Reading journal
The library coughed up a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel a lot faster than I expected, so I’m reading it. Is anybody else reading it, or finished reading it? I saw one or two rave reviews at first, then some revisionist commentary saying actually it’s a tad boring. I’m pretty much with the revisionists. It is interesting enough to keep reading, so far (I’m at p 224, less than halfway), but it’s also pretty boring, and at the moment it’s getting boringer.
It’s too much writing about too few people. There are really only three people so far, and 224 pages is a lot of pages for only three people unless the three people are very damn interesting, and these three people are not. Now, Joyce could do that – but he made the people interesting. That can be done, but you have to do it. Franzen hasn’t done it – not enough. It is as mentioned interesting enough from page to page (as so many many many contemporary novels are not), but when you’re not reading it and you look back over what you have read – it seems like a lot of reading for the not very exciting lives of three not very exciting people. It seems a bit of a waste.
There were a couple scathing reviews on AL Daily, IIRC. Here’s two:
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/77903/impact-man
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/10/smaller-than-life/8212/
Haven’t read it myself and I’m not planning to.
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Thanks Dan.
The Atlantic one – hahaha – snap.
Pre-cisely.
Taking another look, I don’t think I read the TNR one, which means there’s another review floating around somewhere on AL Daily that is likewise very critical. But I remember thinking that particular reviewer was a pompous ass, so I’ll skip trying to track it down.
Weirdly enough, I like reading reviews of fiction much, much more than I like to read actual works of fiction.
Not all that weird; so many works of fiction are so crappy.
The only other one on ALD is Judith Shulevitz at Slate; she’s way too favorable.
You know what, this is one of the best literary reviews I have read in a long time!
I found the story telling really really masterful, and I enjoyed reading this book a lot.
But – I don’t have the impression that it left something behind. I somewhere saw Jonathan Franzen talking about David Foster Wallace, and that Wallace doesn’t have a good message or something, I can’t remember, but he said something that made me think, wow, he really has to be good. But Infiniet Jest was able to wrote imediately to my subconcious harddrive and left big fat emotional marks there, Freedom did not even scratch it.
So, really good storytelling, no deeper layer. Oh, and a stupid happy ending.
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/09/freedom.html
You read novels? I don’t (unless they’re in a foreign language I want to learn), there are too many facts that I don’t know that I can’t pass my spare time on others fantasy. Or maybe I’m just scientistic?
I’ve been hesitant, remembering the brouhaha over his last Great American Novel, The Corrections, and all the fuss over Oprah and all. I haven’t heard anything firsthand that would make me want to read the book, and now your observations, etc… I think I’ll read The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson instead.
Interesting discussion. I thought I was in the minority in not caring for Franzen. Much of the highly touted “literature” of today strikes me as blandly written and uninsightful.
I just finished The Passage, by Justin Cronin, and for the life of me can not understand the rave reviews. These young author/celebrities’ writing frequently contain descriptions that are nothing more than lists of mundane objects: “He glanced in the Pontiac and saw an unwrapped Twinkie, a crumpled Budweiswer can, a dirty front page of USA Today…” Well, that kind of writing.
When I compare this to the writing of Jane Austen, Somerset Maugham, and, more recently John Fowles, well…okay, even the writing of Raymond Chandler, I begin to wonder if I’m simply too old to appreciate this new literature.
>Not all that weird; so many works of fiction are so crappy.
And this is one area where Catholic writers have succeeded. Grahame Greene, Anthony Burgess and Evelyn Waugh have all written exceptional but slightly confused novels. They were all excellent artists, perhaps they would have been far greater if Catholicism hadn’t poisoned them.
I have not read the book, but last Sunday the Observer’s literary editor did a piece on how many books these days are over long. Frazen’s novel was exhibit number one in the fiction category and Robert McCrum said it needed to be one hundred pages shorted.
It needed to be shorter, but also better. I’ve read farther now, and I’m more decided (the scathing reviews no doubt having nudged me); it’s getting worse, and it’s fundamentally not very good. The material is boring, and the writing decidedly does not make up for it – the writing is just not good. It’s reputed to be good, but it’s not. (David Foster Wallace, on the other hand, wrote brilliantly. I haven’t read his fiction and I doubt that I’m up for it, but his non-fiction was simply brilliantly written. Franzen is not remotely in his league.)
Brian, no actually I don’t read all that many novels any more. But I do if they’re good enough. But few of them are.
Brian @ 10:
You’re certainly not alone.
Locutus @ 12:
Consider the fact that much of the Elizabethan literati would have felt the exact same way about Marlowe and Shakespeare. A few hundred years earlier, the literati would have said the same thing about Dante for writing in the vernacular.
Not to defend Franzen, but just to point out that it’s often difficult to see the literary merits of contemporary works.
> Not to defend Franzen, but just to point out that it’s often difficult to see the literary merits of contemporary works.
I would like to see a return to naturalism in art and literature. Not so much the emphasis on socialism, but on the emphasis of rational plots, realism, psychological realism and less postmodernist hocus pocus or magical realism. I think that abstract and conceptual art gets too much praise and talented realist/naturalist painters and sculptors need more credit and recognition.
http://zmkc.blogspot.com/2010/11/freedom-from-freedom.html
I’m always happy to hear that there’s another novelist I don’t need to bother with. I read DeLillo’s Libra recently, the first DeLillo I’ve ever read. I thought it was pretty good while I was reading it with some great feats of ventriloquism, but feel very reluctant to read it again. My favourite novels I read over and over.
Ah the old “they laughed at Beethoven” argument. The mere fact that they laughed at Beethoven/Shakespeare/Keats does not mean that it is impossible to sort good writers from not so good ones. Franzen is not completely without interest, but the reception he gets is wildly out of proportion to his real merit. It’s possible to spell out what’s wrong with Freedom and The Corrections. Others will of course disagree, but we don’t need to shrug and leave it to time.
Some Elizabethan literati did feel that way about Shakespeare, but not very many of them, and at least one of those was a jealous rival who died when Shakespeare was 30 and had written only 7 or 8 plays. Another was Ben Jonson, who was ambivalent – admiring but also critical – but who also changed his mind after reading the Folio, which was of necessity the first time he (or anyone) had read all the works at once. Jonson placed Shakespeare with the Greeks, which for him was like saying he was god.
It’s not all that difficult to see the literary merit of contemporary works if you try hard enough.
Although I admit I’m permanently baffled by the fact that Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools got great reviews when it first came out. It must have been another Franzen-effect – great expectations warping everyone’s judgment. Ship of Fools is abysmal.
It seems to me that a lot of the hubbub about Franzen was over his audaciousness for declining Oprah’s invitation to appear on her show. She had chosen The Corrections for her book club, then he threw pie in her face. It was a brilliant gambit, and he immediately became a kind of enfant terrible. Love him or hate him, you had to have an opinion, because that just wasn’t done. He won out because he got to play the bad boy while his book soared to the top of the bestseller lists. I also remember him giving interviews about how much he disliked Melville and Joyce, among others. He was pushing all the right buttons.
Then there was some sort of maeuver by his publishers to delay Freedom, if I’m not mistaken. The bad boy’s back!
Like I said: I haven’t read him, ever. I’m not judging the work, though he appears to be a very shrewd self-promoter.
I heard someone read a passage on the radio and thought it did sound good; that’s why I’m reading it. It turns out the passage in question is the opening – and it’s better than the rest. But so far I’m interested enough to keep going…but I think it’s going to be more and more skimmingly from here on. The irritation quotient is increasing.
I’m also reading vol 2 of Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin. Funnily enough, it’s better even as a novel than Franzen’s book, let alone as a biography.
OB @ 19:
I’m not literate enough (in the “familiar with literature” sense) to give good counterexamples, but I would be seriously surprised if there weren’t large numbers of both authors who were dismissed by their contemporaries and revered by later generations and authors in the opposite situation. Otherwise, literature would be the only field of study of which I’m aware, including any of the fine arts, where that was the case.
And anyway, I’m not sure I could see the literary merit of contemporary works if I try hard enough. I have a hard time seeing the literary merits of what are held to be the exemplars of literary merit.
Egbert @ 17:
If by “realism” we mean honestly dealing with realistic situations faced by realistic characters, then what we might today call “realism” would have been called “science fiction” back in the 70’s. Think about the difference a smart phone makes — it can hold the equivalent of hundreds of vinyl records, it’s tiny and portable and works as a phone (cordless phones must have been a luxury in the 70s if they existed at all). Browsing the internet from anywhere, never being lost because of your handheld GPS. There’s plenty of movies going up through the 90’s whose plots make no sense in a world of cell phones — a simple phone call would avert the crucial misunderstanding and take out all the conflict.
So we can’t go “back” to realism. Realism changes all the time. What does realism look like in a world without privacy, one where your entire biography can be assembled by datamining Facebook archives? What does realism look like in a world full of youtube celebrities?
Dan – Fair point. I suppose I meant one can make reasonably good judgments about literary merit if one is interested enough, or something along those lines. Maybe something tautological like one can if one can. I’m fairly, not to say offensively, confident about my own judgment, within certain limits.
At any rate, my main point was to say that it’s a myth that Shakespeare wasn’t appreciated in his own time; he was. Nobody knew he would end up as The Giant of literature, but he was well popular and increasingly taken seriously.
It’s not that I’m uninterested. It’s that no one can seem to agree whether James Joyce is the best ever writer of English prose or an utter failure. No one knows what the hell “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is about. Is J.D Salinger a great storyteller, or did he just have lightning in a bottle with that Holden Caulfield book (and there’s plenty of people who don’t even like that one)? The criteria for what passes as good or remarkable or insightful literature has always seemed just about entirely arbitrary to me.
Might he have been severely overrated for the last few hundred years? A lot of people seem to think something similar about Joyce.
That’s exaggerated though. Joyce is a special case; so is Salinger. There is disagreement of course, but it’s not a matter of every writer being evenly split between people who think “terrible” and people who think “terrific.”
No, Shakespeare has not been overrated.
And the criteria aren’t really arbitrary, but there are a lot of them, and different people give different criteria different weights. A lot of very foolish people can’t stand Austen because they think she’s a snob and trivial and girly full stop. More sensible people see what her merits are but just don’t find her to their taste. There’s a difference.
That’s funny–I’m in the same reading situation, though with different books. I picked up Ken Follet’s World Without End at the library the other day, because I recalled somebody mentioning Pillars of the Earth in the Great Endings in Literature thread at WEIT. Oh dear. I should know better–I usually only pick up fiction if my mother has read it. Generally if she liked it, I’ll like it, too–so I mostly can’t be bothered to pick up unknown fiction. I’m also in the middle of E.O. Wilson’s Diversity of Life–and it’s beautiful. Really enthralling–I feel as though I’m right there in the rainforest with him:)) What to do…keep slogging through WWE? Is it worth it?
I suppose I should just go for a walk and <a href=”http://yokohamayomama.blogspot.com/2010/11/friday-field-notes-argiope.html”>look for more spiders…</a>
The reviews of Frantzen in the UK have been mixed but it is up for an Award: the Bad Sex Award run annually by the Literary Review. The criteria include gushy writing, improbably overwhelming sensations at the moment of impact and achievement of physically impossible gymnastic coupling. The competition is always stiff, if I might put it that way, but on the extract cited from Frantzen I think he is in with a chance. ( I haven’t googled the entries but they can often be found online.)
And there is a tradition, that says a lot for British stoicism, that the winner turns up to receive the Award. So don’t do what you did to that nice Oprah Winfrey, Mr. Frantzen, – we expect you here!
Shakespeare certainly was appreciated in his own time. There was a thriving bootleg industry for his plays and Jonson felt it necessary to distance himself from ‘idolotary’ only a few years after his death. The only exception may have been Shakespeare himself, who was hot on protecting his financial interests in the plays but doesn’t seem to have been too bothered about protecting the plays themselves (the sonnets are different, but they weren’t a commercial proposition).
Oh I do hope Franzen wins that award. I think I’m about to abandon Freedom – it’s moving from boring to boring and repellent now, and I believe I’ve had enough.
Jonson felt it necessary to distance himself from “idolatry” but that was before he read the Folio. He did not distance himself from idolatry in the long poem he wrote for the Folio, he went flat-out. It seems likely that the explanation is that he had read the Folio and been…impressed.
It’s not really possible to tell how bothered Shakespeare was about protecting the plays themselves. The company was very concerned about that, for commercial reasons – plays at that time were always being bootlegged; the “bad” quarto of Hamlet is thought to be the work of two actors working from memory – they got their own parts right but everything else is garbled. But plays weren’t treated as permanent literature – until they started being collected in Folios: the first ever was Ben Jonson’s, put together by himself, and the second was Shakespeare’s posthumous one. The plays existed, so either Shxpr or the company or both did in fact protect them.
So different people get different answers because they use different criteria. That’s what I mean by “arbitrary.”
And it’s not like there’s right and wrong criteria to use; you can’t be an expert in judging quality literature the way you can be an expert judging quality wine or quality livestock.
I personally think Shakespeare is overrated. But that’s because I’m giving different criteria different weights than you are. See? Arbitrary.
But different isn’t the same as arbitrary. The criteria aren’t just random – by no means all criteria are relevant.
I’m not an aesthetic realist, if that’s the right term, but I’m also not an aesthetic randomist. I occupy the profound and difficult and smug Middle Ground.
Dan, you said you “have a hard time seeing the literary merits of what are held to be the exemplars of literary merit.” Maybe you just have a tin ear in this particular area? (As I do in other areas; as we all do in some areas; I’m not trying to insult.) Maybe you confuse personal non-response with arbitrariness?
It’s too sweeping to say the criteria are arbitrary. They are multiple and competitive, but that’s not the same as arbitrary. They are subjective and fuzzy, but again, that’s not the same as arbitrary.
It doesn’t matter much, but literature is very rewarding for people who don’t have a tin ear for it, so I resist too-sweeping dismissals.
@Dan
If Shakespeare is overrated, and Joyce is overrated (slightly more probable), then who do you propose as a general kind of yardstick for literary merit? Joseph Conrad? George Eliot? Saul Bellow? It’s funny that Franzen, back around the time of The Corrections, was making similar quality judgements about the “sacred cows” of the Anglo-American tradition. “Moby-Dick is boring,” and that kind of thing. Or are you suggesting that everything is simply a matter of personal taste, and there is really no point in discussing the merits of literature at all? If so, what are we discussing?
I’m baffled how someone can read Shakespeare and come away thinking he is overrated.
This is exactly how I feel about my wife’s taste in movies. The Station Agent is a perfect example. All in all it’s a pretty well-made well-written movie, and I would recommend it to people who like that sort of thing (and kudos for having a little person in a leading role). But ultimately it’s 90 minutes about three fairly boring people who become friends and proceed to have fairly boring lives.
Sure, maybe. But that suggests that my criteria are somehow wrong or faulty instead of merely different from other people’s, and I don’t see a way to adjudicate who’s criteria (or weights thereof) are superior to anyone else’s. And it’s not that I never get anything out of literature. It just seems to me I get different things from other people. I don’t see why what I get out of it is any less valid than what anyone else gets out of it.
The criteria themselves are obviously going to be pulled from a rather limited pool, and aren’t in that sense arbitrary. But the relative weighting is arbitrary and goes according to a person’s taste, and it’s the weights that make the big difference. I don’t think symbolism adds any value to a narrative and so I weight clever use of symbolism close to zero. I think symbolism obscures meaning rather than making it plainer. But almost no one agrees with me. Am I objectively wrong about symbolism? Or is it just a matter of taste?
I’m not saying that literature isn’t rewarding or anything. I’m just saying there are no (known) objective criteria by which we can discuss the relative quality of different works of literature. And measuring quality by how much one gets out of the medium at hand is problematic as well.
As an example, there have been plenty of bands that I didn’t like after one or two listens sober, but that later became some of my favorite bands after listening to them in a somewhat altered state of consciousness. One might say that the reward was part and parcel of the altered state, except that I still got the same reward listening to the music after the fact. Did the altered state tune me into aspects of the music of which I was originally unaware, or did it just reduce my threshold for quality to let in music I shouldn’t have liked in the first place?
Alternatively, if someone finds something worthwhile in a book you didn’t like, is it because they created it themselves upon reading — that they’re seeing something that isn’t there? Or is it because you missed something? Obviously, this goes both ways — maybe you like a book and someone else doesn’t. Are you missing something, or is he? How can anyone say for sure (other than the author, maybe)?
The interesting part is that even though there’s no objective way to decide this kind of thing, it’s still pretty clear to almost anyone that Shakespeare (overrated as he was) was a much more talented writer than Franzen. So I agree that there seems to be some kernel of objectivity here, but I don’t think there’s been any successful analysis of it. In fact, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book I found rewarding and many people hate — who’s got the tin ear again?) is about a guy driving himself crazy trying to do just that.
I wouldn’t.
The second thing doesn’t follow from the first. Just because it’s a matter of personal taste doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t discuss it or that there’s no point in doing so.
OK, well try to think of some writer that everyone loves but you only think is OK or pretty good. That’s how I feel about Shakespeare.
@Marc:
Actually, what I’m suggesting is that this is exactly the wrong way to look at it. You can’t measure quality with a yardstick.
It’s also why I’m not saying there’s no point to discussing it. I’m really enjoying discussing it, and I think we can even get a few insights about aesthetics and quality doing so — this is a bright bunch and I’ve learned a lot at B&W in discussions like these.
Since I’m the one being accused of having a tin ear, let me turn it around on you guys. Is it possible that you think so highly of Shakespeare and the other greats because you were taught that you were supposed to think highly of them?
Not in my case, no. That’s because I did think exactly that while “doing” Sxhpr in school – I thought it was a kind of delusion of teachers (this despite the fact that English was my one stellar subject). Then I saw a gripping production of Hamlet in New York, in senior year, and dropped the delusion idea. I really saw the point of Hamlet. But my next opportunity was a couple of years later when I went to university (having done other random things in the interval) and started as an English major and read Lear – and simply did not get it. Could not see what the fuss was about. This time I was sure it was my blankness, not the partisans’ delusion – it was frustrating. I changed my major, though not really because of that (but it may have been part of it). I simply dropped Shxpr entirely apart from a polite awareness that he was Important.
Almost 20 years later I got a sudden bug that I wasn’t using my mind enough, and decided to start reading Admired Old Books. Luckily for me I started with the Iliad (or rather a translation of it) and liked it so much I never looked back. Then I had Hamlet-revelation 2, which I won’t go into because this is getting long – but it resulted in a total immersion in Shxpr. So…you see it took a lot of doing. Reputation caused me to try again, of course, but reputation did not initially convince me that he was not so dusty. I started thinking the opposite, and after decades and a lot of attention, I found out otherwise.
Who knows, maybe the same thing could happen to you!
Writers I think are over-rated. Trollope. (He’s not rated all that highly, but I think even that’s too high.) Hardy. Probably Thackeray – having read only Vanity Fair I can’t even tell. Hawthorne (maybe – though I also think I may not have tried hard enough). Emerson. Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Wharton.
Writers I think are not over-rated. Dickens. (Much bad stuff and excess, but much brilliance too.) Fielding. Austen. E. Bronte. Keats. Wordsworth. Twain. Thoreau. Willa Cather. Tolstoy.
Writers I think are under-rated, or at least neglected. Hazlitt. Byron. Ring Lardner.
@ Dan
It’s a bit difficult to know where you’re coming from unless you give a few examples of what you think is good writing. It’s one thing to say, “I think Marlowe was much better than Shakespeare” and quite another to say, “John Grisham is my favorite writer.” I would ask you to cite a few names, as Ophelia has.
For my part, I put quite a lot of effort into Shakespeare, too. It was pretty clear early on that he was a brilliant writer, but he was not easy to read at first. Nor was Joyce, and I haven’t read Finnegan’s Wake. I’m saving that for old age. Anyway, it might be worth the effort to give Shax another go.
I’ve never much liked Fitzgerald, other than Gatsby. Hemingway has been only a minor thrill. Hart Crane, for all his opacity, pretty much opened me up to English poetry and its possibilities. I dislike Pound with a passion, but recognize his early genius.
Great Books I haven’t read: War and Peace, Bleak House, all of Don Quixote, Montaine’s Essays and many others. Are they on my to-read list? Damn well they are!
Brian, no actually I don’t read all that many novels any more. But I do if they’re good enough. But few of them are.
It’s a bit late now, but I was being a bit ‘snarky’. I read novels too, just not very often. The real motive for my snark is that I’m dumbfounded how academics or intellectuals seem to read and digest books of any discipline (but all seemingly profound) as if they were columns in a daily newspaper. I’m still struggling with books on introductory science and philosophy to have time for much else. It’s a backhanded compliment I guess.
Ah…in the book group I ran for several years, called Fun With Dead White Guys, we read Don Q (all of it) and Monty’s Essays (all of them) – not War and Peace, but Anna Karenina. No Dickens, for some reason. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Tale of Genji, Herodotus, Thucydides, several Greek tragedies, lots of Shakespeare, Malory, The Prelude, Don Juan…etc. So hooray for your reading list!
Brian – well I’m not one of those people – I’m not a speedy reader at all (except when under a review deadline). Like god, I grind slowly.
That’s one heck of a reading group, Ophelia. I tried once, with a few friends, to read the Iliad in a sort of reading group. We’d get together at a bar on the Lower East Side and order pitchers and talk about everything except Homer. I don’t believe anyone made it past the catalogue of big black ships (at least, I didn’t). So yes, we can all agree that reading is not an easy activity – if you’re doing it well. I, too, have been called a fast reader, though I’ve always considered myself not just slow, but really slow. Somehow I manage to get through the books which interest me.
There’s so much out there, though, that we’ve got to settle for just a fraction of even the books that interest us most. Pity. If I believed in heaven, it would be like Borges’ Library of Babel.
Ophelia, for once I disagree with you. I thought Freedom was quite good, though not the masterpiece that the Guardian made it out to be. Very readable – the opening hook caught me right away, and I cared enough for the characters to want to see them through to the end. I thought Franzen’s style was great; perhaps some might find it bland. (I once thought an experimental style was the hallmark of good fiction, and spent one summer plowing through the collected works of Wiliam Faulkner, starting with The Sound and the Fury. I enjoyed it then, but have no patience with that sort of thing now. Too much resistance.) Good characterizations – I don’t see why literary characters can’t be mundane, it doesn’t imply trivial? I thought Patty was a great character. The least successful character – in the literary sense – was Joey, who came across as too much of a contrived satire on the Bush era and too little as a person. It is certainly a realistic novel, which one of your commenters asked for – no pomo metalevels anywhere in sight, or magical realism for that matter. Good ensemble cast, character driven plot. All in all, a good satisfying bite of a book. Novel of the century? Nah.