TS: Franzen - The Corrections vs. Freedom

http://i.imgur.com/ymMWU.gif

srsly

otm

I never tried to read Freedom so I never had to put Freedom down halfway through because I hated all of the characters. So I guess Freedom wins by default.

Freedom was great for like 50 pages or so. Kept reading til the last chaper than couldn't be arsed. Never read the corrections.

I mean, the fundamentals for something great were there... But then everything went stupid somehow.

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Freedom lover:
http://www.whowhatwear.com/website/full-article/guest-editor-amanda-seyfried/

Reading an essay of his called "on autobiographical fiction" and he keeps making jabs at james joyce. What a piece of shit this guy is.

This is the most prescriptive nonsense i've ever read. The worst kind of literary criticism. "Informational fetishes" is up there with "misogyny" as something his books "campaign against." Nothing like baselessly aligning your aesthetic tastes with everything moral and emancipatory

aren't his novels burial mounds for informational fetishes

franzen has a real thing about joyce. he went on a diatribe about him in some interview about how his humble midwestern everyman sensibilities were offended by the pretentiousness of "ulysses," and of course he had that whole endless boring article in harper's about how no one reads anymore, which he blamed on writers like JJ for supposedly making normal folk (like him) think that novels had to be long and hard to read.

besides which, he got Dreiser, Norris, and the other "realists" wrong.

more like the co-retch-uns vs free dumb

hey

also, can't forget this gem, from 2001:

Colson Whitehead's first novel, ''The Intuitionist,'' was a lively comic fantasy about a New York City elevator inspector named Lila Mae Watson. The book established Whitehead's intelligence and originality as a novelist, but I wasn't too excited by the world of elevator inspection, and I was frankly irritated by the author's choice of Lila Mae as the protagonist. Although it's technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist's fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all? I confess to being unappetized by all three possibilities; and so, fairly or not, I found myself wishing that Whitehead had written about a man.

He left out the fourth —— and only other possible option —— namely that Whitehead was writing an update of Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy"; a modernized version of the tale where we are no longer told outright that she's a robot. Obv that would only work with a female protagonist, since we're far less likely to see men as cold, soulless automata.

fucking hell that's a find, j. d.

trees did i read yr post wrong or is franzen seriously of the opinion he is fighting the good fight against misogyny, because jeez

http://adilegian.com/FranzenGaddis.htm

Reading parts of this for the first time. I don't believe Franzen for a second when he says Gaddis was "an old literary hero" (I haven't read much Gaddis) when he basically spends all his time pissing in his grave. The psychobabble of Gaddis as a five year old who never grew out of his encyclopedic reading is distasteful.

TS: Contract vs Status. Don't think I'll bother with a poll.

gosh why is this guy such a shitboy trashhuman

fuckboy wasteman

pumpboy garbageguy

shiterato

http://www.justjared.com/2014/10/10/kate-bosworth-is-astonished-by-author-jonathan-franzen/

(no disrespect to kate bosworth, who i am sure is lovely. i like many authors other would consider embarrassing too. but the headline' lol)

jonathan franzen though, seriously. the david brooks of novelists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5FvI33QH1M

Not sure exactly what he is getting at, that we shouldn't have hard-to-read doorstop novels, but we should have easier-to-read, people-friendly doorstop novels courtesy of his truly, with some Booker Prize-worthy Michael Hamburger Helper mixed in to keep it classy?

characters, man. it's about characters. and not being ashamed.

I get my full of characters everyday , both on the subway and at either end.

He was listing authors that belong to contract and status and there were writers from both I liked and disliked, whose novels I finished and left unfinished. Meaningless theory.

On the doorstop front I can't believe he didn't finish The Golden Notebook. It has a nice structure that gets you into the book, the writing is quite clear (no 'games' like Gaddis or his ilk).

If the retreat from Modernism didn't start decades ago, Jonathan Franzen would have had to invent it.

Freedom has really stuck with me... elevated beach read/soap sort of book, but really enduring for me nonetheless...

There's plenty of room for the Franzens, Mario Puzos and Arthur Haileys of the world. They're no worse than 90% of what passes for entertainment out there and distinctly better than most of it. Not everyone is going to read or enjoy the latest translation of a Nobel-nominated Estonian litterateur.

i clicked on that video upthread about Overrated Writers joking to myself that he was gonna say david foster wallace. he says that graham greene and e.m. forster are novelists americans don't "get", offers no specific qualities in greene/forster that would make them difficult for americans to get, then suggests as an example of the reverse ohhhhhhh idk, david foster wallace? who british people, not me you understand, but british people, don't get because they think he's "purile, easy, bratty, annoying, broad, or whatever". hemingway had more class talking about fitzgerald's dick anxieties in a movable feast. the fictional salieri had more class murdering the guy.

kinda hilarious that the sponsor of that video calls itself bigthink.com.

There's plenty of room for the Franzens, Mario Puzos and Arthur Haileys of the world.

No argument with that, it's just that Puzo and Hailey weren't feted in the press as wise prophets with IMPORTANT THINGS to say about society/literature/etc. Franzen seems to be inexplicably always being asked his opinions, even though they are trite, predictable and annoying.

aimless how do you feel about John Norman

Upon close interrogation of my feelings I find none of them are attached to John Norman. I wish I could say I had heard that name before you mentioned it, but I have not.

But it is a big world we live in and all of us are more ignorant of it than not.

I wish I was ignorant of John Norman

gorblimey

please don't sully the good names of Puzo and Hailey by linking them with this nullity

aimless how do you feel about Max Hardcore

Puzo is so bad, I did guiltily enjoy that blog article thing that was linked a while back that was just passages from the godfather interspersed with "wait what" or "yeah, that happened" or whatever. I'm sure some similar bit of content exists for freedom, and maybe one day I'll see that linked and enjoy that