Can I just say how much I'm coming to dislike the person or persona sketched out by Jonathan Franzen's essays in How to Be Alone? Because if I can't, I might have to break something. I can't believe I'm still reading this book. I keep hoping it'll get better, that he'll start to sound less self-righteous, less priggish, less sorry for himself and his poor little books, all lonely in their rarified air. His essays that are strictly factual, like the one about the failure of the Postal Service in Chicago, and the one on prisons are fine: the style is unobtrusive, competent, even pleasant and interesting. The personal-at-one-remove essays, like the opening one about his father's Alzheimers, are largely wonderful. It's when he starts examining his own neurotic foibles and the state of reading and writing, both the act and the product (which inevitably means "literature," that distinction that got him disinvited from Oprah's show), that he becomes insufferable. During his rants about the disappearance of the social novel, I wanted to throw the book across the subway car, stomp off and find the twit, and hand him a copy of almost any really good science fiction writer. William Gibson. Ursula LeGuin. Octavia Butler. Sherri Tepper. Samuel Delaney. Kurt Vonnegut, for Pete's sake. Even Robert Heinlein.
Hello? Earth to Jonathan Franzen? Get a clue! Genre fic, especially SF (which has almost always explored social issues), picked up where mainstream lit left off because the Iowa Workshop Navel Gazers are too busy writing about, as you say, "My Interesting Childhood," "My Interesting Life in a College Town," or "My Interesting Year Abroad." Get out more. Read a little trashy lit. Good stories and good writing appear in every genre, every marketing niche.
And he's such a technophobe, too, excoriating the net for supplanting reading and quoting that goofy Robert Coover prediction that hypertext would free readers from the "tyranny of the author." New media just provide storytellers with new methods and new audiences. The shape and method of storytelling might change, but the stories remain, and the impulse to tell them, and that's what's important.
And he's so self-pitying and yet superior in his tilting at the evil windmills of media, and in his self-righteous outrage at the news "invading" his privacy via the newspaper, and his pitiful resistance of consumer culture. Okay, I don't have a TV either, but I don't have one because I'm a video-idiot with one in the house and it becomes a huge time waster for me, not because I think it's inherently evil. Inherently boring and seductive, yeah, but not necessarily evil. I just have no resistance to it.
Good grief. I thought I was snooty about books. Never before have I felt someone deserved the epithet "ivory tower intellectual" as much as Franzen does. He wearies me.
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