middle-class whiteness and haughty moralizing caged in a 500-page family drama). While widespread disdain for Franzen first emerged in 2001 after he disavowed Oprah’s endorsement of The Corrections, criticisms now tend to focus on his dorky bird-watching obsession and fossilized novel formula (i.e. To discuss Franzen among my peers in graduate school was akin to dropping Mentos in a Coke bottle, the explosion of vitriol so swift and insistent that anyone with the slightest taste for Freedom or Purity would have done well to incinerate their bookshelf. What left is there to say about Jonathan Franzen?ĭepending on who you talk to, he’s either a generational talent or a wretched relic of literature’s white male hegemony, an Updikean inbred whose books belong to history.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |