Jonathan Franzen has flourished crankily under controversy since 2001, when two bad things happened to him. beginning, he released his break novel The Corrections and became known as one of the most important american writers of his generation. irregular, he said he was uncomfortable with Oprah selecting The Corrections for her book baseball club because she ’ randomness picked a bunch of schmaltz, and became synonymous with the worst of elitist white male snobbery .
Since then, Franzen has been named, variously, the great american Novelist, a note zigzag, a human Banksy facility, and simply kind of a prick up. He has been embroiled in fights about Twitter ( he says it is everything he opposes ), birds ( he likes them ), and conjunctions ( pro-and, anti-then ). The internet domain ciswhitemale.com redirects to Franzen ’ s Facebook page. He ’ mho released some of the most celebrated novels of the twenty-first century so far, and some of the most despised essays, besides. He is singular : a novelist-slash-public intellectual, and identical much intentionally so, in a prison term when that career path doesn ’ t seem to exist for many people anymore .
here is a history of Jonathan Franzen ’ s career of controversy in four book releases — and why the release of his new novel is poised to meet a more welcome atmosphere than the one that met his last.
2001: The era of The Corrections and Oprah
The Corrections was not Jonathan Franzen ’ s beginning novel ; it was his third base. But its publication marked the first time that one of Franzen ’ s book releases would become an event .
“ If some authors are masters of suspense, others postmodern verbal acrobats, and still others complex-character pointillists, few excel in all three arenas, ” began the Publishers Weekly reappraisal. “ In his long-awaited third novel, Franzen does. ” The review closes by announcing The Corrections to be “ merely, a masterpiece. ”
Publishers Weekly wasn ’ thyroxine alone in its praise. The Guardian called The Corrections “ a Bleak House of the digital age. ” In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it “ by turns funny and caustic, portentous and affecting. ” By the end of the year, it would win the National Book Award .
What was therefore impressive about The Corrections for many readers was the way Franzen managed to marry firework literary ambitions to an immersive, highly clear syndicate saga. It was a scheme Franzen had excellently argued in a 1996 essay in Harper ’ s was the best possible step advancing for the fresh. television receiver had made the big novel of social awareness excess, Franzen said, and the dangerous post-modern novelists like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo were quickly becoming irrelevant. To write a fresh that mattered in the fast-approaching twenty-first hundred, he concluded, a novelist would have to “ connect the personal and the social ” by rooting sociable review in psychologically compel characters .
There are basically two opposing models of the fresh, Franzen would later elaborate in a much-celebrated 2002 essay for the New Yorker. There ’ s the Status model, in the custom of Flaubert, in which if a bible is capital then it ’ sulfur eminent art, and if the public doesn ’ metric ton drive it, well, that ’ mho because they ’ re philistines, international relations and security network ’ thymine it. then there ’ s the Contract model, in which the writer is understand to have made a compress with the subscriber : In central for the reader ’ sulfur attention, the writer gives pleasure. If the populace “ doesn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate pay back ” a Contract bible, then it doesn ’ triiodothyronine matter whether it ’ sulfur high art or not ; the Contract reserve has failed .
Franzen, nervously, could not seem to quite decide which model he aligned with. He kind of seemed to want to do both. With The Corrections, the critical consensus was that Franzen had pulled it off .
Put identical just, The Corrections was both smart and fun. Or as David Gates winkingly phrased it in the New York Times, “ You could read The Corrections as a conventional realist saga … with just enough novel-of-paranoia touches sol Oprah won ’ triiodothyronine delegate it and ruin Franzen ’ s street cred. ”
Gates either spoke besides soon or was a clock time traveler with a ghoulish sense of sarcasm. A mere two weeks after Gates ’ s reappraisal was published, Oprah announced that she had, indeed, picked The Corrections for her book club, and Franzen did, indeed, seize madly after his street cred .
His chief emergence, he said on NPR ’ sulfur Fresh Air, was a fear that the Oprah cachet would push readers to focus in on merely the fun region of his fun-smart alliance. “ I feel like I ’ meter solidly in the high-art literary custom, ” he said, “ but I like to read entertaining books and this possibly helps bridge that gap, but it besides heightens these feelings of being misconstrue. ”
In an interview with Powell ’ s bookshop, Franzen returned to the question of whether Oprah ’ s taste was good adequate that he should be flattered by the attention. “ She ’ south picked some good books, but she ’ second picked adequate bathetic, unidimensional ones that I cringe, myself, ” he said, “ even though I think she ’ sulfur very smart and she ’ s truly fighting the good contend. ”
With icy politeness, Oprah extended Franzen a disinvitation. “ Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey prove because he is apparently uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club choice, ” she said in a public statement. “ It is never my purpose to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict. We have decided to skip the dinner and we ’ ra moving on to the following book. ” Franzen was the first generator ever to be disinvited from Oprah ’ s express .
At the time, Oprah was one of publishing ’ south kingmakers. She was not considered a bastion of dependable taste — one editor program, when asked by the New York Observer if publish as a wholly respected Oprah ’ s literary acumen responded, “ not in truth ” — but she was considered the most authentic promotion exit in the occupation. Her Oprah ’ s Book Club picks regularly sold over a million copies. When she made Anna Karenina an Oprah bible, publishers announced that they were printing 800,000 extra copies .
So the book world responded to the Franzen-Oprah affair with mingle scorn and enchant. Franzen was such a snob that he was going to tell anyone who asked how uncomfortable he was putting the Oprah seal on his record, but he was enough of a hypocrite that he was bequeath to use her name for promotion even so ? What a buck .
“ One would have to be a better person than me not to be amused by this solid play, ” Bill Thomas, editor-in-chief of Doubleday, told the New York Times .
contribution of what gave the Oprah saga such leg was the direction it illuminated the restless underbelly of the smart books/fun books split that Franzen was attempting to bring together. Subliminally speaking, chic books of the earned run average were considered men ’ sulfur books. Fun books were considered women ’ mho books. generally, alone men were believed capable of uniting the two .
“ As male novelists abandoned psychological naturalism for enigmatic pronouncements, ” the New York Times explained in a long, breathless profile of Franzen concisely before The Corrections came out, “ the job of creating memorable characters became women ’ randomness work — the forte of writers like Anne Tyler and Annie Proulx. Franzen aims to bring these traditions together. ”
Oprah ’ s cachet of approval threatened Franzen ’ s street cred not only because she was unserious but because she was feminine. “ I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience, ” Franzen said on Fresh Air, “ and I ’ ve learn more than one reviewer in signing lines now in book stores that said, ‘ If I hadn ’ triiodothyronine learn you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pluck. I figure those books are for women and I would never touch it. ’ Those are male readers speaking. ”
Franzen would later apologize abundantly and repeatedly for offending Oprah. But with this feud, Franzen ’ s villain floor was set. He would be, for the adjacent 20 years, the man who represented the straight whiten male establishment of literary polish and all its most clannish excesses .
2010: Freedom and Franzenfreude
Despite the Oprah scandal, Franzen had earned enough good will with The Corrections that he was, by and large, more admire than despised in the book universe when he released his fourthly novel, 2010 ’ second Freedom. Just like The Corrections, Freedom was greeted with critical exultation .
Time magazine put Franzen on the cover under the headline Great american english Novelist. The New York Times called Freedom “ a masterpiece of american fiction. ” Then-President Obama was photographed reading it on vacation before it even came out. In a redemptive moment, Oprah selected Freedom for her reserve club, and Franzen appeared on the testify, telling Oprah it was “ an honor. ”
But as Jennie Yabroff pointed out in Newsweek, while readers were will to welcome Freedom with exposed arms, Franzen the public person had come to seem more than a short boring. The success of The Corrections had given him a platform, and Franzen had not held off on using his to espouse some fairly controversial takes .
“ There ’ s no getting around the fact that Freedom comes with an ever-expanded set of baggage, ” Yabroff wrote. “ The Corrections was written by a reasonably nameless, earnest-looking ridicule with glasses. Freedom comes from the man who dissed Oprah, complained that the Tony-winning musical spring Awakening was a bastardization of the 1891 Frank Wedekind act ( which Franzen himself had recently translated from the german ), called reserve critic Michiko Kakutani ‘ the stupidest person in New York, ’ and claimed such affectations as writing in an earmuff-and-blindfold-equipped sensory-deprivation chamber. ” ( All links added. )
Where things actually started to change, though, and Franzen ’ randomness crankiness went from annoyance to outright indebtedness, was with the Twitter hashtag Franzenfreude .
The hashtag began with a conversation about the outsize coverage Freedom was enjoying from outlets like the New York Times, and how they compared to the coverage that women authors received .
“ NYT raved about Franzen ’ s fresh book, ” tweeted women ’ sulfur fiction author Jodi Picoult. “ Is anyone shocked ? Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren ’ t egg white male literary darlings. ”
“ Count the reviews, interviews, profiles and essays by/about writers like G. Shteyngart, C. Bock, J. Safran Foer the NYT public house, ” added women ’ mho fabrication generator Jennifer Weiner. “ now try to find a woman who ’ randomness drive that kind of attention. NYT loves its literary darlings, who tend to be fellow w/MFAs. ”
Before retentive, Weiner had coined a attention-getting term for her discontentment. “ Schadenfreude is taking pleasure in the annoyance of others, ” she said. “ Franzenfreude is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen. ”
Read more: 15 Mystery Series That’ll Keep You Guessing
The ensuing Franzenfreude conversation was more nuanced than many angry tweets would suggest, focused on whose voices the acculturation values and why. ultimately, it would lead to the initiation of VIDA Count, an annual data report that looks at the gender breakdown of the books covered at a given publication american samoa well as the bylines at the publication itself. VIDA confirmed that Weiner and Picoult had identified a veridical problem : Book review outlets like the New York Times in truth were more likely to spend their time and resources on white male novelists like Franzen than on books by people from other backgrounds .
interim, Franzen, the man with his name in the hashtag, came to seem like a symbol of the problem : a white serviceman with all the literary credibility in the worldly concern, a white man who had literally been declared the capital american novelist while thus many other capital writers labored in comparative obscurity. He evening had the lapp appoint as the other white men the New York Times loved at the meter : Jonathan Franzen right up there with Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Safran Foer. They were the lighted world ’ randomness harbinger to the Hollywood Chrises. surely there should be as much coverage for marginalize writers as there were for all the Jonathans of Brooklyn ?
It was becoming gradually clearer that the binary star therefore many people used when they talked about Franzen, the binary between fun books and good books, was a gendered one. Franzen was perceived as character of the arrangement that made it that way — and he was a snob to boot .
Franzen did not help defend himself against the allegations of snobbery when he finally responded to the charge in 2015. Jennifer Wiener, Franzen said in an interview at Butler University, was “ freeload on the lawful problem of sex bias in the canon, and over the years in the major recapitulation organs, to promote herself, basically. ” He agreed that mainstream outlets should review more women, he said, but he had a caveat : “ It ’ s an important issue and she ’ s an unfortunate person to have as a spokesperson. ”
But by then Franzen was already deep in what would become his most damaging ledger tour so far .
2015: Purity and adopting an Iraqi war orphan
Franzen ’ s adjacent novel Purity wouldn ’ t come out until five years after Freedom, but he published multiple essays in the time interval. They largely served to strengthen the Franzen-as-villain narrative. even the most give fans of Franzen ’ second novels will normally admit that his essays are impossible : paranoid, accusative, reactionary to the point of cliché, and appearing with much more frequency than the novels .
In 2012, he published a New Yorker essay on Edith Wharton that lingered with such decision on the question of her attractiveness or lack thereof that it powered an entire internet backfire cycle. The Center for Fiction declared Franzen ’ s tone “ excessive, contemptuous and patronize, ” while a more Franzen-friendly slice at the Awl suggested that Franzen “ projects his own responses onto ‘ us ’ in a manner that can be irritating, if we disagree with him. ”
In 2015, Franzen published another New Yorker essay arguing that the bird-conservation-focused Audubon Society was spending excessively much of its energy focused on climate change, leading the public to ignore early forms of conservation, such as changing the kind of glass used in stadium walls. ( Franzen is famously a bird lover, and birds are one of the subjects on which he is most likely to be an impossible crackpot. )
“ It ’ s not clear what the Audubon Society did to piss off Jonathan Franzen, ” wrote Mark Jannot for the Audobon Society in response, going on to note Franzen ’ s miss of journalistic background, along with his “ casual snark ” and “ smug, belittling tone. ” The larger blogosphere received Jannot ’ s man with overpower approval : audubon, the consensus was, had won this one .
Five months subsequently, Franzen released Purity, the first of his novels since The Corrections to be met with less than rave reviews. Critics all thought it was basically good, but they had reservations ; they found the prose besides politic, the plot besides farcical, the treatment of feminist movement excessively willfully contrary .
interim, as Franzen made the rounds of promotion, he dropped one frightful quotation mark after another into the avidly waiting arms of the literature worldly concern. Most infamously, he told Slate that he rarely wrote about race in depart because “ I have never been in love with a black womanhood, ” and the Guardian that he had considered adopting an Iraqi war orphan to try to understand youthful people better. ( That final one seems to have been a very bad attack at a jest. )
Was Franzen the owner of some deeply baffling views on top of your average run-of-the-mill atmospheric racism and sexism ? No one could inevitably prove it. Yet “ misogyny seems to follow him like a cloud, ” Bustle mused ; “ even if you don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate know about his exploits, you catch a whiff of them when he passes by. ”
Was he possibly fair truly bad at expressing himself in any form besides the novel ? “ That Franzen ’ s opinions — expressed in forms, identical much including the try, that he has not mastered and that tend to serve him ill — so often go against the contemporary grain ( for case his distrust of social media ) or situate him squarely in a trainspotterish cul de sauk of hobbyism ( all that birdwatching ) hateful that he is, from the point of view of the virtue-signalling culture warriors of Twitter, a soft target, ” argued the Dublin Review. “ here, once again, Franzen may have to take some of the blasted. It ’ sulfur difficult to think of another contemporaneous novelist who is served so ill by out-of-context quotation, or by his own inability to craft acceptable soundbites. ”
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22907666/183175455.jpg "Jonathan Franzen’s many controversies, explained - Vox 1")
In any lawsuit, Franzen did himself no favors by allowing himself to be photographed doing air quotes at the New Yorker Festival in 2013, therefore giving every release reporting on his bad quotes a arrant example for its subsequent article ( this wall socket identical much included ). It was just excessively arrant for the persona that all those soundbites and essays had coalesced into : person painfully out of touch but so very bequeath to bore his audience to tears with his irrelevant opinions regardless .
It all culminated in a New York Times magazine profile by the bang-up profiler Taffy Brodesser-Akner. A far cry from the breathlessly admiring Times profile that had accompanied the release of The Corrections, Brodesser-Akner ’ s piece treats Franzen as an oblivious grouch whose clear talent as a novelist pales besides his raging wrath issues and miss of self-awareness .
“ What had he done that was therefore wrong ? ” Brodesser-Akner wrote, in Franzen-esque absolve indirect discourse .
“ here he was, in his essays and interviews, making informed, nuanced arguments about the way we live now — about anything from Twitter ( which he is against ) to the way political correctness has been weaponized to shut down discourse ( which he is against ) to obligatory self-promotion ( which he is against ) to the ceaseless ending of a telephone call by saying, ‘ I love you ’ ( which he is against, but because ‘ I love you ’ is for private ) — and though critics loved him and he had a devoted readership, others were using the very mechanism and platforms that he warned against ( like the internet in general and social media in specific ) to ridicule him. Hate-pieces, mean hashtags, reductive eye-rolling at his assorted stances, a nit-picking of every quote. Accusations that he is uncoerced to pontificate but not to listen. Accusations that he ’ second excessively fragile to face his accusers ! Him ! Too delicate ! ”
The constitution had spoken. Franzen wasn ’ t their guy anymore. His character had at last outweighed his work .
2021: Does Crossroads see Franzen at a … crossroads? (Look, unlike Franzen, I am making no claims toward literary genius here.)
The publication of Crossroads is not an consequence in the way the publication of The Corrections and Freedom were, but it ’ s not being treated as disposable in the direction Purity was either. Crossroads is getting big reviews .
The Atlantic declared it Franzen ’ s best book even. Crossroads “ does everything a great novel should do, ” said Slate, urging readers to “ forget all of the controversies and good read it. ” The New York Times concluded that Crossroads was “ warmer than anything he ’ s yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of visualize and intellect. ” ( I myself declared it excellent. )
“ Thank God for Jonathan Franzen, ” sighed the Washington Post .
furthermore, Franzen is receiving uncharacteristically great notices on his press tour this meter approximately. Most notably, he explained why he didn ’ triiodothyronine sign last year ’ second ill-famed Harper ’ mho letter, an open letter that apparently argued for exempt lecture, but with a average measure of suggestion that the real trouble is that people from marginalized groups have gotten excessively loud about challenging institutional biases .
“ I felt it could be construed as somehow an assail on Black Lives Matter at a moment when that was just not the thing to do, ” Franzen said. “ There ’ s a chilling of nuanced discourse …but I besides think, until people start being sent off to Lubyanka for having said the wrong thing to the amiss person, the risk is probably grandiloquent. ”
If anything was bait for a note crank who ’ s been used as a symbol for those very institutional biases that people get loud about trying to knock down, the Harper ’ s letter was. So the fact that Franzen declined to sign it, and cited his support of Black Lives Matter in his explanation, felt significant .
Franzen is handling this bid tour a fortune better than his final. ( No Iraqi war orphan jokes so far ! ) so far to a sealed extent, the literary internet was already prepped to receive a Franzen go with a more welcome spirit in 2021 than it was in 2015 .
In the inflame of the 2016 election, the most fashionable attitude to take on sociable media is to hate social media, and sol Franzen ’ s vocal contempt toward Twitter and Facebook has come to seem more aspirational than anti-democratic. But more importantly, the campaign to include voices besides those of whiten men in the literary conversation has evolved beyond the want for symbols like Franzen.
Read more: The 36 Best (Old) Books We Read in 2021
In share because of the conversation begun by # Franzenfreude and VIDA Count, literary journals have moved toward covering the make of marginalize authors. They are still nowhere near parity, but by now the conversation has developed enough nuance that most people are comfortable aiming their review at systems and gatekeepers quite than at person authors like Franzen .
And as the critics of the world work to disentangle the concept of “ dear art ” from the default option of the directly white male, and simultaneously begin a recoil against the poptimism that dominated the 2010s, snobbery is swinging back into manner. It ’ south cool to have very discerning taste again, deoxyadenosine monophosphate long as your discerning taste spans genres and genders and categories of identity .
Within this evolve conversation, Franzen is freed from the debt instrument to be either the bang-up american Novelist or a regressive symbol of the status quo. He can good be a ridicule who writes in truth good novels and actually bad essays and is terminally offline. At long last, Franzenfreude might ultimately die .
