Word: franzens
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...polyurethaned. Then along came the Impressionists, with their rough-textured, gnarly, worked-looking canvases. Among contemporary fiction writers we have purveyors of lapidary, polished, M.F.A.-perfect prose--John Updike, Alice Munro--and on the other side, a grab bag of avant-gardists (like David Foster Wallace), witty pyrotechnicians (Jonathan Franzen) and operatic monologists (Toni Morrison) who fling words upon the page in heavy, meaningful daubs. Now, just as they did back then, it's the second bunch who get to sit at the cool kids' table...
...were just...unskilled," is what Michael concludes, thinking back on their afflicted marriage. In its picture of a discontented family over the long arc of the years, this book can remind you of The Corrections without Jonathan Franzen's emotional knots. In its subplot of a daughter lost to the lures of the 1960s, it can bring to mind American Pastoral without Philip Roth's refining fires. Toward the end, Michael hears an old song on his car radio. "He liked the way the singer kept her voice so plain and ordinary," Tyler tells us, "too intent on expressing...
...satisfying plots of the trashy one to produce hybrid novels that offer the pleasures of both. Writers like Donna Tartt and Alice Sebold, Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks, Jonathan Lethem and Margaret Atwood, writers whose work will most likely define--more than anything by brilliant mandarins like Wallace or Franzen--what will be known to later generations as the 21st century novel. The next literary wave will come not from above but from below, from the foil-covered, embossed-lettered paperbacks in the drugstore racks. Stay tuned. Keep reading. The revolution will not be canonized...
...sweeping American novels seem to be all the rage these days. Jonathan Franzen set the stage last year with his verbose and neverending The Corrections, and recently another Jonathan—Jonathan Lethem—hit the literary big-time. Fortunately for us, Lethem’s efforts yielded a smarter and more complicated (albeit grandiose) novel, The Fortress of Solitude. And this comic but poignant novel was penned by an author both exuberant and thoughtful, something audience members at First Parish Church learned last Thursday evening...
...offers aren't difficult to understand or accept, and for all we know they may not even be true. They're just, in a profound way, what we want to hear, and there's solace in that, and solace isn't to be sneezed at. Albom is no Jonathan Franzen, but you don't see anybody grabbing Franzen around the knees at O'Hare. Pretty soon Albom will have to figure out what to do with some new royalties: Five People went back to press three times the first week it was on sale. Like Eddie, Albom has touched...