I saw Franzen speak recently and he shared three rules he uses for writing: (1) Complete honesty, (2) Unconditional love for characters, (3) Bias for conflict. Pretty good rules imo!
It's fascinating to see him compare Twitter to cigarettes back in 2012. That comparison has certainly stood the test of time. And I keep hearing that zoomers are getting into bird-watching
Loved this, especially the end. Arguably the best part about being a standup comic is access to “the scene,” the infinite well of comic hangs where every stranger feels familiar
I'm very tempted to write that other essay! Got a few other things to work on, so not sure how I'll fit it in. Part of me feels it won't be a hard piece to write but that instinct generally leads me astray...
"Because before you can have a movement, you’ve got to have a scene. Better yet, a hundred scenes."
Absolutely. But we also need to build a culture of writers who prioritize real writing. So much of what's being written these days is formulaic color-by-numbers genres and tropes. Why are so few writers tackling real themes and writing stories that have deeper meaning? These days, it's all worldbuilding with nothing meaningful within the worlds.
Franzen's prescience and intellect have never been in debate for me or most of my literary friends. Does he put his foot in his mouth on occasion? Yes. Are there more than half a dozen really good essays? No. Are the novels other than The Corrections clear examples of reach without consistent grasp? Yes. His interviews and public appearances show a thoughtful and serious man, IMHO.
He's REALLY rich and successful, though, so that's going to make you enemies in a world where way less than 1% of writers can make a living purely off their published work. And most of those financially independent American writer folks who've won major book awards AND ruled the best sellers roost--say, Donna Tartt or Anthony Doerr--don't really weigh in as much on politics, so they never got the level of backlash that Franzen did.
I very much enjoyed your piece. A couple thoughts.
The two classes: people who learned to read by watching their parents and social isolates who use it as a way to connect to the world. This seems to me a false dichotomy (now and ‘then’): many people have aspects of both, and the latter group is growing WITHOUT the number of readers and writers growing. The imaginary world now is the internet and video games.
The point of your essay seems to be defining Franzen’s world view (as a German speaker, Franzen would say Weltanschauung) as decelerationist. You seem to imply, without really addressing this point (which seems like a big point) that this is the lens through which one ought to evaluate the merits of his fiction. Purity and Freedom had strong undertones embodying such a worldview, but the quality of the writing can and should be judged independently of the author’s social predilections. JF is principally a novelist.
“The books [the New Yorker and NYT] celebrate are predicated on vain moralizing,” as evidence for why readers of literary fiction are dismayed or at best nonplussed amongst much of contemporary fiction, which I in fact agree with. But Franzen’s fiction does not embody such vain moralizing: his characters have drives that seem real (the litmus test for any good fiction) but his books lack overt didacticism.
The four things that drive his writing:
1 Write to find out
2 Opposition to technoconsumerist machine
3 Preservationism
4 I couldn’t find the fourth one…
This a damning indictment I cannot argue with: “And yet our remaining literary institutions – chief among them the New Yorker and the New York Times book desk – are not aligned with this situation. They do not serve the literary community but instead exist to launder cultural cachet to bourgeois readers who want to appear refined. The New Yorker’s real product is not writing but covers, cartoons, and tote bags.” A real banger.
I would argue that Franzen is the best living American writer, but he always comes off as a complete dufus in interviews and I have found his essays just ok. The subtext of your article yearning for a literary renaissance I enjoy…as you imply, the 8 rules from Byrne may be satisfied by substack and I would be interested to read your next essay on this point. I think many of these rules would change for the writer: I am unaware of reclusive (successful) musicians.
To your point on video games on the internet, maybe these take the place of the world of letters, maybe not. I think it’s very different being in touch with Homer and Jane Austin and contemporaries like Franzen, for a number of reasons. Franzen would put chief among them that novels offer a psychological depth that other forms do not – it offers a much closer interface with the character’s and writer’s thoughts than other media. As someone who’s spent a fair bit of time screenwriting (and I still love dramatic media!) I would agree with him that this is the novel’s superpower vs other forms, and not one that is easily replicated or replaced.
I try to resist hero worship. Essays that defend an individual who is fully capable of defending himself tend to wrinkle me. However, I believe this was worth our time and offered broader insights that belong to a discussion that extends beyond Franzen himself. Thank you, I enjoyed it.
"My first real love was poetry; whether or not we incinerate the Earth, that grand four-thousand-year-old tradition seems to have run its course."
Not actually your point, I know, but this common sentiment couldn't be more nonsensical to me. Colloquial poetry flourishes online in a variety of ways. Rapping, which is often highly metrical, is clearly part of that tradition. So are the intricately imagistic lyrics that dominate so much contemporary music outside of pop. People still write silly poems on bathroom walls, and love poems for their girlfriends and boyfriends. Great poetry is still being printed in incredible books, most of which no one reads, but that has always been true. So are reams and reams of terrible poetry. But most poetry has always been dreadful; it is the fact that people insist on writing it anyway that attests to its survival as a live tradition.
agree with most of this but conclusion is a place to wrap things up; per terms of my deal with devil I am only allowed to start one new essay per conclusion
(that’s also why I said 4000-year-old tradition – the oral tradition goes back way longer than that!)
all that said, something is lost with the slow death of written poetry. maybe I don’t agree that much good poetry still gets written & published. I think the break between oral poetry – which still has a substantial audience – and written poetry – which does not – was very damaging, basically irrecoverable, not that many great poets didn’t try.
and that’s the #1 reason I insist that reinvigorating literary scenes it not the endpoint. we jump start the scenes and/then we restore the relationship with the audience. but that particular line of thinking, espec as relates to poetry, just didn’t fit into the conclusion I was bundling up.
I don't disagree with this. Although I also think a few hundred years from now, people who care about literature will be reading the work of the great 20th-century songwriters as written poetry in books, and will probably not even know that there was a whole side tradition that considered itself the only "real" poets. I also think the widespread abandonment of poetic meter was a kind of collective creative death wish, as if 20th century musicians had all at once decided to almost entirely avoid percussion, in order to save themselves the trouble of learning to keep time. But I recognize that my opinions are bizarre and possibly unreasonable.
For a few years I subscribed to Rattle, and I found almost all the poetry so deeply uninspiring that it sort of felt like I was being personally gas-lit by the editor. But I also study 17th and 18th century North America, and colonial Americans cared a lot about poetry. I don't think I've ever read a good colonial American poem. It's all bad. Eventually I came around to the position that the appearance of decline in literature is 100% a result of people not reading the shitty poets of the past. Or maybe it's not that they're bad, but that I've trained my palette on a very random assortment of geniuses: Dickinson, Bronte, Shakespeare, Donne, Coleridge, Milton; in German, Hesse, Celan, Holderlin, Bachmann. And against that basically incoherent assortment of brilliance... most poetry is bad.
Franzen's ascent to the upper echelon of American novelists is pretty freakin' remarkable, IMO. In the mid-90s, he admitted that he felt totally irrelevant to the larger American culture. He felt "despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social" and that no novel since Catch-22 had "truly affected the culture."
So made his bid for relevancy. And, somehow, it worked, despite the fact that he overstuffed The Corrections with a ridiculous number of late-20th century cultural anxieties: cruise ship consumer culture, the de-industrialization of the Rust Belt, the decline of the nuclear family, the increasing ubiquity of surveillance, celebrity foodie culture, the therapyspeak and psychology boom of the 90s. The novel should be a unholy mess. But it isn't. It works. It sold a shitload of copies and made Franzen famous.
How many writers announce, in print, their own irrelevancy and then go on to deliver a novel that obliterates that irrelevancy? Some of his critics seemed to believe that the sheer gall it took to appoint himself spokesman of American culture somehow disqualified Franzen. As if there was something unseemly about the nakedness of his ambition to become the Joseph Heller of his time. But isn't that kind of ambition brazenly American? Shouldn't we WANT our novelists to at least attempt to convey the spirit and the feel of the times we live in?
And anyway I'm not sure Franzen necessarily set out to write a novel about How We Live Now. He was following the James Joyce dictum ("in the particular is contained the universal"), but his Dublin was an American Midwestern Protestant family milieu. It was the critics and readers who dubbed The Corrections the first Great American Novel of the millennium. Hell, it would seem that Franzen did everything he could to sabotage the mainstream success of his novel, via the Oprah kerfuffle and his acerbic public persona.
ANYWAY, this was a great essay. I've enjoyed seeing writers I admire who have been pilloried online and in academia these last few decades (sometimes deservedly, sometimes merely because they are straight, white, and male) receive such impassioned defense: DFW, Franzen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy.
Probably there is something about the curmudgeonly, finger-wagging tone of Frazen's essays (and the more didactic parts of his fiction, like the population stuff in Freedom) that annoys his detractors. But you're right. He's been proven prescient. I also think much of the resentment of him is based in envy. Franzen set himself the monumental task of becoming a more widely known, widely read, widely admired author, and he achieved it.
Great essay, I really really felt this one! I never imagined as a dreamy adolescent “isolate” that I would become nostalgic for the 80’s and 90’s in the 21st century, for I loathed the 80’s and 90’s. Ironies abound and continue….
What interesting is that the growth of class (2) and the decline of class (1) in some ways parallels pre-modern ideas of writing.
In the Italian Renaissance for example, most of those who were recreational readers were also (at least to some degree) dilettante writers. Our world seems to be moving, more and more, towards a fundamentally oral culture.
I think he's probably the one 'big' writer of our era who might survive somewhat well into the year 2100, if for no other reason than because the social realist tradition he's adamant about just tends to be more 'legible' to future generations than a lot of the more high concept/naval gazing stuff that is passed off as "masterful."
The Corrections was one of the best contemporary novels I’ve ever read, and then Freedom was one of the most insufferable despite being so well written.
I saw Franzen speak recently and he shared three rules he uses for writing: (1) Complete honesty, (2) Unconditional love for characters, (3) Bias for conflict. Pretty good rules imo!
It's fascinating to see him compare Twitter to cigarettes back in 2012. That comparison has certainly stood the test of time. And I keep hearing that zoomers are getting into bird-watching
Loved this, especially the end. Arguably the best part about being a standup comic is access to “the scene,” the infinite well of comic hangs where every stranger feels familiar
I'm very tempted to write that other essay! Got a few other things to work on, so not sure how I'll fit it in. Part of me feels it won't be a hard piece to write but that instinct generally leads me astray...
this was great!
"Because before you can have a movement, you’ve got to have a scene. Better yet, a hundred scenes."
Absolutely. But we also need to build a culture of writers who prioritize real writing. So much of what's being written these days is formulaic color-by-numbers genres and tropes. Why are so few writers tackling real themes and writing stories that have deeper meaning? These days, it's all worldbuilding with nothing meaningful within the worlds.
Franzen's prescience and intellect have never been in debate for me or most of my literary friends. Does he put his foot in his mouth on occasion? Yes. Are there more than half a dozen really good essays? No. Are the novels other than The Corrections clear examples of reach without consistent grasp? Yes. His interviews and public appearances show a thoughtful and serious man, IMHO.
He's REALLY rich and successful, though, so that's going to make you enemies in a world where way less than 1% of writers can make a living purely off their published work. And most of those financially independent American writer folks who've won major book awards AND ruled the best sellers roost--say, Donna Tartt or Anthony Doerr--don't really weigh in as much on politics, so they never got the level of backlash that Franzen did.
I very much enjoyed your piece. A couple thoughts.
The two classes: people who learned to read by watching their parents and social isolates who use it as a way to connect to the world. This seems to me a false dichotomy (now and ‘then’): many people have aspects of both, and the latter group is growing WITHOUT the number of readers and writers growing. The imaginary world now is the internet and video games.
The point of your essay seems to be defining Franzen’s world view (as a German speaker, Franzen would say Weltanschauung) as decelerationist. You seem to imply, without really addressing this point (which seems like a big point) that this is the lens through which one ought to evaluate the merits of his fiction. Purity and Freedom had strong undertones embodying such a worldview, but the quality of the writing can and should be judged independently of the author’s social predilections. JF is principally a novelist.
“The books [the New Yorker and NYT] celebrate are predicated on vain moralizing,” as evidence for why readers of literary fiction are dismayed or at best nonplussed amongst much of contemporary fiction, which I in fact agree with. But Franzen’s fiction does not embody such vain moralizing: his characters have drives that seem real (the litmus test for any good fiction) but his books lack overt didacticism.
The four things that drive his writing:
1 Write to find out
2 Opposition to technoconsumerist machine
3 Preservationism
4 I couldn’t find the fourth one…
This a damning indictment I cannot argue with: “And yet our remaining literary institutions – chief among them the New Yorker and the New York Times book desk – are not aligned with this situation. They do not serve the literary community but instead exist to launder cultural cachet to bourgeois readers who want to appear refined. The New Yorker’s real product is not writing but covers, cartoons, and tote bags.” A real banger.
I would argue that Franzen is the best living American writer, but he always comes off as a complete dufus in interviews and I have found his essays just ok. The subtext of your article yearning for a literary renaissance I enjoy…as you imply, the 8 rules from Byrne may be satisfied by substack and I would be interested to read your next essay on this point. I think many of these rules would change for the writer: I am unaware of reclusive (successful) musicians.
Thanks again for a great read.
Good points on Franzen’s fiction. For my part, the scope of the essay got big enough without having to bring the novels into the mix 😅
For the two types of readers, I think it’s worth reading Why Bother in full, but that’s another long essay. https://extrafilespace.wordpress.com/2015/09/15/why-bother-by-jonathan-franzen/
To your point on video games on the internet, maybe these take the place of the world of letters, maybe not. I think it’s very different being in touch with Homer and Jane Austin and contemporaries like Franzen, for a number of reasons. Franzen would put chief among them that novels offer a psychological depth that other forms do not – it offers a much closer interface with the character’s and writer’s thoughts than other media. As someone who’s spent a fair bit of time screenwriting (and I still love dramatic media!) I would agree with him that this is the novel’s superpower vs other forms, and not one that is easily replicated or replaced.
I try to resist hero worship. Essays that defend an individual who is fully capable of defending himself tend to wrinkle me. However, I believe this was worth our time and offered broader insights that belong to a discussion that extends beyond Franzen himself. Thank you, I enjoyed it.
Loved reading this! It's been a while since I've read anything by Franzen, but I always felt like he was someone worth following.
"My first real love was poetry; whether or not we incinerate the Earth, that grand four-thousand-year-old tradition seems to have run its course."
Not actually your point, I know, but this common sentiment couldn't be more nonsensical to me. Colloquial poetry flourishes online in a variety of ways. Rapping, which is often highly metrical, is clearly part of that tradition. So are the intricately imagistic lyrics that dominate so much contemporary music outside of pop. People still write silly poems on bathroom walls, and love poems for their girlfriends and boyfriends. Great poetry is still being printed in incredible books, most of which no one reads, but that has always been true. So are reams and reams of terrible poetry. But most poetry has always been dreadful; it is the fact that people insist on writing it anyway that attests to its survival as a live tradition.
agree with most of this but conclusion is a place to wrap things up; per terms of my deal with devil I am only allowed to start one new essay per conclusion
(that’s also why I said 4000-year-old tradition – the oral tradition goes back way longer than that!)
all that said, something is lost with the slow death of written poetry. maybe I don’t agree that much good poetry still gets written & published. I think the break between oral poetry – which still has a substantial audience – and written poetry – which does not – was very damaging, basically irrecoverable, not that many great poets didn’t try.
and that’s the #1 reason I insist that reinvigorating literary scenes it not the endpoint. we jump start the scenes and/then we restore the relationship with the audience. but that particular line of thinking, espec as relates to poetry, just didn’t fit into the conclusion I was bundling up.
I don't disagree with this. Although I also think a few hundred years from now, people who care about literature will be reading the work of the great 20th-century songwriters as written poetry in books, and will probably not even know that there was a whole side tradition that considered itself the only "real" poets. I also think the widespread abandonment of poetic meter was a kind of collective creative death wish, as if 20th century musicians had all at once decided to almost entirely avoid percussion, in order to save themselves the trouble of learning to keep time. But I recognize that my opinions are bizarre and possibly unreasonable.
For a few years I subscribed to Rattle, and I found almost all the poetry so deeply uninspiring that it sort of felt like I was being personally gas-lit by the editor. But I also study 17th and 18th century North America, and colonial Americans cared a lot about poetry. I don't think I've ever read a good colonial American poem. It's all bad. Eventually I came around to the position that the appearance of decline in literature is 100% a result of people not reading the shitty poets of the past. Or maybe it's not that they're bad, but that I've trained my palette on a very random assortment of geniuses: Dickinson, Bronte, Shakespeare, Donne, Coleridge, Milton; in German, Hesse, Celan, Holderlin, Bachmann. And against that basically incoherent assortment of brilliance... most poetry is bad.
Franzen's ascent to the upper echelon of American novelists is pretty freakin' remarkable, IMO. In the mid-90s, he admitted that he felt totally irrelevant to the larger American culture. He felt "despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social" and that no novel since Catch-22 had "truly affected the culture."
So made his bid for relevancy. And, somehow, it worked, despite the fact that he overstuffed The Corrections with a ridiculous number of late-20th century cultural anxieties: cruise ship consumer culture, the de-industrialization of the Rust Belt, the decline of the nuclear family, the increasing ubiquity of surveillance, celebrity foodie culture, the therapyspeak and psychology boom of the 90s. The novel should be a unholy mess. But it isn't. It works. It sold a shitload of copies and made Franzen famous.
How many writers announce, in print, their own irrelevancy and then go on to deliver a novel that obliterates that irrelevancy? Some of his critics seemed to believe that the sheer gall it took to appoint himself spokesman of American culture somehow disqualified Franzen. As if there was something unseemly about the nakedness of his ambition to become the Joseph Heller of his time. But isn't that kind of ambition brazenly American? Shouldn't we WANT our novelists to at least attempt to convey the spirit and the feel of the times we live in?
And anyway I'm not sure Franzen necessarily set out to write a novel about How We Live Now. He was following the James Joyce dictum ("in the particular is contained the universal"), but his Dublin was an American Midwestern Protestant family milieu. It was the critics and readers who dubbed The Corrections the first Great American Novel of the millennium. Hell, it would seem that Franzen did everything he could to sabotage the mainstream success of his novel, via the Oprah kerfuffle and his acerbic public persona.
ANYWAY, this was a great essay. I've enjoyed seeing writers I admire who have been pilloried online and in academia these last few decades (sometimes deservedly, sometimes merely because they are straight, white, and male) receive such impassioned defense: DFW, Franzen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy.
Probably there is something about the curmudgeonly, finger-wagging tone of Frazen's essays (and the more didactic parts of his fiction, like the population stuff in Freedom) that annoys his detractors. But you're right. He's been proven prescient. I also think much of the resentment of him is based in envy. Franzen set himself the monumental task of becoming a more widely known, widely read, widely admired author, and he achieved it.
Great essay, I really really felt this one! I never imagined as a dreamy adolescent “isolate” that I would become nostalgic for the 80’s and 90’s in the 21st century, for I loathed the 80’s and 90’s. Ironies abound and continue….
What interesting is that the growth of class (2) and the decline of class (1) in some ways parallels pre-modern ideas of writing.
In the Italian Renaissance for example, most of those who were recreational readers were also (at least to some degree) dilettante writers. Our world seems to be moving, more and more, towards a fundamentally oral culture.
"It is very strange to blame a writer for offering opinions that “go against the contemporary grain,”"...
When everyone right of the middle is labeled a Nazi by "the contemporary grain," it makes perfect sense.
Oh please.
And thank you.
I think he's probably the one 'big' writer of our era who might survive somewhat well into the year 2100, if for no other reason than because the social realist tradition he's adamant about just tends to be more 'legible' to future generations than a lot of the more high concept/naval gazing stuff that is passed off as "masterful."
The Corrections was one of the best contemporary novels I’ve ever read, and then Freedom was one of the most insufferable despite being so well written.
Thanks for writing this wonderful essay. Not a week goes by when I don't type "new Jonathan Franzen novel" into Google. He's the best :)