I have a love/hate relationship with Franzen;
I loved Freedom;
I liked The Corrections, but…
I struggle with his superior New York intellectual persona. But, I’ve never met him, so maybe his personality doesn’t translate well in his publicity;
He is probably one of the finest US novelists alive;
I like the fact that he has two desks and two laptops in his study, one wi-fi connected, the other not;
I even like that he wears noise-cancelling earphones when he writes;
I would like to see The Reduced Shakespeare Company do versions of The Corrections and Freedom;
I own hardbacks of his books, somehow it doesn’t seem right to buy an e-book;
He does for middle-class East Coast families what Jane Smiley does for mid-west families and Anne Tyler for the Whitmores in A Spool of Blue Thread. All three writers take ‘the cover off our superficial lives and delving into the hot stuff underneath’. That last is a Franzen quote from an interview with The Paris Review printed on the publication of Freedom. Click here to read the full article;
Visit Jonathan Franzen’s Facebook page here, it is run by his publisher [Farrar Straus and Giroux] not Franzen himself.‘Purity’ by Jonathan Franzen [UK: Fourth Estate] Buy now
Hope you enjoy it.
🙂 SD