Having just previously blogged about B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, first penned some ten years ago, I was curious what he had to say about today’s novels.
I found Myers’ scathing review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom in The Atlantic (October 18). Myers characterizes the novel as “a 576-page monument to insignificance” in which the author employs “juvenile prose” that trivializes relationships. “The result is boredom.”
Conversely, The New York Times Sunday Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus praised the same novel to high heaven in a lengthy August 19 review, calling it “a masterpiece of American fiction” and using adjectives such as “ingenious,” “vivid” and “crystalline” to describe Franzen’s writing. His review concludes with this encomium:
“Like all great novels, Freedom does not just tell an engrossing story. It illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew.”
You can read Myers’ review here.
And Tanenhaus’ review here.
Also, The New York Times thoughtfully offers an excerpt from Freedom here. It is enough to convince me that, as Myers contends, the novel is indeed boring, second-rate fiction comprised of juvenile prose. Thus I’ll bypass Franzen in favor of dead, more mature and more interesting writers.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Just finished this. It was a better book than the excerpt would lead you to think! But uneven in my judgment. And a bit too long. Actually I thought he tied the characters together in a kind of creative way throughout a lot of it, and then rambled or was repetitive.
I think he excels in short descriptions of various facets of human existence. Makes me think “yeah, he nailed that!”.
I’ve been laboring through this book all summer. After weeks of fitful reading, I’m now enjoying it. I agree with Ruth’s comment above — that excerpt didn’t do much for me, either, when I read it in the beginning of the book. However, that characters are more fully drawn now, on page 450, or so. Franzen uses dark humor to capture the moral sickness pervading our society. Perhaps he could have done it in fewer pages, but he’s got it down.