Franzen: s/d

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.

^kinda agree w/ this except for liking franzen as a person. idk, maybe i do a little. at least think hes interesting. i couldnt even read that nonfic 'how to be alone' thing tho. i think the Patty character arc was probably the best of any of them, though to some degree i found all the characters compelling. updike is an ok comparison, though franzens sentences are not nearly as evocative & are too clunkily infused w/ pop/political culture here

Just reread patches of The Corrections and it is still fabulous. Comic dialogue is one of its greatest strengths.

We mentioned Franzen's New Yorker article on Edith Wharton. A response in The Daily Beast.

every once in a while i pick up the corrections and every time i look at the first paragraph it stops me dead in my tracks. and stops me from ever reading the book.

"The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat."

this paragraph drives me a little crazy and the whole northern religion of things comes to an end. firstly, i REALLY want to know how apples ripening in a bag add to the "madness" and "disorder" of an autumn prairie cold front. secondly, i ALWAYS imagine that the storm windows are actually IN the bedrooms. Like, they are all on the bed shuddering. Though, that at least does imply some sort of madness. Thirdly, is the "gust after gust of disorder"...wind? Do empty rooms and yards free of children somehow add to the "madness" of a cold front? if there are leaves and acorns and ripening apples it can't be THAT cold yet. Are leaf blowers and clothes dryers ominous symbols of mother nature's fury? And are the trees smoking a lot of cigarettes and pacing a lot? What exactly makes them "restless"?

so many questions...

and even when i browse at random i find things like:

"It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games."

It's like one of those wise and pithy Tolstoy quotes...except....really? IS that the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements? Maybe I hang out in the wrong prairie towns.

is he talking abt man hunting man??

i have no idea.

local apples

the whole northern spie religion of things coming to an end.

wait, northern spy/spie wouldn't be local to a prairie. nevermind.

i read that paragraph and it makes me think the person who wrote it has only read about going outside. or only seen pictures of outside.

I don't know, I feel the problem may be obscurely connected with wanting to do this:

The madness of the trees ripening in the mortgage of a minor light. You could feel it: gust after gust of disorder. The cold front restless in the sky: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low on the autumn prairie, termperatures falling, storm windows shuddering in empty bedrooms. No red oaks in the yard here. The children rained acorns on houses with no gasoline. The nasal contention of a clothes dryer, the drone of a leaf blower, paper apples in a local bag, the autumn prairie coming to an end. A cold front lengthened on yellowing zoysia. The smell of the whole northern religion of things with which Alfred Lambert had made morning love to the wicker seat after a paintbrush. HIccuping.

dude, that is friggin' brilliant. would read your book any day.

Maybe I shd go get myself a copy of the corrections. I cd do something like Averroes' The Incoherence of The Incoherence. The Corrections of The Corrections

do it!

"Body warmth was hanging in the air, faint smells of Enid's White Shoulders perfume, and something bathroomy, something old-persony."

That is a much, much better paragraph, Fizzles.

would read a 500-page Cheever-inspired novel about a man in suburbia who has a torrid threesome with a chaise and a paint brush.

I also would read.

Thank you, Scott. I'm totally with you on this. The farthest I've gotten is about ten pages in, and that was a painful ten pages. All those images that have some kind of profound meaning that can be sensed but never truly KNOWN.

the beginning is the worst part iirc

Never read Franzen--everything I've read about him, and his various holy pronouncements, make him seem incredibly humourless, which is one of my main turn-offs. Can anyone who knows his work confirm my prejudice?

"the nasal contention of a leaf blower" WTF

hey how come nobody has posted franzen's rulez fur ritin' on here?

In February 2010, Franzen (along with writers including Richard Ford, Zadie Smith and Anne Enright) was asked by The Guardian to contribute what he believed were ten serious rules to abide by for aspiring writers. Franzen's rules ran as follows:

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2. Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
3. Never use the word "then" as a ­conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
4. Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6. The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8. It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction [the TIME magazine cover story detailed how Franzen physically disables the Net portal on his writing laptop].
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

3, 4, and 6 are actually shrewd comments. otoh wtf is "an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown"?

i believe that refers to having no internet connection.

4 is sorta ridiculous--i can't think of a single first person voice that isn't "distinctive"

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

i actually want anyone reading my stuff to be an adversarial spectator. i have enough friends.

I think he's warning MFA students stuck for material

xpost

so tired of this fucking guy

i found three copies of the corrections in my sisters house

burn them

i have made the proper 'corrections' *crazy eyes*

http://s21.theawl.com/awl/up/2012/02/Screen-shot-2012-02-20-at-7.08.06-PM.jpg

someone should interview him and half way through his schtick abt why contemporary writing and the internet is bad just slide that photo across the table

^^^^

why denim shirts are bad by jonathan franzen

what the film kicking and screaming took from us by jonathan franzen