jonathan franzen is a music nerd

in the same section there's someone who "fancie(s) himself a hipster and collect(s) Cream and Jimi Hendrix 'vinyl' (his word) with a passion that God had surely intended him to bring to building model submarines." He's even a music nerd snob!

my point being something like: how weird it is when a writer's grasp of the aesthetic values of popular music (or any other medium or genre) fit enough with yours that their namedrops fit as actual detail rather than standing out about three miles.

compare to e.g. the not-so-great new j lethem novel.

and i think i am a lot fonder of lethem than i am of franzen, who seems unlikably self-important about writing another Great White Novel, which said book i am only just getting around to reading despite buying it for fifty pence five years ago or so.

it's pretty good, actually.

I like Jonathan Franzen in part because he is such an insufferable snob. I find it endearing.

at another point one of the characters isn't present due to being off having dinner with "Greil Marcus and Stephen Malkmus" (!)

^^rendered (one assumes) in utter earnestness w/o trace of irony etc

Great White Novel

this is priceless

i had forgotten about this thread entirely; also, did i only read the corrections three years ago? huh

So does anyone have an opinion on the following:

"... but when Patty expressed curiosity about these concerts Eliza said first Patty had to listen to all the mix tapes Eliza made her; and Patty was having some difficulty with these mix tapes. She did like Patti Smith, who seemed to understand how she'd felt in the bathroom on the morning after she was raped, but the Velvet Underground, for example, made her lonely."

this Eigenmelody must be pretty close to possible now, what with that crazy program that allows you to separate and edit tiny sonic details from recordings, + the Shazam song recognition software.

When I read that bit it made me think of hit prediction software.

I always imagine Shazam being a call-centre full of painfully competitive music geeks all desperate to one-up each other.

The software sounds like Wendell (Mucho) Maas's drug vision of rock.

the narrator's description of patty's reasoning there seems very… i don't know, belittling, thom.

patty is the narrator: that section is presented as a third-person biographical manuscript she's writing at request of her therapist. but franzen's description of patty's reasoning, yeah, is weird, a rather unpleasant act of ventriloquism.

it's not really alone, either, in its unpleasantness; the enough-of-these-white-males criticisms from people who hadn't read the book yet? turn out, actually, to be pretty justified.

on the other hand, this is the 'jonathan franzen is a music nerd' thread, not the 'jonathan franzen is a misogynist' thread --

my point being something like: how weird it is when a writer's grasp of the aesthetic values of popular music (or any other medium or genre) fit enough with yours that their namedrops fit as actual detail rather than standing out about three miles.

compare to e.g. the not-so-great new j lethem novel.

― thomp, Tuesday, July 31, 2007 10:12 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

freedom is pretty lazy in this regard; it's given as a measure of someone's insincerity that he thinks, at one point, of a Bono lyric; an emptiness at the core of one character is telegraphed by his having some affection for Thomas Bernhard; plus the Ian McEwan and Bright Eyes bits, which seem to have 'become' 'news'

haha, i'd like to read a bernhard story where affection for franzen is used to identify character flaws.

I'm reading Freedom and enjoying it a lot, but Franzen's rationalisation for having a dig at McEwan seems off-puttingly narcissistic. He's written one critically lauded novel and he feels entitled to take umbrage because another writer doesn't rank him with Philip Roth?

the patty section is titled 'mistakes were made' and then has a subtitle noting that it's a manuscript composed by patty at behest of her therapist; i was wondering, today, if that subtitle was a later addition. it doesn't make that much sense that it's written in the third person; it seems like it would have made sense for that to remain ambiguous, until (three hundred pages later) the fact that this thing has been written by her becomes a part of the book's plot. it seems like a redrafting decision to make things easier for the reader. (which i probably shouldn't be against without coherent reasons that that is a bad thing.)

kind of mini-lol @ thomp being all "TMZ exclusive find" on a six-year-old book ITT

hey, no one read ilb in those days

no one still does.

I didn't really read the very offhanded reference to McEwan as a dig. The relevant passage is that Joey was given Atonement as a gift and can't really get into all the descriptions of "rooms and plantings" -- I mean, that seems genuine to Joey's character! Unless the point is that it's gratuitous to mention Atonement at all.

Also, more relevant to the thread: I liked the references to "Jeff Tweedy or Ben Gibbard or Jack White" as potential Free Space performers: that felt pretty dead-on to me.

weird that whiney is in an ilb thread

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

^^ He gets into his tastes a little here.

"My favorite band is the Mekons," he tells me. "That tells you everything you need to know about me."

(Klostermann then says he's completely joking with the "everything you nee to know" remark, but I doubt that the guy is completely joking.)