Word: franzen
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...Jonathan Franzen is looking for an owl. He got a tip off the Internet about an owl living in a particular tree in this particular park in sunny San Jose, Calif. Now we are staring at the tree with binoculars from a distance of about 20 ft. Is the owl not home? Is it using some owl camouflage power on us? Is this even the right tree? In the past hour Franzen, 47, who's a pretty hard-core bird watcher, has already spotted California quail, some towhees, a scrub jay, a flicker and a few acorn woodpeckers...
Bird watching isn't actually Franzen's main gig. You probably know him as the author of the huge 2001 best seller The Corrections, a symphony of Midwestern, middle-class mental suffering that conveys depression and anxiety more entertainingly and eloquently than almost any book I've ever read, and which almost instantly made him the premier literary novelist in his age bracket. You might also possibly remember Franzen as the man who rather too honestly expressed his ambivalence over being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club, prompting Winfrey to honestly, unambivalently rescind her invitation to come...
...this cheerful, good-natured, owl-spotting nature boy? And what has he done with Jonathan Franzen? He's not the same tortured genius who wrote The Corrections. Success has changed him. He's a slightly different kind of genius now. His wonderful and supremely personal new memoir The Discomfort Zone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 195 pages) offers a few clues...
...Wallace, Franzen et al. aren't the leading young novelists anymore, who are? It's not an idle question. The novel is one of the most vital cultural resources we have--a private, potent means of sharing the unspeakableness of daily life with one another. So it's only natural to wonder who's taking care of the novel--who's taking up the torch and where exactly they're taking it. Or whether it has gone out. The novel is one of the platforms from which the voice of a generation speaks. And if you listen closely...
...only do young novelists exist, but we can even say a few things about what their books have in common. For example, they're getting shorter. Ten years ago novels were expanding rapidly, like little overheated primordial galaxies. Chunky, world-devouring tomes like Wallace's Infinite Jest and Franzen's The Corrections were supposed to be the wave of the future, as if the ominously burgeoning complexity and interconnectedness of contemporary reality demanded correspondingly fatter books to embrace them. Now, writers are more likely to immerse themselves in a single time and place, and at more portable lengths. The cosm...