Blog Post #3

I was flipping through The Atlantic on Wednesday. There was an article with the sub-heading “The Case Against Jonathan Franzen.” I have never read any of Franzen’s books, but I saw him on the cover of Time recently. I didn’t read the article about him, but I did see his picture with the caption “Great American Novelist.” Based on those three words alone, none of which were written by Franzen, I decided to like this Jonathan Franzen character. Who could have a case against him? I decided to read the article.

After a few paragraphs I decided it was really pointless to read a review of a book that I have never read by an author I really knew nothing about. But I scanned ahead a few paragraphs and found something interesting. Something that relates to class. Something about…Don DeLillo.

But if Freedom (Franzen’s new book) is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more “social,” broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus. This may be the reason we get such boring characters. Instead of portraying an interesting individual or two, and trusting in realism to embed their story naturally in contemporary life, the Social Writer thinks of all the relevant issues he has to stuff in, then conceives a family “typical” enough to hold everything together. The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book’s covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be.


Every big fat new effort to “develop” the DeLillo model is thus hailed as important even before it is read, as happened with Franzen’s last novel, The Corrections (2001). No doubt the rave reviews for Freedom will evince the same reluctance to quote from the text that we saw then. Reviewers gave that book maximum points for sweep and sprawl while subtracting none for its slovenly prose, the short-windedness of each of its thousand “themes,” and the failure of the main story line to generate any momentum. (These flaws, too, were in the great DeLillo tradition.)
-From Smaller than Life by B.R. Myers, printed in The Atlantic Oct. 2010
(follow the link here for the full article http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/smaller-than-life/8212/)

I particularly like the part about critics giving a novel “points for…sprawl.” I think a fair number of the students in our class would subtract points for sprawl. In fact in almost any work of storytelling “sprawl” isn’t something that is desired. No one ever leaves a movie and says, “Wow, that plot really just meandered around. Terrific! Half the characters served no purpose. I only wish there had been a few more meaningless scenes placed between the important ones.”
In truth, though, it is not really fair to compare a novel to a movie. Movies are meant to be viewed in one sitting, and, therefore, cannot sprawl. There’s no time for it. Of course there are exceptions—particularly the movies of P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will be Blood) and Robert Altman (Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shortcuts). But, by and large, audiences will not sit through sprawling movies. The stories must be concise and told quickly. Movies have become so interwoven with modern society that this very plot/action based storytelling has become the norm. I think Myers strikes this nail on the head when he writes, “the novel can lure Americans away from the entertainment buffet by becoming…broader in scope.”

Myers views this as a negative though, thinking that modern novelists should still be able to tell exciting stories with exciting characters. But, with all apologies to hardcore literature fans, movies will always be more exciting, at least to the general public. And for modern novelists to be able to make a living, they must appeal to the general public. Franzen and DeLillo have keyed in on this sprawling style because it something that is more effective in literature than movies or TV. It is a way for them to stand out from the “entertainment buffet.” Don’t we all want to stand out? Isn’t that something a writer must do to make a living? Like B.R. Myers writing a negative review of Franzen when all the others have been positive?