Franzen’s daring has been to take on soap operas and HBO mini-series, demonstrating that if you want modern emotional dramas, the novel can provide them today as effectively as it did in the 19th century.
Authors Jonathan Franzen
David Shankbone
-
-
Franzen has that tendency common among younger American novelists to medicalise everything. A postman can’t walk up a path and, as it were, deliver a letter, without his actions being garlanded in super-conscious irony about the meaning of corporate gardens, the infernal consciousness of dogs, and wised-up statements about the general homeostasis of the postman,
-
For the most part Franzen writes as if literary modernism and experimental postmodernism had never occurred.
Jonathan Jones
Andrew O'Hagan
-
Franzen is a novelist whose primary technique is aggregation; he piles on the pages and incidents in the steady hope that the text is deepening.
-
More and more, I think of novel writing as a kind of deliberate dreaming.
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s opinions on others
-
Money, in novels, is such a potent reality principle that the need for it can override even our wish for a character to live happily ever after, and Wharton, throughout the book, applies the principle with characteristic relentlessness…
-
You don’t have to admire Undine Spragg to admire an author with the courage and the love of form to go for broke like this. Wharton embraces her new-fashioned divorce plot as zestfully as Nabokov embraces pedophilia in Lolita.
-
At the most global level: he produced a thousand pages of world-class jest which, although the mode and quality of the humor never wavered, became less and less and less funny, section by section, until, by the end of the book, you felt the book’s title might just as well have been Infinite Sadness.
The House of Mirth
The Custom of the Country
Infinite Jest
Freedom
The Corrections