Franzen Frenzy Gets Foolisher
So the century is precisely ten years old and already it has a greatest novel?
Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’ has yet to be released, but on the strength of a few pre-publication review copies doing the rounds, the literary establishment has declared it to be the novel of the century. Time magazine even put Franzen on its cover. Our own Kevin Bloom wrote about him in the Daily Maverick, wondering aloud whether literature was about to make a comeback (where did it go?).
All of which leads us to one inescapable conclusion: when men write about families and relationships, it’s called high art – when women write about the same thing, it’s called chick-lit.
If this sounds like sour grapes, well, perhaps I just lack the fine discernment that characterised the Pulitzer Prize committee in 1930 when they declared ‘Laughing Boy’ by Oliver La Farge to be the novel of the year. ‘Oliver La Who?’ do I hear you ask? You mean you’ve never heard of him? Well, he must be good because in 1930 he was up against such competition as Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury’ and Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’. He beat them both … and now he is out of print and completely unheard of.
If you think this is an isolated case, you should check out this website. Random samples: The Great Gatsby losing out to ‘Arrowsmith’ by Sinclair Lewis in 1926. ‘Catch-22’ losing out to ‘The Edge of Sadness’ by Edwin O’Connor in 1962. (Edwin O’Who?). There are plenty of others.
The point is that great modern classics aren’t easy to call in the year they come out. Sometimes not even in the century they come out. We need the perspective of time and distance to judge the real impact a novel has. Much of that impact has to do with whether a book stays in print, which it only tends to do when people buy it, which they only tend to do when they enjoy it. People are funny that way.
You wouldn’t be far wrong in saying that the literary canon is made up of fan favourites that gradually got adopted by the literary establishment. From Shakespeare, to Austen, to the Brontes, to Dickens, and many points in between, we see smash-hit plays and novels being retrospectively gathered into the bosom of the establishment and granted a recognition they lacked in their own time.
I suspect Kevin Bloom would disagree with me. When he writes about the death of literature, and about popular culture having ‘moved on’, he clearly doesn’t mean fiction in general. We live in the age of Twilight, Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code. Fiction is more popular than it has ever been. Kevin is drawing a distinction between popular or generic fiction (low art) and literary fiction (high art). The trouble is that history tends to blur those distinctions and to elevate those that were disregarded by their peers.
We have no way of knowing whether a novel like ‘Freedom’ will stand the test of time. When future scholars pick over the bones of the early 21st Century dysfunctional family, will they turn to ‘In Her Shoes’ by Jennifer Weiner – New York Times bestseller, made into a Hollywood movie – or Franzen’s ‘Freedom’ – a tome that runs just shy of 600 pages, and that some reviewers have described as hard going? You have no way of knowing the answer to that question, and nor do I. All we know is that it would probably surprise us.
You’d think book reviewers would know this by now, wouldn’t you, so why the near-hysterical adulation for a book very few people have read? I’m not the first person to ask this question.
Bestselling novelists Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner have been making some scathing references on Twitter lately about the tendency of the literary establishment to fawn at the feet of its white, male literary darlings. Their iconoclasm has ruffled more than a few male feathers, causing Weiner, rather mischievously, to create the hashtags #Franzenfreude and #grumpyoldmen to describe the resultant furore.
One encouraging sign is that her concerns are not being dismissed with a smile and a pat on the head this time. The question that I started this blog with is receiving some serious attention in publications such as The Huffington Post. One can only hope this attention will lead to a modification of popular opinion.
‘When men write about families and relationships it’s called high art – but when women write about the same thing, it’s called chick-lit’. FINALLY, it’s being said out loud. The terms ‘high art’ and ‘chick-lit’ are both well overdue for a reboot. One can only hope they’ll get it.
