for franzen's essay collection 'how to be alone', at the very least over his fiction. i think part of it is that in my worst moments i can empathize with franzen's pungent disgust for almost all aspects of contemporary life but i also felt like the essays were less terrible in their certainty, like franzen could at some points gain access to what the world outside his head looked like and realized that a lot of the time the problem is him. like he could see his 'legitimate' rage at the world's base selfishness and unkindness curdle into this self-regarding myopia? idk i thought it was interesting but maybe it was just too 'there but for the grace of god go i' for me to hate outright...

good post -- makes me feel more inclined to check out his essays at some point. the last franzen i read was the corrections, back in 2006. i want to read his essay on dfw but it's behind the nyer paywall and i don't have a sub at the moment so that'll have to wait

I felt so dirty reading Freedom -- as if someone had poured ooze over me -- that I stopped reading it after seventy pages, which I NEVER do.

I fucking hate the kind of all-pervasive jocular flippancy in Franzen's tone, you see it in so many modern American writers now, post-Corrections. It's okay when he's doing obvious comedy, less so when he's talking about one of his key characters being raped as a schoolgirl.

gonna try real hard to remember all the things i thought about freedom, & that ny-er article (most recent dfw one), & mount a defence at some point - i think i more think that he's sometimes good, usually not terrible & just generally a lot better than one might assume from this thread, but i realise i am gonna have to have the stats to back this.

i think he's VERY good as a stylist, fiction-wise. on freedom he seemed to finally achieve the more-or-less transparent, slick-as-grease, lyrical-but-not-really thing he was going for on the corrections. it's just that, as mentioned above, i couldn't get with the content or the tone.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/assets_c/2011/10/AuthorJon_Neils_127752799_600-thumb-465x310-109844.jpeg

this picture is kind of unnerving

i liked Freedom quite a bit (and still LOVE, even on a second reading, The Corrections) but Freedom does have problems. I couldn't reconcile the four or five different Pattys into one Patty at four different stages of her life, she wasn't a believable whole even although for the most part i liked, or could sympathise with her, at those different points. Joey's character arc wasn't convincing because the main thrust of his business dealings in south america/iraq was totally, ridiculously, unbelievable and garbled and rushed. In spite of this i was still entertained and ultimately moved by the book. Plus I think I just like Franzen a whole lot in spite of his persona. i met him at a reading and talked to him for a bit and found him very attractive.

Just like him to write a good book after everyone has already decided he's over.

Lots of the public have liked several of his other books. Aren't they bestsellers?

They're good books.

This sounds dreadful.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/04/the-church-of-jonathan-franzen

Crossroads is so good

enjoyed it

not sure why it had to be so long

it contains this hilarious sentence:

He lingered to push his tongue as far into her as it would reach, to taste what his penis couldn’t

but also this decency

The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

I really don't understand why the guy is so popular, kinda like Elon Musk it seems more like he won the lottery than went out and achieved

but much more fun than Purity that's for sure

If you mean Crossroads, it's too long and kinda fizzles at the end, I thought -- the other novels have had stronger endings.

I actually enjoy his celebration of awkwardness in free indirect speech (like the penis line - it's funny! and deliberately so, I think). I like that he's unembarrassed to explore the more doltish aspects of our inner monologues without getting all inane and Nick Hornbyesque about it.

(This is probably an overcharitable reading, but I'm a fan, so yeah)

hehe indeed, good defense

I'm not that critical, mostly find it funny, similar to rap music's memorable banalities

and yes, was referring to Crossroads

Really liked The Corrections and Freedom, everything I read about Purity put me off so I never looked at it, will read Crossroads at some point

It's weird how in many corners of the internet it's taken as a given that "everybody hates Jonathan Franzen" when in fact he is widely praised by critics and his books sell hundreds of thousands of copies

sorry ive been overcome by a vision of an alternate universe where penises can taste

I think his non-fiction is insufferable in a way his fiction largely isn't, but not really sure Actual Franzen that closely resembles Internet's Approximation of Franzen.

He is certainly capable of bad, thoughtless writing when he wanders out of his "male sadsack" safe space, but I'm a fan and large uncritical. They're all fun to read, even Purity and Strong Motion. The new one is maybe his best until it sags for the final fifth.

What the Penis Can't Taste: Essays

It did strike me while reading Crossroads what kind of massive confidence it must take to write those standard issue Franzen sex scenes, go through the whole revision and editing process, know that thousands of people are going to read them, and still feel comfortable leaving them in as is.

Was thinking something similar when I read the book, for sure

Maybe he finds nothing embarrassing about them, maybe he thinks the prose is stellar

Again -- possibly being overcharitable -- but I think he's comfortable having his characters indulge in embarrassing or inappropriate or pretentious modes of thinking, and he doesn't overuse irony or stylistic excess to keep an authorial distance from that.

Yeah, I agree and actually don't think that's overcharitable, just the level of charitability we should extend to any author/artwork

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Crossroads and I fucking love this novel. I read the Corrections probably 20 years ago, it was a chore for me at the time; took over a year to finish, I just could not make myself care about most of those people and the ending seemed extremely anticlimactic. I would probably feel differently about it now, and should revisit it. But I feel much more empathy for the characters in Crossroads; each of them, fallible and stupid in their own ways.

Those are the best quarters of the novel, lol. But yeah I still think it's one of his best.

yeah, I found the ending a bit disappointing (finished this morning); a bit on the nose ('all these people are at a CROSSROADS in their life do you see'), and it kind of left Perry dangling there although maybe there wasn't much that could be convincingly conveyed from his POV. Though I did like the retreat from Russ and Marion's POVs ... we spent a lot of time in their heads and seeing how that resolved from the outside was a nice change. Anyway, yeah, good book so now I'm reading Freedom.

The whole desert trip chapter, especially the farcical sequence where Russ is trying to find somewhere to fuck, is an incredible/nerve-jangling bit of writing — but yeah, everything that comes after was a bit of a disappointment. On the whole an amazing book though.

Now I'm going back and reading Freedom which also sat on my shelf for years unread. 1/4 of the way through it now, it's also great.

Perry was the most fun character, and his punishment was excessive in a "this is your brain on drugs" way that felt moralistic, Franzen did him dirty from what I remember.

ok, well, just about done with Freedom which I mostly loved but it was depressing as fuck so I need to read something affirming now.

ok now I'm finished with it and was actually taken by surprise at the denouement.