… because:-

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