Self-diagnosis is always a dangerous business, but apparently I’m suffering from Franzenfreude.
Franzen as in Jonathan Franzen, novelist and TIME magazine cover boy on its swimsuit edition.
Freude as freude with an e on the end and not Freud as in Sigmund but it might as well be because boy are you unconsciously revealing volumes about yourself when you admit you have it.
Franzen + freude.
Franzenfreude.
Sounds like a parody of Frankenstein, doesn’t it?
Dr Franzenfreude’s Monster Masterpiece?
“LIFE! Do you hear me? Give my literary creation LIFE! And a rave review in the New York Times Book Review!”
But, according to novelist Jennifer Weiner, who invented the term, playing on Schadenfreude, which is taking the pleasure in the pain of others, Franzenfreude is:
Taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.
I’ve definitely got it. And I’ve had it since The Corrections came out. The publication of Franzen’s new Great American Novel (Except That We Don’t Use That Phrase Anymore), Freedom, has only intensified it.
Mine’s a mild case. Franzenfreude is most acute among women novelists like Weiner herself. For good reason, as Weiner explains in a piece at NPR:
But her angst is not just about the book — or even about Franzen himself.
"It's about the establishment choosing one writer and writing about him again and again and again," Weiner says, "while they are ignoring a lot of other worthy writers and, in the case of The New York Times, entire genres of books."
Weiner is known for writing "chick lit" — which she says is just a snappier way of saying "commercial women's fiction" — and though she's done very well with the genre, she knows it's not a critical favorite. But even "literary" novels written by women, Weiner says, do not get the same attention as a small group of men whose writing is taken very seriously by publications like the Times.
Ron Hogan elaborates in a post at Beatrice:
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, isn’t even out yet, and already it’s become one of the most talked-about novels of the year—although, if truth be told, for the last week people have actually been talking more about how much people have been talking about Freedom than they’ve been talking about the novel itself. Let me explain: Jennifer Weiner, who also has a new novel out this summer (Fly Away Home), pointed out that the folks who run the book coverage at The New York Times sure do love them some Franzen, based on the number of articles they’ve written about him and his book, and she noted that this attention (which she called “Franzenfreude”) is just the latest manifestation of the Times tendency to dwell obsessively on Great White Male Novelists—I can’t recall offhand if she used specific examples, but she could certainly have cited the ways in which, after the publication of I Am Charlotte Simmons, the Times became, as I put it, “the newspaper that cried Wolfe,” or their fixation on John Updike after the publication of Terrorist, as examples. Soon after Weiner’s remarks, Jodi Picoult reinforced the message with a tweet that said, in part: “Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t white male literary darlings.”
I’ve never been much of Franzen fan. His work leaves me cold. Too much exposition, dialog that sounds a lot like the expository prose around it, no good jokes. I’m serious about the jokes. If a novel doesn’t make you at least chuckle every other page, put the book down. Name the saddest novels you know. (Ten points to everybody who immediately said, The Good Soldier.) Madame Bovary? Comedic gold. Lord Jim? A laugh riot. Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick---the first ten chapters of both are as funny as anything by Dickens or Jane Austen.
Ahab’s “from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” is one of the great laugh lines of American literature, depending on your point of view.
Moby-Dick’s, for instance.
God’s.
Although…they’re the same thing, aren’t they?
If a part of you doesn’t laugh when Emma Bovary takes her poison, or Jim stands there and lets himself get shot, or Anna kneels down to wait for the train, or Ahab goes down with the damn-ed whale then you haven’t been paying attention.
I don’t mean this the way Oscar Wilde meant it when he said that a reader must have a heart of stone not to read of the death of Little Nell and laugh.
I mean that Flaubert and Conrad and Tolstoy and Melville all intend us to see that there is something ridiculous as well as something beautiful in human beings taking themselves and their troubles so seriously.
They also intend us to see that what makes their tragedies tragic is that things didn’t have to happen this way. We’re not the Greeks. We know the gods aren’t playing games with us. The fault likes not in the stars but in ourselves or as the great Discworld philosopher Didactylos says, “Things just happen. What the hell.”
Anna, poor, poor, pitiful her might have found out that the train don’t run by here no more.
Emma might have discovered too late she’d swallowed a dose of cod liver oil.
Jim’s friend’s father’s old flintlocks might have misfired or Jim might never have been on Patusan because he might never have jumped at all. Or he might have started to jump but tripped and fallen flat on his face, knocking himself silly, so that he was onboard when the Patna was rescued and found himself being hailed as a hero instead of reviled as a coward and a disgrace. Instead of spending the whole novel trying to be the hero he failed to be, he could have spent a whole different novel trying to live up to the hero he never really was.
Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim contains the plot of Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero.
The comedy that might have happened is present in the tragedy and the corollary holds as well: we might just as easily be crying as laughing at the end.
The best writing acknowledges this. Writing that doesn’t--- or, more usually, can’t acknowledge it because the writer doesn’t have the right touch or, also more usually, lacks a sense of humor---is merely sentimental.
The better writers see life as comic and tragic, which is how the great Shakespearean critic Northrop Frye can ask us to see Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as basically the same play.
Franzen is a sentimentalist. Which doesn’t make him a bad writer. It just makes him a typical late 20th Century American writer, like Charles Baxter, Jane Smiley, Gail Godwin, and a slew of other good writers whose books I’ve enjoyed but that have not excited a particular interest in me to revisit.
I think Weiner and Jodi Picoult are both sentimentalists too.
I’m sorry to say that Russell Banks, who wrote two of the best tragic novels of the last quarter of the last century, Continental Drift and Affliction, and one of the saddest stories I know, The Sweet Hereafter , has descended into a rank sentimentalism since, oh, about the third page of Cloudsplitter, which is still a very good novel.
Just, you know, not that funny.
And, by the way, irony is a form of sentimentality, but that’s another post.
So, I’m probably going to give Freedom the skip.
But, Lance, isn’t that unfair? Have you really given Franzen a chance? Freedom is said to be a a great book. Shouldn’t you at least read some of it before you dismiss it and him out of hand?
Tell you what. You read Strong Motion and The Twenty-Seventh City, then we’ll talk.
Anyway, I’m not dismissing Franzen or Freedom. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read him. That would be dismissing him. I’m saying I don’t want to read any more of his work. It’s only a matter of taste. As I’ve said before, when it comes to art of any kind, some people like pesto and some people don’t, and you don’t change anybody’s taste by forcing pesto down their throats or slapping the fork out of their hand.
But I’ll tell you what, even if I hadn’t read Strong Motion and The Twenty-seventh City and half of The Corrections and most of the essays in How to Be Alone , and wasn’t tired of Franzen’s pesto, I’d have a hard time picking up Freedom because of my Franzenfreude.
Jennifer Weiner has reason to be annoyed. The literary powers that be, represented in the NPR piece and Ron Hogan’s post by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, routinely decide that an author or a book is IMPORTANT for reasons that seem to have little to do with questions of art or literary merit. The writer or his books---and it is usually a his---will be declared IMPORTANT because the subject is IMPORTANT.
ISSUES of the day are being tackled.
Something BIG is being said about the way we live now.
And we’re meant to read this IMPORTANT work in order to learn stuff. IMPORTANT stuff.
Besides that this sort of judgment values fiction as if its purpose was sociology, when books get pushed for their IMPORTANCE, I feel like I’m being assigned homework.
And this is the root cause of my Franzenfreude.
It’s good that a novelist has made the cover of TIME for the first time in a generation, and I guess it might as well be Franzen as anybody else, but he’s not there because the editors at TIME think he’s a great writer. He’s there because they’ve decided he’s news.
The criteria for newsworthy here is probably the same as what it is for any story that captures the attention of editors working in the MSM: controversy. Franzen is controversial, if you remember how he dissed Oprah and think that’s worth a second thought.
If there’s more to it, it’s that Freedom itself, as The Corrections supposedly was, is news or is delivering news.
That is, it’s telling us something IMPORTANT about the way we live now.
So there he is on TIME’s cover, as news, and I can’t help feeling I’m expected to read Freedom for the same reason I’m expected to read anything that news, to be informed.
Will there be a quiz?
I’m not saying that no great writers set out to tell their readers IMPORTANT news about the way they were living at the moment. Trollope certainly did, at least once, in a novel he called, in case anybody might miss it, The Way We Live Now.
I am saying, though, that if Sam Tanenhaus thinks his job is to identify the books that will “endure”---and he does; that’s how he describes it in the NPR piece---he should keep in mind that nobody reads the books that have endured to find out how people lived then.
Nobody since the grad students in the 1980s and 1990s desperate for trendy topics for their dissertations, at any rate.
Tanenhaus compares Franzen to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, a comparison so empty that I can’t help wondering if he’s basing it simply on the fact that books by all three are big enough to make excellent doorstops.
Stylistically, artistically, and temperamentally (I’m referring to their approaches to writing but also to their personalities), Tolstoy and Mann are very different from each other, and comparing Franzen to both is like comparing a painter to both Goya and Edvard Munch. But Tolstoy and Mann have at least one thing in common that makes both of them very different from Franzen.
They’re funny.
There are more jokes in the first five pages of Buddenbrooks than in all 500 or whatever of The Corrections. And, as I said, Anna Karenina, starts off as a comic novel.
There’s another, major difference between Tolstoy and Franzen. Tolstoy is dramatic.
I mean that he works in scenes in which things happen.
Franzen works in long paragraphs of exposition broken up by dialogs and anecdotes that illustrate the expositions.
Again, this is why I enjoy Tolstoy and not why you shouldn’t enjoy Franzen, but it is part of what makes Tolstoy a great novelist and that’s more to the point. It’s actually unfair of Tanenhaus to compare Franzen to Tolstoy. It makes Franzen look small. Franzen may be good, but he’s not likely to be that good.
Plus, if you’re looking for a novelist who is like Tolstoy, you might as well just re-read Tolstoy.
But I’m guessing that the reason Tanenhaus makes the comparisons is that he is thinking about the writers’ subjects. Tolstoy and Mann wrote big IMPORTANT books that made the connection between the micro-society of a family and the larger society in which those families lived out their private dramas.
Just like Franzen!
How about that?
This is, to repeat myself, valuing fiction as if it is or ought to be sociology or history or news and judging a novel’s importance based on its IMPORTANCE---for what it teaches us about the way we live now.
If that’s what you want from a book, then you should read non-fiction, a lot of which is livelier, smarter, and more actually important than most IMPORTANT novels, and, to use a standard that Tanenhaus ought to be using to rate novels and novelists, non-fiction writers like John McPhee and Susan Orlean are better literary stylists than Jonathan Franzen or, for that matter, Jennifer Weiner.
Judging books or their authors’ importance based on their IMPORTANCE is judging them as something other than novels and it suggests that you’re really not all that interested in novels. Which is the case, in this case. One of the first things Tanenhaus did when he took over as editor of the NYTBR was to shrink the hole for fiction reviews. I don’t know if he did it because he wasn’t all that interested in novels himself, but he was making the editorial judgment that the readers of the book review or the new readers he wanted to attract weren’t.
He saw the book review section as just another section of a newspaper and as a section of a newspaper he thought it should do what every section of any newspaper does, deliver the news. Ron Hogan again:
When he took over the New York Times Book Review a few years back, Sam Tanenhaus declared that he wanted the section to exemplify “news about the culture”…
Based on what he tells NPR, I’m guessing he still thinks this way:
"The extraordinary interest in Franzen derives from this," Tanenhaus says. "He somehow seems to give you a panorama of the culture but also tap[s] into the deeper anxieties, tensions and questions that animate us today.”
The book review delivers news, the novels that are important enough for the very important New York Times to review are the ones that contain news worth the the very important New York Times taking the trouble to deliver.
There aren’t as many as there used to be, but there are still many intellectual types who miss the days when novels mattered and novelists weren’t merely minor celebrities but major public figures.
Bellow’s gone. Mailer’s gone. Updike. Heller. Malamud.
Philip Roth is the last of the giants.
I don’t know about you but I feel an organized push to make Franzen their heir and successor, and it’s making me want to push back.
That’s Franzenfreude.
__________________________
One more thought: Trying to “identify the fiction that really will endure” is a mug’s game.
Someone should say three words to Tanenhaus.
James. Gould. Cozzens.
There was a time when Cozzens was ranked with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, when he was far better known and more highly regarded and more widely read than Faulkner. These days it’s not so much that he’s endured but that he’s somehow managed to hang on, barely.
Know anybody who’s read The Just and the Unjust lately? By Love Possessed? Guard of Honor?
Actually, you do. Me. Good books. But don’t rush out.
No good jokes.
To be revised and updated in the morning.
Thanks, Mannion. I am so glad you're doing this. I am just too tired to take it up. For me, the necessary effort would also be a mug's game. Lean in on it, lad, turn that greasy wheel.
Posted by: Joseph Michael Reynolds | Friday, September 03, 2010 at 12:11 AM
I have bought Freedom, but I haven't started it yet; I'm about halfway through The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and nothing is going to stand between me and finishing that. But seriously, no laughs in The Corrections? You must have been in a really bad mood, is all I can say.
Posted by: redactor | Friday, September 03, 2010 at 01:33 AM
I liked The Twenty-Seventh City but I think it stands as to Franzen's work as Dangling Man ad The Victim stand to Bellows-- it is a warm-up, an exercise in craft that only peripherally addresses the themes which currently are occupying the authors' focus. Hate, hate, hated The Corrections. It was well done, but the characters were despicable. I suppose that was the point, but I think it is a novel that is unlikely to occupy the attention of graduate students 25 years from now.
It's been a while since I had a look at Cozzens. Maybe I should re-read The Last Adam.
Posted by: Bill Altreuter | Friday, September 03, 2010 at 11:15 AM
Ahem. From the eXile, circa 2002:
http://exiledonline.com/jonathan-franzen-will-rim-bobos-for-book-of-the-month-fame/
"Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, billed as a masterpiece, is a worthless fraud, a hopelessly trite story gaudied up with tedious overwriting. The overwriting is meant to conceal the fact that this novel is a simple mix of three of the most hackneyed storylines in American fiction:
1. The picaresque adventures of a feckless male academic, borrowed from DeLillo;
2. The sentimental tale of the decay and death of one’s parents as in Dave Eggers’s “masterpiece”;
3. The old, old plot device of the family Christmas reunion to bring the centrifugal parents and kids back together again against all odds, as in every sentimental John Hughes movie ever made and about a thousand more before him.
That, folks, is all there is to this mess: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation meets dying-parents memoir meets Manhattanite satire Lite. God help me, but that’s it!"
He's the James Frey of SERIOUS, IMPORTANT Novelists. He got his marketing right.
Posted by: DupinTM | Friday, September 03, 2010 at 11:22 AM
That's a subtle and useful point about good jokes. I first read Moby Dick on my own without benefit of clergy (literary critics) so didn't know any better than to find it funny. For Conrad too it seems the case the novels that aren't full of amusement are also the sentimental and less true ones - Chance, The Arrow of Gold, etc (confess to being a romantic sentimentalist myself, so still can derive great pleasure from them).
Never read Franzen yet, exactly because he's supposed to be IMPORTANT and I have a disinclination toward fashionable modern novelists. That's a prejudice I suppose I should be working against, but vita brevis.
Posted by: Doug K | Friday, September 03, 2010 at 11:35 AM
Ms. Weiner must not be very familiar with German -- the "freude" in "Schadenfreude" means "joy", as in "Freude, schoner gotterfunken" and all that. So "Franzenfreude" should mean "taking joy in Franzen", not its opposite.
Posted by: Dave MB | Friday, September 03, 2010 at 02:25 PM
I'm with you on the jokes. The ones that aren't just funny, but dog mean. In that respect,Hilary Mantel has written everyone's ass into the ground for a long time to come.
Posted by: coozledad | Friday, September 03, 2010 at 03:41 PM
Bill, good comparison, vis a vis Dangling Man. Re: Cozzens. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many of his books are still in print. The Just and the Unjust is the one I'd like to see endure.
Posted by: Lance | Friday, September 03, 2010 at 04:05 PM
Three things from a longtime admirer: 1)Glad someone corrected the German -- what you have is, I believe, more properly rendered as SchadenFranzen; 2) Regarding your evaluation of Franzen, I'm with redactor; 3) Getting het up about literary reputation as portrayed in the organs of establishment publishing is about as useful and taking them as gospel. And while Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult have a point, it's rather like Marilyn Monroe's in All About Eve. MOST of what get's published by big name houses is terrible and always will be and, especially in today's market, worrying that the establishment is making an error in promoting actual literary talent is beside the point. As Gore Vidal quoted a sage relation as saying, upon hearing about how many copies were sold of a Vidal's "bestseller," it is astonishing that anyone could sell so little of anything in America as publishers sell of books.
Posted by: M. George Stevenson | Friday, September 03, 2010 at 07:33 PM
I'm curious, Lance. Did you read the article?
While, yes, the magazine is clearly covering Franzen as if he is a news event, well, it's more because Time picked him to showcase how novels are written now, and how Franzen bucks the trend. What goes into them. Why Franzen and his cohorts (like the late David Foster Wallace) have changed what a novel is, for good and bad.
Here's the article. The author does admit his admiration for JF, so there's a bit of fawning, but when I read the article, I didn't walk away with a desire to buy The Corrections or Freedom. I just understood one of the more important authors of our time a little better.
Yes, there are probably women authors (Picoult comes to mind) who deserve a Time cover. But it's hard to argue with the choice of Franzen.
Posted by: actor212 | Saturday, September 04, 2010 at 08:01 PM
Wouldn't you say Dickens is as big a sentimentalist as any? Not that I don't love and adore him.
And stuff HAPPENS in Franzen's books -- certainly stuff happens. Especially in the 27th City. But I don't believe him when he tells me it happened. It's bizarre stuff. It happens for the sake of happening.
I liked The Corrections because that stuff about lonely mothers always gets me, and has fooled me many a time into thinking something is good literature simply because it has made me cry.
I find Franzen irritating though and am done reading his books. Besides The Corrections, I haven't even remotely liked anything he's done.
Posted by: FormerlyApostate | Sunday, September 05, 2010 at 11:06 PM
redactor: But seriously, no laughs in The Corrections? You must have been in a really bad mood, is all I can say.
George M. Stevenson: Regarding your evaluation of Franzen, I'm with redactor
Redactor, almost certainly. I was dealing with my first case of Franzenfreude or, as George and DaveMB point out, I should say, SchadenFranzen. The Corrections was hyped as IMPORTANT too.
I re-read some of The Corrections and selections from Freedom before I posted this one though. Still couldn't find any good jokes.
actor212, Yes, I read the article. The article's fine, in itself, but there's no reading it in itself. It's the COVER story. But my point isn't that Franzen isn't a good writer or even that he's an over-rated one or that Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult deserve equal time (I can name about 50 writers more deserving than either of them. But so can they). My point is that judging a writer by his IMPORTANCE or reading a novel because it's IMPORTANT is the least fun and dullest way to approach fiction outside of a class taught by a diehard deconstructionist. I don't enjoy Franzen's stuff but because of the way he's been pushed I can't enjoy it. And the pushing began within intellectual circles before The Corrections, although back then it had to due with Franzen's being friends with another IMPORTANT writer, David Foster Wallace.
Formerly, you know how much I love Dickens, but you're right he can be the Sentimentalist in Chief. But what makes him different, and IMHO so much greater, than other sentimentalists is that he's also a comic writer. That's really another category. And in his stories it's not the case that the tragedy is there behind the comedy or the comedy there behind the tragedy. He puts them both onstage at the same time. Krook's spontaneous combustion in Bleak House is horrifying but part of its horror is Guppy and Weevle's comic reaction to it.
As for things happening in Franzen's work, I was actually talking more about how Tolstoy works, which is in scenes that could be played out as written on stage or in the movies. The opening chapters of Anna Karenina are practically a play script.
Posted by: Lance | Tuesday, September 07, 2010 at 08:10 AM
Back in the 1970s, Lewis Lapham said that when a book was hyped as IMPORTANT, he would not read it right away. If people were still talking about it in two or three years, he would give it a chance. This approach could work for you. I did read The Corrections about a year after all the hoopla, which might have helped me enjoy it more.
Another book that was deemed IMPORTANT was Don DeLillo's Underworld. I loved it, but IMO it was DeLillo's last good book. And it's certainly true that what happened afterward is that his books became self-consciously arty and not at all humorous. He went from being serious to being solemn (h/t Russell Baker). I don't see Franzen as solemn, at least not in The Corrections. We'll have to see about Freedom.
In any case, you're right that judging a writer by his IMPORTANCE or reading a novel because it's IMPORTANT is not fun. Fortunately, I'm not a critic, so I'm free to read or ignore IMPORTANT books as I choose and to evaluate them by criteria other than IMPORTANCE. I tend not to read reviews until after I have read the book in question, because I want to hear the author before without strangers preinterpreting him for me.
When I was in school, I didn't much like the assigned reading. I've read most of those assigned books since and discovered that they were pretty great. I suppose like you, I was resisting reading as an exercise in "eat your vegetables." Left to my own devices, I read a lot of books my English teachers would approve of, but I can interact with them on my own terms, whether they're IMPORTANT or not.
Posted by: redactor | Tuesday, September 07, 2010 at 02:04 PM
Count me in as one who's read James Gould Cozzens. For decades now I've been evangelizing Guard of Honor as one of the absolute best novels to come out of World War II, & a viable contender for the "Great American Novel."
Posted by: Ralph H. | Tuesday, September 07, 2010 at 02:48 PM
Okay, maybe only people who know some German are bothered by this, but Franzenfreude doesn't make a lick of sense. It does not work because freude means joy or pleasure and if you feel Franzenfreude according to Weiner, you're enjoying something, not suffering.
But then why should I be surprised at this terrible attempt at wit when Jodi Picoult thinks nobody knows what the adjective "lapidary" means and she also thinks that Jane Austen was a "popular novelist" when the facts are completely against her:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lev-raphael/was-jane-austen-a-popular_b_705583.html
Posted by: Lev Raphael | Wednesday, September 08, 2010 at 11:59 AM
I *LOVE* THIS.
Sign me on with rampant CormacMcarthyFreude.
Or more correctly, SchadenMcCarthyFreude.. if only he would start getting some decent schaden for me to take Freude in.
Theres another word that this late 20th century American Writing evokes in me, with every benighted foray into Benighted and Noble:
Tedious.
Thanks Lance.
Posted by: Zach | Thursday, September 09, 2010 at 03:02 PM
Margaret Drabble might have a right to be irked. Or Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Or even Joanne Trollope. But Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult are just embarrassing in this context. And I'm with those who were immediately irked by the term Franzenfreude ("You keep saying that. I do not think it means what you think it means). I suppose the unfortunate invention unintentionally underscrores that sour grapes are most often spewed by belong to those who can't hang with the big boys and girls.
Posted by: velvet goldmine | Friday, September 10, 2010 at 10:07 PM
Lance -- I greatly enjoyed this post. It caused two reactions.
1) I have owned a pristine $2 copy of Corrections that I got a few years ago from our library's used book store. Over those years I have noticed that we get many donated copies to resell. At least twice before, I have read a few pages and stopped. But when I read the glowing reviews of Freedom, I almost bought it (40% off with my card.) Instead,I picked up my Corrections to give it another try before investing in another work of this allegedly great talent. Still no dice. And your post made me feel so vindicated that I have placed Corrections in a bag to donate back to the book store to add to their pile of duplicate copies.
2) I knew of Cozzens but had never read anything by him. I might have if I had ever noticed a work of his
coming through the store, but none ever did. Wondering what Updike thought of him, I checked the index
of all four of his thick non-fiction books for the name Cozzens. Nothing. Then I checked my Edmund Wilson collection. Nothing. I had to settle for what
Wikipedia has to say. So today I went to our public library and went to the online catalog. Good, they
supposedly had thrree works. Guard of Honor, By Love Possessed, and The Just and the Unjust. So I checked availability.
One was listed as "missing," the other two as
"in storage" So I asked for all three, alerting them that there was a chance that the missing one would be alongside the other two. The storage runner camed down and pronounced that all three were missing. The clerk at the reference desk where I requested the copies speculated that the books had probably been placed with the humongous pile of discards declared ready for the big October sale by the Friends of the Library, and if so would be sold for the usual $1 a copy.
Rodney Cozzens gets no respect.
Posted by: Pop Mannion | Saturday, September 11, 2010 at 10:14 AM
This is deep in epu-land, but some of the readers of this thread might be interested in Steven Moore's The Novel. An Alternative History where Franzen is placed into an acronym (along with Myers and Peck) to denote a particularly narrow view of what a novel should be. You can read the introduction here.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Monday, September 13, 2010 at 12:30 PM