Ben Marcus' recent Harper's article calling task Jonathon Franzen

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― the jonathon franzen thread, Sunday, 2 October 2005 14:23 (twenty years ago)

I think Marcus is essentially right, but he wrote at such excruciating length and in such largely drab prose that he came across as as big a whiner as Franzen.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Sunday, 2 October 2005 14:59 (twenty years ago)

Yeah, he took pains toward the end to leaven the impression of sour grapes airing. If I were Franzen, and inclined to retort, I'd compare unfavorably Marcus' Notable American Women to "A Manual for Sons" in Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father. "This is where avant-garde canonism gets you," he could argue, or words to that effect, implying his own more irreverent attitude to the canon yields greater originality.

But still, I'm with Marcus on this one. Franzen sometimes seems like he's the king nerd picking on the less successful nerds. Some of his memoirs lately in The New Yorker have softened that image (and I liked his last story--the one Marcus cited as symptomatic of Franzen's anti-ambition).

When was the last beef between two important American writers? All I can think of is Leslie Silko's contempt for Louise Erdrich's aesthetics.

Maybe one of these two will write a "Battle of the Books" or a Dunciad.

― jft, Sunday, 2 October 2005 16:08 (twenty years ago)

I'm mostly fascinated by how long it took Marcus to get off his ass and complain. I mean, didn't the Franzen article come out about two years ago? And the article in the Atlantic that he's griping about earlier in the piece - isn't that about four years old at this point? Christ, the Harper's people should have licensed the other pieces and printed this thing alongside 'em, so at least there'd be an imitation of real-time debate. As it is, you gotta wonder if Marcus is stranded on a desert island somewhere and submitted this essay to Harper's by stuffing it in a bottle and throwing it out to sea.

― pdf (Phil Freeman), Sunday, 2 October 2005 16:44 (twenty years ago)

The simple task of taking down Franzen wound up feeling a little easy, I think. Through the last third of the piece, Marcus wound up pulling back his thesis until it became something really small -- i.e. "some of us like this stuff, and it's not as if anyone pays attention to us anyway, so why you gotta be a dick about it?" Which was fine and true and adequate, obviously, but I kind of wished there'd been space to go into the larger questions in that debate -- like the interesting reasons why someone like Franzen would have a bug up his ass about experimentalism, or the ambitions involved in the opposite path, or the fascinating cultural reasons why certain types of people (usually the kind of middle-class educated white men who've been told that they have no real-world culture to talk about, or that their real-world middle-class culture is boring and passe) wind up attracted to the experiment.

― nabiscothingy, Sunday, 2 October 2005 17:13 (twenty years ago)

I mean, that last point is really interesting to me. As of the 70s and 80s there were loads of Carverish average-white-people literature -- but it feels now like more of a split has developed. I'm maybe biased by thinking about workshops here, but it seems like there's a clear organization. People who are not white and suburban and middle-class write about that: about wherever their parents immigrated from, or about whatever class they hail from, or whatever unusual part of the country they hail from. Women who are white and suburban and middle-class are still willing to write about that. And then the bulk of men who are white and suburban and middle-class are formalists and experimentalists.

― nabiscothingy, Sunday, 2 October 2005 17:17 (twenty years ago)

I'm not equipped to respond to your specific point of interest. I can however try to obliquely. The complete absence of reference to speculative fiction as an alternative to hyper-realism and avant-garde experimentalism both was quite conspicuous. Obviously not all writers are concerned with their class and/or ethnic origins or crafting experiments designed to represent the further reaches of conscious reflection. A more accurate portrait than either Franzen's or Marcus' corrective would mention people like Philip K. Dick, Kelly Link, and China Mieville.

― jft, Sunday, 2 October 2005 17:32 (twenty years ago)

I started to read this yesterday in the bookstore but got distracted by trying to look for books by some of the authors that he recommends. Now I will probably go back and try to finish it. I thought his point about different expectations for experimentation in painting, etc. and writing was good. Maybe writers do work under different constraints, and I think an exploration of what these are, how they operate, and how they might be subverted (or how attempts to subvert them can fail) would be interesting. (But somehow it seems likely that someone has already written about this.)

― youn, Sunday, 2 October 2005 18:21 (twenty years ago)

"I'm mostly fascinated by how long it took Marcus to get off his ass and complain."

hahaha! this is very true. it took me a while to even remember that he was talking about the reader's manifesto guy. i liked the thing anyway, though. and i have no horse in any race. i think i like ANYTHING that shows an ounce of passion for writing or reading or language and that is a reaction against the status quo and is fairly funny and that makes fun of sour-pusses like franzen. cuz i am an old punk. as long as it is written well enough. and his thing was written well enough. anything like that is welcome to me. even if i disagree with it. or read nothing but little old lady novels. which i do, for the most part. i really need to pick up that dale peck book.

hey, just this morning during the new book round-up on cbs's morning show whatshername ended her piece with "and it tells a good story. which is what every book should do." damn plot-lovers.

i thought his point about "dificult" novels was right on. it reminds me of people who talk about music and assume because they find something unlistenable that nobody could truly enjoy it.

― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 2 October 2005 18:23 (twenty years ago)

read Clive James' takedown of Elias Canetti in today's NYTBR for a hilarious humane instructive and painfully well-written review.

― m coleman (lovebug starski), Sunday, 2 October 2005 20:38 (twenty years ago)

i didn't read it. i will read it. i used to think i was a john leonard fan. i don't think i am anymore. is it him or me? i wanna get that collected clive james that came out not that long ago.

i'm glad whatshisface was nice to my beloved alice munro. there are always going to be people who feel like the true challenge is adhering to the rules of a given form/genre and seeing what you can achieve within those forms/genres. freejazz fans vs everyone else, basically. i can dig that. munro is a good example of someone who has an almost infinite amount of "novel" approaches to form/structure within the trad fiction model. i dunno, i can see it from all angles. testing the limits -vs- trying to hard to prove that you can test limits. for me, it (writing) has to be compelling as something other than science or math or linguistics. cuz my brain isn't wired for abstract symbols as much as it is for orderly systems. not that math and science can't be orderly...it's the gin talking.

the dude also gave a shout-out to my homegirl joy williams. she was and is an inspiration to me in many ways.

― scott seward (scott seward), Monday, 3 October 2005 00:11 (twenty years ago)

I'm sort of with Scott on this--lit feuds are like spectator sports, and I tend to go with whoever hit the ball most recently. Though I did find Marcus to be quite lucid and not especially self-defensive, unlike e.g. Rick Moody in The Believer re: the National Book Award recently (also touched on by Marcus). Marcus's basic message--"Some people like this kind of writing, and there should be room for that, because it doesn't invalidate any other kind of writing--it's a big tent, there's room for everyone"--is absolutely closer to my own opinion on it, even if I don't care much for literary writing, per se, myself.

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Monday, 3 October 2005 06:06 (twenty years ago)

i used to think i was a john leonard fan. i don't think i am anymore. is it him or me?

It's him. I feel the same way, well I don't know if he changed or I did but the last few years his reviews feel egregiously over-written and under-thoughtout, all baroque style and little or no content. Like the Yardbirds sang, he's "all dressed up w/no place to go."

― m coleman (lovebug starski), Monday, 3 October 2005 09:35 (twenty years ago)

It is odd that so many people have read this article.

What does it say?

― the bellefox, Monday, 3 October 2005 10:20 (twenty years ago)

I've always hated John Leonard, at least ever since he had that bookchat show. What's he trying to be- a kinder, gentler John Simon?

― k/l (Ken L), Monday, 3 October 2005 12:52 (twenty years ago)

And as for the Ben Marcus article, I looked it over very briefly before heading for the crossword puzzle and, while I'm sure I agree with what I believe his message to be, I couldn't be arsed to actually read it, so I say JtN OTM.

― k/l (Ken L), Monday, 3 October 2005 12:54 (twenty years ago)

It occurs to me that my Harper's subscription must have run out, or rather that I never sent in my renewal. Hm.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 3 October 2005 17:00 (twenty years ago)

How long did it take you to notice, Chris?

― k/l (Ken L), Monday, 3 October 2005 17:02 (twenty years ago)

Well after seeing this thread I gave my copy a few days to come.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 3 October 2005 17:07 (twenty years ago)

three weeks pass...

Well I haven't read either of these articles - I'm fine with just laughing at bookslut's mention of harper's desperately emailing bloggers about the 'debate' so it will get some press, and with other commentary (such as slate's) - but I'll note that the September issue of The Believer contained a six page letter, by Andrew Ervin, addressing Franzen and many of the points he probably covered in the article. It's all in the context of elaborating on Rick Moody's defense of the National Book Awards picks.

It discusses the values of Franzen's 'contract novels' and 'status novels'. Anyway, it's interesting - probably more interesting than Marcus' article. Unfortunately I don't think it's available online.

― gratznic (gratznic), Monday, 24 October 2005 16:55 (twenty years ago)

Marcus was nice to Munro, yeah, but so was Franzen. I mean, Marcus's complaint is that Franzen had to structure his whole review of Munro around this hand-wringing about her level of fame and popularity (and having read the review (oddly enough, considering I only pick up the NYRB three or four times a year), I remember being frustrated at its flimsiness).

I found myself pretty sympathetic to Marcus in this article, although it's kind of hard not to be -- who wants to deprive him of his ecstasy over language? This despite the fact that I absolutely hated The Age of Wire and String and don't really have a whole lot of use for his brand of experimentalism.

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 4 November 2005 16:47 (twenty years ago)

I liked TAOWAS but I have yet to make it through Notable American Women.

― k/l (Ken L), Friday, 4 November 2005 16:53 (twenty years ago)

I liked the premise of TAOWAS but overall found it too oblique. Maybe my love for language is insufficient. :(

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 4 November 2005 17:04 (twenty years ago)

One thing I decided recently is that "love of language" as a concept has kind of been non-violently co-opted by Wire-and-String sorts of things; there is also love for other language, freshness and amazement in words from other places. The idea that something like TAOWAS is about "love of language" -- just because most of what's going on in it is the effect of language and language-created ideas -- cares kind of an unfair implication that a book with a conventional narrative isn't equally enamored of language. (This is often true, but not inherently so.)

This is mostly a point of semantics, though: I'd say that what distinguishes something like TAOWAS from conventional books isn't so much about "language" and more about something a little harder to name. (We do this same thing with other forms of art, too: we say experimental albums are about "pure sound," when pop albums may be just as interested in sound-in-itself; we say abstract painters are interested in the act and subtleties of brush-against-canvas, when a painter of landscapes may be just as focused on exactly that.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 4 November 2005 22:38 (twenty years ago)

Well, yes, but the idea is that the abstract painters remove everything that is extraneous to the idea of brush against canvas, so you are forced to focus upon that idea. So "love of language" might mean something along the lines of "not wanting the other things that writing can do to get in the way of pure unadulterated language".

― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 4 November 2005 23:15 (twenty years ago)

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