Can you feel it? That slight chill in the morning air. The first leaves beginning to change color. A pumpkin-spiced beverage in the hand of every mom you walk past. Somewhere, you just know it, a sixty-something man is writing an essay about birds.
It can only mean one thing. It’s Franzen Fall.
I’m talking about Jonathan Franzen, of course. I don’t know what’s going on, but it feels like Franzen has been in the air lately. I wasn’t thinking about him at all until Marie Matter (one of my favorite bookish Instagram accounts) posted about his interview on the 3 Books podcast. The interview was almost 2.5 hours long, and despite never listening to this podcast before or ever listening to a Jonathan Franzen interview at all, I decided to give it a go. It kept me company for a week whenever I had a free minute, and by the end of the episode, I was hooked. I was a fan. You might say…I had Franzen fever.
It’s not that I’ve never read Franzen before. I mean, I was getting my creative writing degree in the mid-2000s. Everyone read The Corrections, and a few scenes made a big impact on me (I think about how much one character hated pigs in a blanket whenever I have pigs in a blanket, and I think A LOT about the talking poop scene). And then post-college I read Freedom. Again, I mostly remember the poop scene (this one involved someone trying to find a wedding ring inside poop). What can I say, it’s a theme with him.
Back then, it was not only fashionable but almost a knee-jerk response to complain about Franzen. There were plenty of things to say. He was cranky, snobby, mean to Oprah, pretentious, bad at writing women, racist…basically name a complaint, people said it (okay, no one was saying he was too quirky…but honestly, sometimes he IS quirky! See: all that poop).
When I was in college, we hadn’t quite started to really examine the fact that we were almost exclusively reading white men. Or, more accurately, we had but no one cared. I took a seminar on post-9/11 literature (in the year 2007 or 2008…imagine taking a class on post-pandemic literature in the next couple of years! The hubris!) and we read exclusively books by men, like Don Delillo’s Falling Man. When Lauren told our professor we should read something by a woman (I think Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children…correct me if I’m wrong, Lauren!), he said no because he didn’t like it. And he seemed to think it was charming and/or precocious that she’d asked to read anything by a woman at all. In a turn that feels related, a guy in that class once told us all that he thought the greatest living writers were Philip Roth, John Updike, and John Irving. Reader, Toni Morrison was still alive.
But after college, when people seemed more open to the idea that our canon should include authors who weren’t white men, Jonathan Franzen became a sort of poster white man. Even before this, he was always getting into trouble, or the literary fiction equivalent of trouble. He was like teenage Justin Bieber, except instead of getting a monkey confiscated in Germany, he was insulting Oprah’s book club and offending large swaths of women (although if you look back at what he actually said, it was more nuanced than that). He became the face of literary sexism after Freedom came out and Jennifer Weiner made up a new term: Franzenfreude (and then he got into a little bit of a public feud with Jennifer Weiner, never a good idea). He talked about how disconnected he is from the internet and wrote a lot about birds. He was easy to write off, and things kind of snowballed from there. I’d be willing to bet that many of the Jonathan Franzen haters had never read any of his books.
Something’s different now, though. This 2021 Vox piece explains Franzen’s tumultuous career quite concisely, but allow me to explain it in Taylor Swift terms. The Corrections was his 1989 era. He was on top of the world. And then he had his Reputation moment around Purity. Nobody physically saw me for a year. And then, if we’re continuing this metaphor, Crossroads is folklore/evermore. He’s yet to embark on his Eras tour/have whatever is his equivalent of a relationship with Travis Kelce.
While I never outright hated Jonathan Franzen and actually enjoyed my experiences reading his books, I was guilty of overlooking him, too. I never even tried Purity. Well, no more. Franzenfreude is dead. Long live Franzen Fall.
I’m going to read Crossroads, a compact but pretty long book, and write about it right here on No One Asked. No one asked me to do this, but big surprise, I couldn’t stop myself. It’s almost 600 pages, so it makes sense to discuss somewhere close to 200 pages a week. Here’s the schedule:
September 27th: Pages 1-202
October 4th: Pages 202-369 (up to “Easter”)
October 11th: Pages 370-580 (the end of the book)
If you’d like to read along, I’m sure you can find a copy at your library, given that this book came out in 2021. I bought my copy at Gramercy because I need to underline/dog-ear. I have zero idea what Crossroads is about, other than the flap copy that says it’s “the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis.” So something different for him, then! Har-har.
Please let me know if you’re interested in reading along with me (almost said us, but there’s NO guarantee anyone else wants to do this). I think comments are limited to paid subscribers on this post because I included a paid section, but the Franzen Fall posts will be fully public from here on out. Starting on September 27th should hopefully give us all plenty of time to get a copy and get a head start on our reading. I’m really excited to see what this book is about, learn something about the 1970s, read an uncomfortable sex scene or five, and, God willing, read a poop scene. Honestly, if there’s no poop scene in this I’m gonna be pissed. I’ll take to the streets! Make Jonathan Franzen Write Poop Scenes Again.
I think we should end it here. I’ve got Franzen Fever and the only prescription is reading Crossroads. After the paywall: a little bit about the podcast interview and why it intrigued me so much. See you soon. xo
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