Jonathan Franzen is an Insufferable Douchebag.

Didn't he have some beef with Oprah? I thought he stood up to her somehow?

She invited "The Corrections" to be a selection in her bookclub, and he said no thanks. Nobody said no thanks to the O, so he was persuaded to relent, after an embarrassing PR debacle.

I cheered for him, personally, and was sorry he felt pressure to tackify his book with O stickers.

He said that only women would his book and not men, because they put an Oprah Book Club sticker on it.

The guy's an idiot.

Idiot or not, anybody know if Franzen's into the mansex? He's kinda hot.

R2 Actually, he consented to have The Corrections as a Book Club selection, but on a talk show he complained that most of Oprah's book selections were middle- to low-brow and lamented having the ubiquitous book club sticker affixed to his work.

She rescinded the invitation.

I liked The Corrections but it isn't exactly the second coming of Dostoevski.%0D %0D I thought it was Steven King again on the cover of Time. If it looks like a duck...

I am curious who is PR person is. How the hell did he get the cover of Time? Not many living authors get the cover, and they're usually much more famous than him (Stephen King, Tom Wolfe) It's really strange.

Beware! His author photos are deceiving.

@R8, link please?

"but on a talk show he complained that most of Oprah's book selections were middle- to low-brow and lamented having the ubiquitous book club sticker affixed to his work."

As generally insufferable as Franzen is (imagining himself the love child of Trollope & Cheever), he was right about Oprah's equally insufferable "book club".

He is the original frau basher. Good for him.

@R11, so only married heterosexual women read low and middle-brow books?? Just because your mother falls into that category doesn't mean the rest of them do, you know?

No, R12. Only fraus watch Oprah. He knew that and didn't want that association.

First off, it's true, Jonathan Franzen is a jerk. I've liked some stuff he's written, but I hated THE CORRECTIONS. Whenever he talks about his writing, he sound pretentious and self-involved to the extreme.

Secondly: Can we please just stop with the word "frau?" Jesus, it makes everyone on this board sound offensive and stupid.

Looks like his diclining to be chosen as an Oprah Selection helped the sale of the novel as evidenced by the following excerpt from Wiki: "By declining Oprah's pick, Franzen gained himself and his novel widespread media attention. The Corrections soon became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction. At the National Book Award ceremony, Franzen thanked Oprah in his brief acceptance speech: "I'd also like to thank Oprah Winfrey for her enthusiasm and advocacy on behalf of The Corrections."

Why R14? Every DL'er knows exactly what is meant when you say "frau". That one word perfectly describes of who JF feared his audience would be.

Franzen is obviously writing about himself with the Professor character in THE CORRECTIONS. I found the book to be as masterful as he is insufferable as a human being.

I have about 100 pages left of "Freedom" and I have absolutely been loving it. I don't want to finish it. It's better than "The Corrections" (which I also loved) - it's not quite as stylized and feels like it takes place more in the real world. It's also more tightly plotted and harder to put down.

I am thrilled to see Franzen on the cover of Time. He's operating at a higher level than most of his contemporaries in literary fiction. He's interested in the sweep of modern life - not vampires, or apocalyptic/dystopic scenarios, or giant domes, or serial killers - just regular people with relatable problems. He writes in a very journalistic, accessible style.

He's extremely perceptive about why people make the decisions they make. I think about the book when I'm not reading it, which may not be what everyone wants but I love it - it reminds me of what I loved about reading in the first place.

I know, Mary! But it's fun to get excited about a book.

r 16, the implication is that "frau" means "all women who like Oprah." What is that, 10 million women? Hatred of 10 million women - who include probably all the women you and I know - is hatred of women. Not SOME women, or CERTAIN women, but all of them.

Jesus, I don't know why gay men - who should understand the pain of being mocked by bullies - should be so willing to bully women.

You are such disappointments.

I couldn't finish "The Corrections." Then I tried to read at some part of a book of his essays, but they were too boring.%0D %0D The whole business with Oprah was tedious. JF came off as a high school intellectual. %0D %0D

The shrieking about fraus seems so much like the stereotype of gays--hysterical sissies barely about to contain their anger about Mom. %0D %0D Why would you want to venerate that image? And if you have those feelings, they're really fodder for your shrink's office.

the corrections was one of the funniest sad books (or saddest funny book) i've read. loved it. can hardly wait to start the new one.%0D

People who get how funny The Corrections is know how to read a book well, in my opinion. It's freaking hilarious if you know what to look for.

painfully funny, i suppose

R18, thank you for posting that and I appreciate you sharing your enthusiasm -- it's nice to see a person excited about a modern novel and not some stupid reality show.

Is Freedom in stores already or did you get an advanced copy r18?

Hey, don't scold me for not liking THE CORRECTIONS. I thought the book was messy and over-written. I guess I'm also just not a fan of Franzen's specific sensibility: self-absorbed anxious horned-up-and-depressed straight white male angst. Who cares? I resent all those folks - including TIME - who treat Franzen as "the only writer who is representing the world in which we all live." Why is the straight white male writer always held up as the central consciousness? This has been going on since Hemingway: the Midwestern white guy is at the center of experience, and consequently has access to ALL experience, whereas the rest of us are just floating in the margins, and cannot, by definition, have a panoramic understanding of reality.

This is nonsense. Plus, people who rave about Franzen tend to privilege realism as the only appropriate style/form for the novel. But realism is a recent guest at the House Party of the Novel - it snuck in through the servant's quarters in France in the 19th century, and it sprawled on all the furniture, to the point where it eventually appropriated the entire house. But if you sneak past Ian Watt and allow as how the "novel" as literary form has existed in one way or another since the ancient Greeks, and if you include non-western novels like Japan's TALE OF GENJI, then you are looking at an art form that is amazingly expansive, and not in any way limited to the techniques and tropes of realism. To treat Franzen as if he were the only guy who is really writing "novels" is to display a lot of ignorance about what a novel can be.

Nice post, R27. %0D %0D (I'm just bored by Franzen...I'd rather not be, since it's difficult to find writers I want to read. I'll give this new book a try, though.)

"But realism is a recent guest at the House Party of the Novel - it snuck in through the servant's quarters in France in the 19th century, and it sprawled on all the furniture, to the point where it eventually appropriated the entire house."

My eyes! They've been over-metaphorized!

R27, You took the thesis right out of my mouth!

r18 here, I managed to snag a review copy for the person who asked.

r27, I think it's fine you didn't like "The Corrections" and you raise some valid criticisms. I feel like I can love Franzen without devaluing other writers or schools of literature. I happen myself to most enjoy realism as a literary genre and I think Franzen's abilities place him in a great American tradition of writers like Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Cheever and Updike. Yes, this is a straight white list because most were working in a time when it was harder for minority voices to get into the mainstream. Fortunately he has some female company now in the guise of writers like Jane Smiley and Lorrie Moore - two writers whom I believe Franzen actually has more in common with than some of the male contemporaries he gets lumped in with like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody etc. As Moore herself has pointed out, Franzen actually writes from a deeply feminist viewpoint though he is just as unflinching with his female characters as he is with his males.

As you point out, there are plenty of literary alternatives out there for readers who aren't as interested in realism. But I also happen to think it's a good thing for a literary novelist to be on the cover of time, and good for Franzen for getting himself into that position. I hope it helps his book sell more.

(Although Cheever wasn't straight, as we now know)

I can't bear Jane Smiley!

Sorry.

I mean I can't bear her novels. I've never met her!

Yeah, I don't know if Franzen is so feminist. And funny to hear that from Lorrie Moore, who LOATHES women. Well, Moore loathes everyone.

I mean did you read the scene about the guy fucking his own divan in THE CORRECTIONS? I think Franzen is horrified by bodies, which, fine, bodies can be horrific, but. . .

I can't forgive him for saying he wrote THE CORRECTIONS in a rented apartment in Harlem with no heat where he sat in fingerless woolen gloves and BLINDFOLDED at his computer terminal, blindfolded and with ear plugs, so that "I COULD HOLD MY MIND FREE OF ALL CLICHES!"

That's what the dude said.

Jesus.

He needs to be anally penetrated by the defensive line of the Miami Dolphins, if you ask me.

If he's the best living writer that America has to offer, God help us. I know people who've met him and he truly is a cunt.

I read "The Corrections" over the course of two days. I actually called in sick to work because I simply couldn't put the thing down. I think he really captured pre-9/11, pre-economic meltdown America perfectly, although I'm sure some will complain about the lack of non-white characters.

Rejecting Oprah was a fucking brilliant move, especially in retrospect because now she's so fucking insufferable and full of shit.

What writer isn't an insufferable douchebag?

Most modern writers are insufferable douchebags.

Franzen

Another pic

Michiko like it!

*likes*

"Only fraus watch Oprah. He knew that and didn't want that association."%0D %0D %0D %0D %0D But he originally consented to be on Oprah. It was Oprah who didn't want him to be on the show after he bashed her audience.%0D %0D If he hates "fraus" so much he shouldn't have consented to be on the show in the first place.%0D

"But he originally consented to be on Oprah. It was Oprah who didn't want him to be on the show after he bashed her audience.%0D %0D If he hates "fraus" so much he shouldn't have consented to be on the show in the first place"%0D %0D Let's pretend this never happened. Let's just ignore it.%0D

R43 never reads.

If JF is the best we have, we are in the dark ages.

Gay rights are women's rights.

Stop the violence against women on DataLounge.

Jonathan Franzen has been making waves for a recent interview he gave, in which he comes after everything, from young adult literature to his arch-nemesis Jennifer Weiner (the chick-lit novelist).

I know people have their hate on for J-Franz, but I kind of like him more for not giving a fuck. He's more of a bitchy queen than an insufferable douchebag, imo. He'd fit right in on DL!

He would be great here, insufferable snob but very intelligent.

For a pseudo feminist he made Denise in The Corrections insufferable

He's one of my many, many "love the work, hate the person" people. A true cunt.

[quote] Jonathan Franzen is an Insufferable Douchebag

Clear to me in the first ten pages of The Corrections. I never understood the fuss....couldn't read any farther and haven't looked back since.

He's a typical entitled, up-his-own-ass white male, who doesn't have the chops or talent to be the American Man of Letters everyone claims he is.

(Michael Chabon is far more talented, and used to be way hotter.)

I liked The Corrections, though I didn't get far the first time I tried to read it. I kind of had R51's opinion. A couple of years later, a friend left her copy at my apt, and I read it and liked it. I'll never look at prepackaged smoked salmon the same way again.

I liked his next book, Freedom, even more, and I didn't stop reading it once I opened it.

R51. As Ethel Kennedy once said to Kathie Lee Gifford, SHUT UP!

Hated Freedom, but I can see where, for the kind of people who still read books these days, it would be right up their alley.

Tell us more, R54.

Where would Hugh Grant fit, DL?

I found this interview hilarious.

He seems interesting to me but I honestly don't understand what the privacy problem is with the news papers. I need to read about a case that he was concerned about. Death of a victim...what? Pictures being published or revealing personal information about the victim?

R57, thanks for chiming in. It's to do with newspapers (well, tabloids, so rather rags) that exploited personal tragedies that happened to ordinary people. In one instance, they managed to erase messages on a missing girl's phone so that new messages could come in, so that they could print them in their articles. Needless to say it caused enormous stress on the families and didn't exactly help police investigators.

"Jonathan Franzen is an insufferable Douchebag."

You're not wrong there. And the tedious bird spotting obsession...pitiful!

He just keeps grinding away under the delusion that he has some kind of talent. Truly talented writers like Amis and McEwan wipe the floor with him.

I attempted to get through a couple of his books and I actually found myself laughing at how bad they were. It is pretty shocking that so many critics are in love with him. He's smarmy and talentless.

The Corrections are clearly his greatest book, but he has had several good books and he was also a great essayist and writer for the New Yorker, and he is a very educated and academically educated man; he gives also great interviews, partially because of that. It's great that he writes high-brow and educated literature entertaining, he is in the league of David Foster Wallace and Jeffrey Eugenides and was/is friends with them, and I think The Corrections is the greatest novel of this era, other authors have been more cultural and others have been better, but I think he is the greatest author of the last couple of decades; him being straight of course helped also his academic success immensely and not just his commercial one, and it was much easier to be closeted back in the days, so you mostly get real straights nowadays, which e.g. clearly Hemingway was not, what r27 implies, maybe straight-bi, but I'm sceptical (e.g. Vidal called him gay), which reduces the talent and creativity pool.

r7 Tom Wolfe was nowhere near as famous as Jonathan Franzen, outside the US not many people cared for him, and at least Franzen is much more educated and scholarly. I don't enjoy reading belletristics much, but I did study English and American Literature in university, so I know something about literature, I did read much more of philosophy, social sciences and the like, but I know a lot about the belle literature as well. You learn a lot by studying a subject in university, and I do psychological endeavour, and he is a very good author, thinker and intellectual; I personally liked his first book 27th city, which tells a story about St Louis, the most. He is a star and spokesman, which most people can't be and hardly any authors, so that helped his success, but that is part of being a famous author nowadays and it's difficult to be great otherwise. American exceptionalism and hegemony also helped his success. He was born at a good time for being an important American author.

I somehow made it through The Corrections. Don't know how but I did. So fucking boring.

I'm currently listening to the audiobook of The Corrections. For the most part, I'm enjoying it. The Lamberts kind of remind me of my own somewhat dysfunctional family, although my mother isn't overbearing, sneaky and annoying like Enid. But Alfred and the kids definitely remind me of my father and siblings. I get that it can sometimes tend to be a little boring. I occasionally find myself saying "Move on already." But I do like how he's telling the story of each character and winding their stories together.

Not only is he unpleasant, Franzen is a terrible writer and I'm shocked that so many critics didn't see it. During his heyday, the praise heaped upon him was reminiscent of the Emperors New clothes. Is he well connected or something? Or did he simply fuck the right person (although I don't imagine that pinched faced Franzen has much erotic power but you never know ).