Depending on whom you ask, Franzen is either the premier living American novelist or the last literary dinosaurĭepending on whom you ask, Franzen is either the premier living American writer or the last literary dinosaur: a pompous white male Luddite who gazes disdainfully down at us tweeting, Facebooking fools from his comfortable perch of astronomical sales and critical adulation. With this passage, was he making fun of himself? Of a false public perception of him as egomaniacal? Of publishing culture? Presumably, at the least, he was baiting someone like me to do exactly what I did. While Franzen has, since the 2001 publication of The Corrections, been hailed for his extraordinary sentences and ability to capture the American zeitgeist, as well as reviled for ostensible arrogance and sexism (more on those in a bit), his fiction had never struck me as overtly self-referential. ‘And what about Zadie Smith? Great stuff, right?’
Ambition, vitality.’ He arched an eyebrow at Pip.
If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you’d think it was the most common male name in America.
0 kommentar(er)
