Word: fictions
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...very deeply under your skin. So who can blame the amiable and soft-spoken author, Jonathan Franzen, if he sounds a little cheeky these days? "You can get a million people to read your book in this country," he says. "It's not a tiny audience for fiction. It's not chamber music...
...even while he says this you can see the doubts digging tunnels under his composure. Because this, after all, is the same Jonathan Franzen who nine years ago was almost ready to call it quits as a fiction writer, figuring that not only was he at the end of his rope but so was the novel in general. When his first book, The Twenty-Seventh City, was published in 1988, he was just 29. The intricate tale of a vengeful woman hired from Bombay to become police chief of St. Louis, Mo., it got good reviews and decent sales...
Four years later, the same benign neglect greeted his next book, Strong Motion, about toxic subterfuges carried out by a Boston chemical firm. "Sixty reviews in a vacuum," as he later put it. Franzen began to wonder if literary fiction were going the way of the lyric poem, a deluxe specimen of cultural product enjoyed only by the happy few. When, he asked himself, was the last time an ambitious novel achieved the name recognition of Portnoy's Complaint, to say nothing of Catch...
...years later, Franzen's unhappiness about the state of fiction led him to publish a 15,000-word essay in Harper's magazine in which he pondered whether the serious novel could survive in a culture consumed by television, movies and the Web. "Where to find the energy," he asked, "to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?" It seemed hopeless to think of the novel as a medium that would change the world. The world wasn't paying that kind of attention. But Franzen refused to give...
...already an impressive 90,000 copies in print. While that's not quite John Grisham territory, Franzen has so far made more than a million dollars. This could be another reason why he's feeling optimistic about the literary novel these days. He may be right that serious fiction has not gone the elitist route of chamber music. But what happens to The Corrections in the marketplace is going to tell us just how big a sound it can still make...