Wednesday, August 30, 2006
No corrections necessary.
Jonathan Franzen has always rubbed me the wrong way, and not it seems that he has written a memoir to explore the unpleasant aspects of his personality.
Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about this unhappy relationship or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery. In fact, by the end of this solipsistic book, the reader has begun to feel every bit as suffocated and claustrophobic as Mr. Franzen and his estranged wife apparently did in their doomed marriage.Notwithstanding the small thrill of feeling vindicated, I'll, um, wait to take it out of the library.
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You are so wrong on this one. The Corrections kicked ass! Ditto for his Alzheimers essay in the New Yorker. I'm not afraid to stand with the masses on this one.
I agree that his essay on Alzheimer's in The New Yorker was terrific, and I have thought of it often since I read it (in early September 2001). But I didn't like The Corrections nearly as much as everyone else did. Towards the end of the book, there was an affecting story about the father's decline, mirroring what we know from the magazine piece about Franzen's own father. But he did not make me care about or sympathize with the other characters, and his efforts to introduce Big Ideas were too contrived.
What about the article about Peanuts in the New Yorker? I loved that one. (Not enough to find a link to it or anything.) The Corrections is sitting on my nightstand, unread.
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