Word: franzens
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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...
...didn't help that Franzen had produced both books while living a writer's life of discipline and isolation, one that made him feel out of touch with the wider world. After he graduated from Swarthmore in 1981 with a degree in German, he and his wife Valerie Cornell, also an aspiring novelist, had lived in the Boston suburb of Somerville. For years, their days were devoted to writing, their nights to reading. On weekends he worked at Harvard's geology department, tracking earthquakes. By 1994 his marriage had fallen apart...
...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...
...time, Franzen was working on a long novel not so different from his earlier ones, full of polemical subplots involving anarchists in Philadelphia, the prison system and Wall Street. He threw away nearly all of it. "The big socially significant characters were not coming alive," he says. Working in a small writing studio in Harlem, he says, "I literally extracted a more personal book from that one." The book he finally wrote focuses on the inner lives and dismal family dynamic of the Lamberts, a couple of whom were minor characters in the book he abandoned. Alfred, a retired railway...
...Franzen's literary heroes are the masters of the paranoid, postmodern novel--William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo--writers who spin huge plots full of manic undertakings and dense riffs on civilization and its discontents. The book he put aside to write The Corrections was cut from that cloth. "It had prisons, race relations, stock-market corrections," Franzen says. "The 'corrections' in the finished book are more personal." The social disorders of the 21st century are expressed mostly through the personal distempers of the three siblings and their flight to the false consolations of sex, careerism and consumerism. "They...