Today, an act of rebellion. I'm going to break a rule. It's a rule I set for myself, so maybe that means I'm not really rebelling at all. Can you be The Man trying to keep yourself down? Is it Fighting the Power if the Power is you? These are questions for a philosopher. Or perhaps, with a little rhyming and a generous dose of anapestic tetrameter, Dr. Seuss. ("I asked I and myself and I even asked me -- if you're oppressing yourself, how oppressed could you be?")
The rule I'm going to break is this: Don't criticize a fellow writer unless you're going to do it properly -- behind his or her back at a convention, preferably while drunk. In the age of Google Alerts, any on-the-record nastiness is sure to be discovered sooner or later, and I have no desire to make life harder for a fellow scribe. That's what critics and the accountants who calculate royalties are for.
An aside: I just realized I could use Google Alerts for good. Let's direct some good vibes to the deserving.
Hey, Kristine Kathryn Rusch! I just finished The Disappeared and I really enjoyed it! Hey, Craig McDonald! I'm in the middle of Head Games, and it's a blast!
We now return you to our previously scheduled negativity.
I figure it's okay for me to criticize this particular writer, because (A) he's endured much worse than what I'm about to dish out, (B) he wouldn't give a crap what someone like me thought of him and (C) he's the last guy in the world who should be Googling himself anyway. According to him, it's not a zombie apocalypse we should be worried about. It's the Internet that's going to turn us all into drooling, mindlessly consuming monsters. To which I say: Don't sweat it, dude. TV did that already. You should stay focused on your number-one concern -- the suffering of f-ed up upper-middle-class white folks.
Cheap shot! Sorry! I haven't read enough Jonathan Franzen to say something like that. And hey -- someone's gotta write about f-ed up upper-middle-class white folks. It's not like 20,000 MFA students (and all their teachers) are writing about them this very moment, right?
Oh, it's Jonathan Franzen I've been thinking of, BTW. You know, the guy who jumped up and down on Oprah's couch ranting about how her viewers were bourgeois pigs and he was in love love love!!! with Katie Holmes. Or was that James Frey?
Anyway, Franzen is America's greatest novelist (according to Time Magazine and, if I'm not mistaken, Cat Fancy and Juggs, as well). Yet I don't have the slightest desire to pick up a doorstop like Freedom and read it. Those doors won't keep themselves open, darn it! Plus, I read a short story of Franzen's in The New Yorker once, and it didn't do the one thing I ask of miserabilist art: TELL ME SOMETHING I DON'T KNOW. If your message is "Life can suck," you've failed the test. The message I got from Franzen's story was "Boy, some of those 1 percenters sure are dysfunctional." Which isn't "Life can suck," but it's not much better.
(Cheap Shot Mea Culpa #2: I don't think Franzen actually writes about 1 percenters. For the record, they're probably more like 3.764 percenters.)
I started thinking about Franzen recently after reading a couple of great blog posts by my pal Sophie Littlefield. Sophie was spanking NPR lit critic Alan Cheuse for...well, being all lit crit. (Sophie wasn't literally spanking him on her blog, of course. The spanking's on YouTube.) You can read what she wrote here and here. It speaks for itself -- and very well, too.
Sophie astutely picks up on the condescension and catering to snobbishness in Cheuse's review of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. This is "a beach book you won't mind being seen with this summer," Cheuse says. Because screw enjoyment -- what's really important about a book is how people will perceive us if we're caught reading it.
(Cheap Shot Mea Culpa #3: If I were reading, say, Spock Must Die! in a Starbucks, I would be tempted to wrap it in an issue of The Economist.)
Bottom line: It's all about taste. Critics and fans of "contemporary literature" (and let's please not start trying to figure out what that is) tend to admire writers of downbeat, plotless navel-gazery, such as Franzen. This won't always be the case because, on the macro level, tastes change. On the micro level -- me -- tastes don't shift as much over time (though I'm not as likely to read Spock Must Die! as I once was.) So....
The critics will tell you that plot's déclassé.
But I don't fret about what they have to say.
Just read what you want and go your own way.
Cuz the day will come, friend, when even Franzen's passé.
Great post.
As a reader, I use to bounce back and forth regularly between litrachur and genre but as the former became more and more books about nothing and and on top of that the artiste would belabor the point about how it took them years and years of struggle to get the nothing down just right. I can't recall who, but someone wiser than I said that all writing is character driven, but at least in genre fiction they drive somewhere.
Good shout out on Craig McDonald's HEAD GAMES. I just recommended it over at www.newpulpfiction.com
Posted by: Greg Daniel | July 15, 2012 at 06:25 PM
Hmm ... guess I really should utilize that preview feature after all ;-) ... cut out the repeated "AND" before "on top" and then after "down just right" add "I have decided to read good stories as opposed to 'important' books." ... and I make slightly more sense.
Posted by: Greg Daniel | July 15, 2012 at 06:38 PM
Does this mean I can now delete my digital copy of Freedom I stole off the Internet? The one I never read?
Posted by: John Purcell | July 16, 2012 at 10:21 AM
Thanks, Greg! Love the quote about character-driven fiction needing to actually go somewhere. Guess one of us should Google that sucker and see who said it first. Or we could just pretend it was one of us....
You've just put your finger on the problem with ebooks, John: You can't even use them to prop open doors. You also can't leave them out on coffee tables to fool people into thinking you're hip.
An idea that should make me a million bucks: an app that, with one touch, substitutes whatever you're reading on your Kindle with Freedom. That way when someone tries to peek over your shoulder, you'll have just enough time to swap Jonathan Franzen for 50 Shades of Grey.
Posted by: Steve | July 16, 2012 at 02:02 PM
Four stars for your Dr. Seuss bit.
Posted by: Esri Allbritten | July 17, 2012 at 10:09 AM
Steve, for 2 bits I will sell you half interest in the quote and we can take turns being someone wiser than I. If you really want to make a million bucks, forget the app and just write 50 Shades of Freedom.
Posted by: Greg Daniel | July 18, 2012 at 07:26 AM
Yes! An artsy friend of mine gave me a copy of "The Corrections" for some reason, insisting that I MUST read it! I would love it! (I couldn't make it through the cover blurb.)
I also confuse Franzen with Frey. Have they both been on Oprah's couch or were they both married to Katie Holmes?
Posted by: Carolyn B | July 21, 2012 at 03:04 AM
Thank you for the four stars, Esri
I appreciate the special...uhhhhh....
I was hoping to write my thank you in Seuss-verse, but unfortunately nothing rhymes with "Esri." Let me try again.
Thank you for the stars, Ms. Allbritten....
Oh, I give up.
Greg, have you checked out the Amazon bestseller list lately. I swear to god half the books are 50 Shades of *something*. So why not 50 Shades of Freedom? Or how about 50 Shades of Sherlock Holmes? I hear that Mrs. Hudson was a real vixen. Mrrrow!
It's understandable that you'd confuse Franzen and Frey, Carolyn. Frey wrote a memoir about how he was a heroin-addicted gigolo with Alzheimer's, but it was later revealed that no "James Frey" even existed: It was just Jonathan Franzen's alter ego. Then Franzen married Kate Holmes and gave everyone in the greater Chicago area a brand new car. Or something like that....
Posted by: Steve | July 21, 2012 at 12:15 PM
Steve, you are the wind beneath my wings. Well, you and Michael Chabon, who's also written trenchantly on the subject. I trust you don't mind being lumped in with him.
I was ruined to Serious Literature, in part, by a virulent case of John Steinbeck at an impressionable age. (Needless to say, it was not my idea.) I subsequently summed up the Steinbeck Ur-Novel thus:
1. Miserable people have ghastly depressing lives.
2. Someone decides to try to make things better.
3. It all goes horribly wrong, and it was probably a bad idea to even try.
4. Everyone ends up even more miserable with even worse lives; it would have been better if they'd just all killed themselves on page 3.
The weed of Literature bears bitter fruit. Sounds like Frantzen has supped heartily on it.
Posted by: Jonathan Turner | July 24, 2012 at 10:43 AM
If I'm the wind beneath your wings, Jonathan, then you are my sunshine, my only sunshine. Your Steinbeck Reading Guide could apply to much "great" "literature." (Though I will say I liked Tortilla Flats and Travels with Charley just fine. Probably because the literati wouldn't consider them sufficiently lugubrious to be great.) Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I'm not sure, but Steinbeck surely thought he did...and now it's Franzen's turn.
Posted by: Steve | July 25, 2012 at 08:41 PM