Jonathan Franzen Is Having More Fun Than His Critics

Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, appears, like his previous one, Freedom, amid the media equivalent of the fog of war. There have been trumpeted interviews and fatuous raves, but also misleading headlines, Twitter diatribes, backlashes to the backlash and a deluge of emptily sassy online retorts aggregating all of the above. Low-key irony and a stickler’s insistence on saying exactly what one thinks have never played well in the press, so this author—whose original sin consists of being inanely praised in the New York Times Book Review and declared a “Great American Novelist” on the cover of Time—has only succeeded in compounding the murk. Someone has to be the face of every (real and imagined) injustice writers face when negotiating the publishing establishment; it’s so much more fun to hate a face.  Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2015-08-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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