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    LordBurleighTom Scocca
    9/01/15 1:28pm

    Is it that he's a bad writer celebrated because he's a white man and writes about it?

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      licjulieLordBurleigh
      9/01/15 1:36pm

      I would argue that he’s not exactly a “bad writer.” I say this as a person who 1) is suspicious of over-lauded white male writers, and 2) very much dislikes Franzen as a writer. But he isn’t “bad,” exactly. He can write gorgeous, scalpel-precise sentences. He has a sense of story. He’s just a retrograde asshole who hates his characters as far as I can tell. Which makes him boring.

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      mostlyharmless24LordBurleigh
      9/01/15 1:36pm

      Yeah that’s it. Everyone is celebrating his whiteness, there is no merit what so ever to his writing.

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    ennui is boringTom Scocca
    9/01/15 3:16pm

    I love Franzen, though my love is layered and not unconditional. There were parts of The Corrections that were so insanely well written, I’d have to put the book down and take a deep breath. His dad drinking tea and his hands shaking, everyone watching for the spill. It sounds silly, but it made me cry, seeing the exact same thing with someone else, those feeling on point.


    Freedom there was a bit less love, but it was well done. I had idea that Purity came out today. I squealed out loud and bought it and am now stroking my kindle like it’s a real book, like I can feel the pages. I can’t wait to crawl into bed with this when I get home.

    Franzen has always struck me as a pompous, so much smarter than everyone in the room, sighing jerk, but the man can write.

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      gilgrissomsglasssesennui is boring
      9/01/15 3:32pm

      Having only read The Corrections, I’d guess I file him under “Good Writers Whose Work I Don’t Like Reading.”

      I’m old and tired and can’t muster the motivation to read stuff I neither want to nor have to.

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      ennui is boringgilgrissomsglassses
      9/01/15 3:41pm

      I mostly think Franzen is a guy you either really love or really don't. Nothing much happens in his books, they're more character studies than anything else. Like, for me, the thought of reading David Foster Wallace makes me want to put a bullet in my head (though I will allow he's had a few decent essays).

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    River KleenexTom Scocca
    9/01/15 1:29pm

    Aside from the fact that he looks like a hastily thrown together Al Franken Cosplayer, I see nothing wrong here.

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      MattRiver Kleenex
      9/01/15 1:40pm

      I'm still nursing the theory that he is a version of Stephen King from an alternate dimension that slipped into our reality via a rift. In his home dimension, Franzen was a version of King that actually listened to all the people that shit-talked horror fiction, deciding to become a 'serious writer' and he never had substance abuse issues. If him and King ever touch, they're going to go all Ron Silver from Time Cop.

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      River KleenexMatt
      9/01/15 1:47pm

      Though clearly outlandish, and perhaps the result of mild psychosis; this theory you have tabled seems entirely plausible, and I don’t hate it.

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    ThrumbolioTom Scocca
    9/01/15 1:35pm

    +1 for posting something not tied to racism, bigotry, a tragedy, or a bigoted racist tragedy

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      ReburnsABurningReturnsThrumbolio
      9/01/15 1:45pm

      Jonathan Franzen once took a potshot at Oprah Winfrey. Granted it’s hard to say that it was because of racism, but it’s close enough for playing One Degree of Racism.

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      ThrumbolioReburnsABurningReturns
      9/01/15 1:49pm

      It isn’t in the headline. That works for me. I’m fully expecting a story about a Nazi murdering a box of puppies in Florida before the day is out, based on what we’ve gotten thus far this week.

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    BolexTom Scocca
    9/01/15 1:39pm

    Um, no. From the very first sentence, it’s obvious Phillips either doesn’t read very much or is pretending he doesn’t for the sake of his audience.

    “Probably no one alive is a better novelist than Jonathan Franzen” is an impossible expectation to live up to, a false assertion, and one neither Franzen nor his publishers nor his advocates have ever made. Even setting aside every other country on earth, off the top of my head, living Americans who are better novelists than Franzen include Roth, Morrison, DeLillo, Robinson—and I really doubt Franzen would argue with that assessment.

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      EtchasketchistBolex
      9/01/15 3:54pm

      Who’s “Robinson”?

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      BolexEtchasketchist
      9/01/15 4:17pm

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilynne…

      She’s an unprolifif woman from the Midwest, which means she doesn’t get anything close to her due (though she was profiled in nytmag when her latest came out)

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    Jeff BercoviciTom Scocca
    9/01/15 5:18pm

    His point about the causality of Franzen’s characters being a little too deterministic has some bite. Otherwise, the gist of this review is that Franzen is awful and terrible because he’s so close to being great but he’s not quite there and that’s annoying, either because you want him to be great or because you’re sick of hearing that he’s great.

    I haven’t read “Purity” yet but based on “The Corrections” and “Freedom,” I’d say Phillips is partly right. Sometimes the experience of reading Franzen is the awareness you’re reading the prose of a very good writer, and sometimes that awareness fades and the characters come alive.

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      mildmongrelJeff Bercovici
      9/15/15 1:43pm

      You’re missing the criticism a little bit, it’s not that he’s so close to being GREAT, it’s that he is almost able to write believable humans, but not quite. That’s much worse.
      Its the difference between “Almost a great chef” and “He almost gets the flavors right.”

      Dude is writing about everyday life without understanding everyday life.

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      Jeff Bercovicimildmongrel
      9/15/15 2:36pm

      I don’t think that’s what Phillips is saying, in fact. He’s saying that Franzen “understands” the world perfectly as an intellectual matter but something in his rendering comes across as mechanistic rather than organic, like a photorealistic painting that makes you think “Wow, what a lifelike painting” rather than “Wow, that painting makes me cry.” He’s saying Franzen’s writing is virtuostic but not transcendent. And I’m saying transcendent is a pretty fucking high bar. And I’m also saying (and Phillips fully concedes) that this line of critique is more than usually subjective, meaning if I find, as a reader, that Franzen’s characters do in fact come alive, then Phillips’ criticism holds no value for me.

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    ReburnsABurningReturnsTom Scocca
    9/01/15 1:48pm

    They feel like real life irritably recreated from a spreadsheet, by someone who is a genius at reading spreadsheets.

    So what you’re saying is that I, a person who deals with spreadsheets that reflect real life information all day and is pretty damn good at reading spreadsheets, could write a novel that sells as well as Jonathan Franzens’ do?

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      DolemiteReburnsABurningReturns
      9/01/15 2:27pm

      I’d suggest starting with an erotic novel dealing the theme of someone spread on the sheets continuously. That could be the title. “Spread: Sheets”.

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    TheDamnPaterfamiliasTom Scocca
    9/01/15 4:38pm

    I know this is a potentially specious theory, but Franzen writes about the ennui of life in the midwest. He would never say so (too unmarketable), but I really believe it’s true. Having been born in the midwest and lived most of my life there before escaping to the West Coast, everything he writes rings very true and vital to me, even though not much happens. I think it’s unfortunate he was labeled the next great American writer. Just like Brad Pitt (also from the midwest) is a better character actor than lead, Franzen is a better regional novelist than spokesperson for any generation.

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      ·٠•●*♥♫•*♪♥♫♪ღ•°*”˜˙TheDamnPaterfamilias
      9/01/15 8:23pm

      You’re absolutely right on - except he does say so, and it is marketable!

      And Wallace was Midwestern to the core, so he presents the avant-garde realization of it. The opening MP chose for Pale King is a wondrous example. That he finally found his voice at the moment he died (from completely unrelated circumstances) is heartbreaking.
      You’re picking up on both these things as I - another Midwesterner - did.*

      In this time of uncertainty and change (?), a book like The Corrections - a sweeping epic (literally: it’s an odyssey) about coming home to family dinner - will do very well indeed, as, indeed, it has. And it appeals especially to women, lit’s target demographic. That’s why eagle-eyed Oprah picked it out of all the little novels scurrying through the flatlands.

      The Midwest and the South are the only two regions of the country that have that peculiar magic which produces great writers. There are exceptions, of course (Cheever, Melville, James, Whitman being obvious exceptions).

      But we claim Twain, Hemingway, Pound, Eliot, Morrison, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Bellow, Angelou, Roethke, Sinclair Lewis - that’s almost the pantheon. The South has Faulkner, Williams, O’Connor, and the Agrarian poets, who rank lofty for me. Weird.

      I want to add that the distinct poetry of the Midwest is at the heart of America’s greatest filmmaker, David Lynch. There are moments in Straight Story that were unbelievably redolent for me. Watching the storm, for example. I spent hours with my dad doing just that.

      *Tangential. A rare sentence in which my pet peeve could function with minimal manipulation:
      Your picking up on both these things was mine - another Midwesterner - as well.

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      TheDamnPaterfamilias·٠•●*♥♫•*♪♥♫♪ღ•°*”˜˙
      9/02/15 12:22am

      Wonderful post, thank you. I used to sit and watch the thunderstorms across the open corn fields with my dad, too. I can still recall the smell, the electricity and humidity in the air, and all that flat land seemed so vast when I was a kid. And yes, all that came rushing back to me when I watched Straight Story, an absolute miracle of a David Lynch film.

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    heartbraiderTom Scocca
    9/01/15 1:43pm

    Franzen’s writing is the This American Life of novels. It’s not poorly done, it just knows its audience too well and is really quick to pander to its sensibilities.

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      Johnny ChundersTom Scocca
      9/01/15 2:45pm

      I read The Corrections and thought that it was OK.

      Was this a hot take? Someone please tell me.

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