Jonathan Franzen is the angriest novelist in the world. He is the novelist who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.
He is angry because Salman Rushdie uses Twitter, and nowadays people can buy books on the Internet, and the Home Depot, and he had to go to Germany one time, and also some women exist who have not had sex with him.
I wasn’t born angry. If anything, I was born the opposite. It may sound like an exaggeration, but I think it’s accurate to say that I knew nothing of anger until I was 22. As an adolescent, I’d had my moments of sullenness and rebellion against authority, but, like Kraus, I’d had minimal conflict with my father, and the worst that could be said of me and mother was that we bickered like an old married couple. Real anger, anger as a way of life, was foreign to me until one particular afternoon in April 1982. I was on a deserted train platform in Hanover. I’d come from Munich and was waiting for a train to Berlin, it was a dark grey German day, and I took a handful of German coins out of my pocket and started throwing them on the platform. There was an element of anti-German hostility in this, because I’d recently had a horrible experience with a penny-pinching old German woman and it did me good to imagine other penny-pinching old German women bending down to pick the coins up, as I knew they would, and thereby aggravating their knee and hip pains. The way I hurled the coins, though, was more generally angry. I was angry at the world in a way I’d never been before. The proximate cause of my anger was my failure to have sex with an unbelievably pretty girl in Munich, except that it hadn’t actually been a failure, it had been a decision on my part. A few hours later, on the platform in Hanover, I marked my entry into the life that came after that decision by throwing away my coins. Then I boarded a train and went back to Berlin, where I was living on a Fulbright grant, and enrolled in a class on Karl Kraus.
Think of all the women who have never slept with Jonathan Franzen. His anger must grow by the day. Soon it will envelop the world, and we will be forced to bow down in chains before it, and create ziggurats out of human corpses as terrible tribute. Some of these women who Failed To Fuck Jonathan Franzen might now be on Twitter, which is wrong because of a German essayist who is now dead.
I myself have never had sex with Jonathan Franzen, to the best of my knowledge. Not once has he used his hands or mouth or his genitals – whether in part or as a conglomerate – to bring me to the point of orgasm, which I have been given to understand is pretty much the gist of the whole thing.
I wonder if [Kraus] was so angry because he was so privileged. Later in the Nestroy essay, the Great Hater defends his hatred like this: “Acid wants the gleam, and the rust says it’s only being corrosive.” Kraus hated bad language because he loved good language – because he had the gifts, both intellectual and financial, to cultivate that love. And the person who’s been lucky in life can’t help expecting the world to keep going his way; when the world insists on going wrong ways, corrupt and tasteless ways, he feels betrayed by it. And so he gets angry, and the anger itself further isolates him and heightens his sense of specialness.
“Hate us ’cause we’re beautiful?” Kraus and Franzen ask. “Well, we don’t like you either.” Franzen is wearing a T-shirt reading “Don’t Hate Me Because Your Boyfriend Likes Me.” Kraus is dead.
As a wedding present, three months after I returned from Berlin, my college German professor George Avery gave me a hardcover edition of Kraus’s great critique of nazism, The Third Walpurgis Night.
As you can imagine, marrying the woman he loved and then receiving a rare book from a man he respected filled Jonathan Franzen with a molten and an unbearable fury, because there is nothing more enraging than privilege or good luck. It was too much for him to bear, and it made him particularly special. He became so angry that he temporarily became a geode. A geode full of crystals, but also of anger. (Have you had sex with Jonathan Franzen yet? No? Be careful. He will hate you for it and fling coins at old German women to punish them.)
The thing about Kraus is that he’s is very hard to follow on a first reading – deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism, and to his cult-like followers his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the playwright Hermann Bahr, before attacking him: “If he understands one sentence of the essay, I’ll retract the entire thing.” If you read Kraus’s sentences more than once, you’ll find that they have a lot to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment.
Oprah once tried to enjoy one of Jonathan Franzen’s books without his permission, which was bad because she had been on television. Television is also bad; perhaps not as bad as Twitter, but they both start with T, which rhymes with P and which stands for Pool. Trouble also starts with pools. Right here in River City.
Although Kraus could sound like an elitist, he wasn’t in the business of denigrating the masses or lowbrow culture; the calculated difficulty of his writing wasn’t a barricade against the barbarians. It was aimed, instead, at bright and well-educated cultural authorities who embraced a phony kind of individuality – people Kraus believed ought to have known better.
It’s not clear that Kraus’s shrill, ex cathedra denunciations were the most effective way to change hearts and minds. But I confess to feeling some version of his disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter. Or when a politically committed print magazine that I respect, N+1, denigrates print magazines as terminally “male,” celebrates the internet as “female,” and somehow neglects to consider the internet’s accelerating pauperisation of freelance writers.
Sometimes things sound elitist, but you are wrong to think so. Twitter has consumed the elderly novelist Salman Rushdie. He will be missed.
***
Every woman must decide how not to sleep with Jonathan Franzen in her own way. I learned from my grandmother, a wise woman who lived in the forest and only very rarely slept with Jonathan Franzen. She told me once, on a frosty winter night, how best to escape his sexual clutches if I ever encountered him on the path that led to the nearest market town.
“You will know him,” she said, “for he shall be riding on a white steed, and his right hand will bear no glove. When you see him, you must rush at him, and throw your kirtle over him, and hold fast to him, no matter what form he may take as he struggles against you.”
“What forms will he take?” I said. She leaned in close to me and stoked up the fire.
“He’ll turn into a serpent in your arms,” she said, “a deadly adder. Then a bear, grim and terrible; then a lion, all teeth and claws. Hold him fast and show no fear, for he shall then melt into a burning brand, and you will feel as if you are clasping Hell itself to your bosom. But he shall not – he can not – do you true and lasting harm, as long as your heart holds no fear in it. Last of all he shall turn into a flaming coal, which you must drop into a well, and he will emerge a naked man, truly himself. All you must do then is cover his nakedness and not have sex with him. Then you can go on your way. But that’s the most important part, not having sex with him at the end. Don’t forget and accidentally have sex with him.”
“Will it kill me?” I asked her.
“Oh, no, child,” she said. “It won’t kill you. Jonathan Franzen cannot kill. He conquers, but he never fights. The most he will do is write novels at you.”
I buried my head into her neck. “I don’t want him to write novels at me,” I cried. “I don’t want him to write novels at anyone.”
She laughed softly but not unkindly and stroked my hair. “There, there. No one can stop Jonathan Franzen from writing novels. Women stronger and older than you have died in the attempt. There is only so much we can accomplish in this life. Be satisfied with not having sex with him. Not having sex with him is enough.”
The next day I set out to seek my fortune. And I gaed a’ that day, and a’ the next day; and on the third day, in the afternoon, I came up to where a shepherd was sitting with a flock o’ sheep. And I gaed up to the shepherd and asked him wha the sheep belanged to; and the man answered:
“John Franzen of Manhattan
Ance lived in Bellygan,
And stole King Malcolm’s daughter,
The King of fair Scotland.
He beats her, he binds her,
He lays her on a band;
And every day he dings her
With a bright silver wand
Like Julian the Roman
He’s one that fears no man.
It’s said there’s ane predestinate
To be his mortal foe;
But that ane is yet unborn
And lang may it be so.”
Jonathan Franzen will one day drown the world.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
Tags: always a woman to me, anger, calling the old man out, hulking out, jonathan franzen, karl kraus, nicole loved freedom which bears mentioning i guess, not having sex with jonathan franzen, oprah, salman rushdie, shit that doesn’t make sense, the angriest dog in the world, the angriest novelist in the world, the last unicorn, the music man, the red etin of ireland, twitter, whoever the fuck that is
Good stuff! I bet he’s frequently constipated, too.
I mean, I can’t speak to that.
This is some fine frosty haterade. I’m drinking it!
MORE EDITED BY ANDREW LANG FAIRY TALE BOOK REFERENCES I AM SO EXCITED
I myself have never had sex with Jonathan Franzen, to the best of my knowledge. Not once has he used his hands or mouth or his genitals – whether in part or as a conglomerate – to bring me to the point of orgasm, which I have been given to understand is pretty much the gist of the whole thing.
Pretty sure that in this situation, the key factor is not the lady’s orgasm.
Leigh, that is what we in the BUSINESS refer to as a “clever subversion of expectations.”
It’s taken me years of therapy and hard-won self-knowledge to accept that sleeping with Jonathan Franzen was not something I brought on myself.
I love you, and I love the Red Etin of Ireland, and the incongruous use of the word “ding”, and I love being very far away from Jonathan Franzen.
Mallory. I want to sew you a banner with which to raise a feminist army against the forces of Franzen.
In 90 years, a child of my line will write a libretto for a musical based on this battle; a costume designer, perhaps a descendant of one of these VERY ONES READING THESE WORDS, will remake the banner with their own hands; a descendant of the Jonaii will sing those very words, tears springing to their eyes every night upon the great stage of the Broad Way, as it will be known then; and Franzen, the feminist army having flung him into space nowhere NEAR a genesis planet, will continue a lonely journey into the void, where all the coins he threw on the ground for German women will be waiting to have sex with all his orifices.
How does one become one of Mallory’s bannermen/women? Is there an oath? Do I need to own a sword? (Perhaps a crysknife would be more appropriate?) I will get myself a crysknife, don’t even think I won’t.
There is so much here to comment on but I must focus on this:
“…I’d recently had a horrible experience with a penny-pinching old German woman and it did me good to imagine other penny-pinching old German women bending down to pick the coins up, as I knew they would.”
GOOD JOB FRANZEN noticing that women who lived through a ( possibly both? idk when Franzen visited Germany) world war feared poverty! So insightful! Way to punish them for it!
Yes, that was the part that leapt out at me too. How despicable of those women to have tight budgets and bad knees! How loathsome their scrimping and saving and trying-not-to-starve make them!
How delicious it is to be young and unhurt and have the economic latitude to throw away money, even in small amounts, so that you can amuse yourself with the mere thought of people you despise — despise for their penny-pinching — suffering actual physical pain to pick your discarded money from a dirty station floor!
I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything more blithely privileged than Franzen’s screed of empty hate in my whole fucking life, and that is saying something.
Never heard of him.
I love you, mama.
I know his name, and that he is a writer, but I have never read one of his books. And probably never will, unless he like, sees this comment, kidnaps me, and forces me to read it while locked in his basement.
(That said…if I stop commenting in the next few days you might want to call the police…)
Oh thank God. I thought I was the only one who hadn’t yet slept with Jonathan Franzen.
Let us raise up our arms and cheer! Tho not too loudly, lest he hear and be summoned.
But I have slept with a Jonathan Franzen book BECAUSE IT PUT ME TO SLEEP, OOOOOH BURN.
A GEODE!
This probably isn’t the point, but I feel a great swelling of relief that I’ve neither read or banged Jonathan Franzen.
Nope, nope, I think that is exactly the point.
The reading is boring and irritating enough–can’t speak for the banging (though I don’t imagine a lot of difference)
All I see or hear when I attempt to look at Jonathan Franzen or read words by Jonathan Franzen is a small boy. The small boy is screwing his face up really, really tight. He is whining through his nose.
“Why can’t you see how much cleverer than you I am I am so much cleverer than you I m so much better than you I can tell stories I am the best writer ever no-one should do anything I don’t like and why won’t they listen when I tell them how wrong they are! Mummy, aren’t I just the cleverest? Aren;t I the cleverest? Why won;t you admit I’m the cleverest!”
His voice gets higher and whiner with every breath until he sounds like a mosquito.
Or like that tiny demon in that haunted frat house party episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The one she squished with her foot.
He also says: “WHY WHY WHY DO YOU LOVE MY DEAD BEST FRIEND BETTER THAN ME WHY” and it is most offputting.
I heard tell that if you call him Jonathan Lethem — to his face — Jonathan Franzen will explode in a cloud of moths.
I just call him “The Franz” he loves it.
That was bracing. Like a wheatgrass shot and a new toothbrush. Made of spite. Ahhh.
oh my god
misandry 4ever
The tags. The tags. Looking forward to seeing all of those tags again on The Toast.
Sex with Jonathan Franzen is just him talking while staring into his own eyes in a mirror; you sit in his peripheral vision and nod occasionally. When he reaches completion, he smashes your iPhone, and afterward he lies with his head in your lap while you read “Freedom” aloud.
this website is broken, it’s not letting me give this comment a MILLION thumbs up.
How did you get access to my secret diary
Bryan Goldberg says I should use the internet more, Jonathan Franzen says I should use it less. WHICH MAN SHOULD I LISTEN TO?
Listen to me. I say: Use it just right.
UGH, those old German women. Didn’t they know he was a FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR?! Like, where WERE they during the intensely competitive nomination and selection process? Weren’t they keeping up with the fast-paced world of scholarships and grantmaking? Fulbright scholars CHANGE THE WORLD, and these old women are worried about where to get their next handful of dirty train station coins.
I knew this was coming from the moment I read Franzen’s essay on Saturday. Thank you!
And now I want to throw pennies at Franzen.
I think he’s Jewish, so that would technically be anti-Semitic.
Nope. On both counts.
Jonathan Franzen is the living embodiment of the phrase “talking is just masturbating without the mess.”
I’m not sure I quite understand. It sounds like he’s angry with himself, an anger he projects “at the world” for his decision not to sleep with said girl. As in, it was something he could have done, something SHE may have wanted to do, but he decided he didn’t want to at that moment and now regrets it. You say, “Some of these women who Failed To Fuck Jonathan Franzen…” If you’re extrapolating from his little anecdote, it wasn’t women who failed to have sex with him, it was he who failed to have sex with women. I don’t see any evidence of him being angry at her or at women in general, unless yr counting old German penny-pinchers. Does this not render the point of this whole piece moot? Or do women have absolutely no sexual agency and it’s only conceivable that women “fail to fuck” and not men? Of course, Franzen is an curmudgeon with his head up his asshole, no doubt about that.
“Women Have No Sexual Agency” was the working title of this essay and, coincidentally, my Led Zeppelin cover band.
I think you probably know a lot more about Jonathon Franzen than I do, all I knew before this piece is that he didn’t like Twitter, and was very “get off my lawn” about it. (I think my life was better when I didn’t know about him.)
Nevertheless, I have had regrets like that, though I didn’t fling pennies in spite. And the women in question definitely had sexual agency that was all agencied in my direction. Do you take me as bragging? How is a man to say, “I said no, and regretted it later?”
In fact, the man who says “no, I don’t want to” is a rare figure. I feel this is a problem, as is the near-nonexistence of the woman who initiates. Both are objects of shame.
There are lots of great ways to say “I said no, and regretted it later” (in fact, that is a great way to say it). “My failure to sleep with” is probably not the best one.
Indeed. Though as you highlight in the piece, if he said something in the simple, direct way, he wouldn’t be Jonathan Franzen.
It’s a curious locution, but I think it exists because of the shame attached (for him) to being a man who says no to sex. It’s very common for men to explain that they didn’t have sex because something was wrong with that woman, rather than, “I didn’t feel like it”. Being A Man involves banging everything that affords you the opportunity, after all. In my opinion, this is one of the ways in which men are damaged by our gender system.
One last note of clarity: I do not wish to subtract from your reading of JF, but to add to it. There are plenty of people who deny the sexual agency of women, just as they deny the possibility that men might be the objects of desire.
I also WOULD count the old German penny-pinchers. There’s a lot of continuity in the essay between women being stingy with their money and their favors. To me, this screams of “I resent it when I don’t get the things I want from women, and it gives me pleasure to think of them suffering in punishment for being so withholding.” I also think there’s a hint of resenting the old women for being un-fuckable (in his mind), but that might be over-interpreting.
Jonathan Franzen is always getting on my case when I try to tell him about horse-race gamblin’. (Not a wholesome trottin’ race, no, but a race where they set down right on the horse.) “Like to see some stuck-up jockey boy sittin’ on Dan Patch?” he sneers. “Make your blood boil? Well, I should say.”
With a capital B, and that rhymes with T, and that stands for TOOL.
By the way, sidenote, Karl Kraus is good stuff though not very translatable and it’s not Karl Kraus’s fault that Jonathan Franzen likes to read him. Karl Kraus is a very good writer! (unlike Jonathan Franzen in my opinion). And Karl Kraus is NOT elite in any US/contemporary sense of the word! That’s the other, more minor part of this quote that makes me go WTF.
He was a giant gadfly who risked his personal safety and well-being to satirize and attack Anti-Semitism, religious piety, bourgeois and imperialist values, and hypocrisy of all stripes, and bad politics. He risked his own financial and personal future to promote avant-garde art and to satirize moral and political corruption. He really took a dangerous moral stand against Nazism at a time when there were a lot of openly violent Nszis in Austria even though he died in 1936, a year or so before the annexation by Nazi Germany of Austria happened. Yes, he wrote very complicate, amazing sentences, but you just have to be able to recognize wittiness to read it, not be an “elite” person. Ugh. Jonathan Franzen don’t slime things that are good in their own right through your own twisted way of liking them!
Oh my god, I thought that part about him being angry about not having sex with the woman from Munich was a joke quote, but when I checked the article on The Guardian, IT WAS ACTUALLY THERE.
WHAT.
And the person who’s been lucky in life can’t help expecting the world to keep going his way; when the world insists on going wrong ways, corrupt and tasteless ways, he feels betrayed by it. And so he gets angry, and the anger itself further isolates him and heightens his sense of specialness”
You’d think after writing that the best reaction would be to go back, delete everything and never publish this article.
I mean, right?
I don’t think he’s condoning the angry man feeling “special,” if anything, he’s criticizing the privileged man who works himself into tantrums *because* he has the resources to do so.
But he is that angry privileged man who works himself up into a tantrum because he has the resources to do so. This article is the tantrum.
When reached for a comment on this, Franzen replied “You’re a great writer, Mallory, and you’re cute as hell. Maybe you’re just not ‘cool-enough-to-be-allowed-to-read-my-brilliant-and-oh-so-serious-op-ed’ material.”
She laughed softly but not unkindly and stroked my hair. “There, there. No one can stop Jonathan Franzen from writing novels. Women stronger and older than you have died in the attempt. There is only so much we can accomplish in this life. Be satisfied with not having sex with him. Not having sex with him is enough.”
I do not ever think I will be done laughing at this.
What a petty, mean-spirited little shit he sounds like. Really? You’re gonna make old ladies bend over to pick up your pennies (some of whom might really fucking need those pennies) because one of them was mean to you? And goddamn am I ever sick and tired of hearing men express, in more or less explicit terms, their belief that they are entitled to sex/romance with a beautiful woman. I mean I know the entire culture we live in communicates to them that attractive women are trophies they will be awarded simply for being sexually mature men, but for real, fuck that shit. I cannot remember ever hearing a woman say or imply that she felt entitled to sex with a handsome man; in fact the women I know who are rejected by hot guys usually react by asking what’s wrong with themselves. This goes way beyond Franzen, and in all fairness I don’t know much more about him than what’s in this article, but it’s just both infuriating and boring to hear that sentiment expressed yet again by a famous, powerful man.
I love, too, how he spins it as “his choice not to sleep with her,” like he just has to let us know that he was NOT SEXUALLY REJECTED by this beautiful resident of Munich. We must not labor under that misapprehension! THE CHOICE WAS HIS. He could have had sex with her, he was just really busy at the time.
Haha, right. “Let the record show, your Honor, that I could’ve TOTALLY banged that hot German chick if I’d wanted to, I just wasn’t feeling it, you know?”
Again, why is it so inconceivable that he decided he didn’t want to have sex with her? What evidence do you have that she sexually rejected him? Where is this “entitlement” that you and others see? That’s not to say that male entitlement, sexual and otherwise, isn’t pervasive–it is, and I hate it–but I simply see no evidence of it here.
I love that of all the things one could defend about Franzen (and his body of work as a whole does — I dare say — have some defensible qualities) THIS is the thing people are jumping on?
HE COULD HAVE HAD SEX WITH HER
HE COULD HAVE HAD SEX WITH HERRRRRRRRRRRRRR
That’s not inconceivable at all, but A). his phrasing is classic hard-boiled hero/teenaged boy and B). if it really was his decision, then why act so spitefully to other people? And have that be the catalyst for all of his anger? Regardless of who made what choice, he still has the choice to get over his pettiness and take responsibility of his allegedly grown up life.
Mallory, it’s only because your brain is rotted out from too much Twitter that you fail to understand the limitless brilliance of Franzen’s young Andy Rooney shtick. Do you also let your cat go outside?
If I had sex with Jonathan Franzen, I’m sure it was too complicated for me to understand.
Update: this wicked man was magicked into a penny and his still little head shone from the train tracks till a flock of wizened crones plucked at him with crooked fingers. They dropped their pennies into jars to keep till the internet bills came due, and they crow about their treasure on Facebook. “Like.”
I love being able to identify a Mallory article (without reading the byline first) within the first 3 paragraphs. It makes me feel like I belong here.
I AM SO EXCITED that the comments are all on one page. Also, this was hilarious and awesome.
I started reading Freedom, but couldn’t finish it because I stopped caring about any of the characters or what happened to them about halfway through.
Let’s talk about the time I was in graduate school, and the university invited Jonathan Franzen for a week’s residence as part of which he was supposed to write a new essay and read it and he took the money and then read an essay that had been published in the New Yorker the month before, thus getting paid TWICE for the same essay, and the essay insisted that birdwatching was not boring, but was in fact, stupefyingly boring in its discussions of birdwatching. That was a long reading. Way too long. And then none of us slept with him. AT LEAST I HOPE NOT.
I still like his books but it’s sad how Jonathan Franzen has basically turned into Kurt Cobain without the courage of his convictions.
Yep. I’m mostly astonished how someone who has written such nuanced relationships could publish something so tone-deaf in so many ways. A Saul Bellow-like transformation comes to mind.
Smug sarcasm riffing off of one paragraph of a long essay is so easy. Why not try something more difficult next time?
Go back to sleep, Franzen.
Look out guys, we’ve got a SUPERIOR BEING in our midst.
In fairness, I riffed off several paragraphs of his long essay. But I don’t want to do anything more difficult, because I’m very sleepy most of the time.
He sounds like a guy who thinks about whatever he wants, and what he wants to think about is swears.
he went to my elitist college. since he became “f-a-m-o-u-s” we can’t speak his name without a severe eye roll and slight brain hemorrhaging. very few of us have read his book. we were in class with six to ten other franzens, we figured, what was the point?
Why not read it and then roll your eyes…? There is an awful lot of pettiness and poutiness in this comment thread, I gotta say.
Because how could we keep our branding as the top college if we didn’t shun the bestsellers????????????????
And no pettiness or poutiness at all in Franzen’s article.
He lost me when he called Edith Wharton “not pretty.” http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/13/120…
That was IT for me. I loved The Corrections and liked Freedom, honestly, but it was the END when he wrote that goddamn essay.
GET. OUT. Oh my Lord. Yeah, I liked The Corrections too, but wow….
Flinging coins at the ground to spite old German women who may later pick them up seems like a really bizarre reaction to “I chose not to have sex with that girl and then regretted it later.” Bizarre and mean. Gee, the old ladies who lived through world wars might pinch pennies. I wonder why.
But… is he actually worth reading?
I mean, I would not BUY the book, but I would borrow it, if it were good.
Is it good?
I’ve only read The Corrections and I both hated and enjoyed it. But if you read this essay of his and can’t stand its defensive, naval-gazing white maleness, then you’ll probably feel the same way about The Corrections because several of the main characters (including a female character) are really just him. And another one of the main characters is basically those German women. And a good deal of the plot is basically just throwing low-denomination coins away.
Kraus is very much worth reading, even if Franzen is a poor advocate for him. You’re better off seeking out Harry Zohn’s translations, though.
am i the only one who hears franzen’s ownership of his pettiness and impotence, and feels that lambasting him for the same is kind of redundant….? i like your style, but the way he writes is already telling me “i’m angry. and stupid.” seems to me you guys are in agreement… this is not really a critique of writing, as much as a character attack, which he himself initiated.
have i just not read enough to hate him yet? i am a female who, to the best of my knowledge, has not slept with him.
Can we also talk about how he wrote TWO novels where an attractive, young, female, Indian evil genius sleeps with the married but estranged middle-aged white protagonist and then dies? It just seems so… specific.
Wait, “evil”?
(Maybe it’s just the people I have to deal with through work, giving me a high standard for “evil.”)
Well S. Jammu was definitely an “evil genius” type, what’s-her-name in the last novel was a million times less interesting but seemed to have some similar personality traits. (It’s interesting how his treatment of female characters seems to be devolving over time. I think maybe Mallory has it figured out though.)
Gotcha. E.g., Enid and Denise were pretty great.
Nina Martyris has more on this angle here: http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/brown-noise-fran…
Hey I just saw the notification for this comment earlier today and wanted to let you know that that is probably the best piece of Franzen criticism I’ve read (in large part because it attempts to answer a question that has long mystified me) so THANK YOU.
I remember reading the introduction he wrote for a particular edition of the play Spring Awakening, and he spent at LEAST a couple of paragraphs of his intro bashing on the musical version and how wrong its interpretation of the play was. He was just SO MAD about this.
“Hate us ’cause we’re beautiful?” Kraus and Franzen ask. “Well, we don’t like you either.”
I’ve never read anything by Jonathan Franzen, but I know that’s a Bring It On quote.
There. Now he doesn’t want to sleep with me.
Do I detect a hint of Heller in this piece? It would be appropriate, as apparently he was fond of ladies.
At first, when I saw the throwing coins jokes, I thought it was a beautiful weird slander invented by you. But he wrote it, he actually fucking wrote it. Who is this mook we give our prizes to?
Upvoted for the phrase ‘beautiful weird slander’.
This is the only thing that ever needs to be written about Jonathan Franzen.
There doesn’t seem to be any substantial criticism of Franzen here. I think he’s obnoxious and prosthelytizing but this article is just a snide ad hominem, no real argument. At least Franzen manages to construct halfway-coherent arguments in his rage.
Okay. Is this somehow now a website made exclusively of serious literary criticism? Because I didn’t think that’s what we were doing here.
Well, no, but that’s not a bad aim to have!
You don’t get it.
“As you can imagine, marrying the woman he loved and then receiving a rare book from a man he respected filled Jonathan Franzen with a molten and an unbearable fury, because there is nothing more enraging than privilege or good luck.”
Hahahaha… This whole post is outstanding.
Bascially the best thing I’ve ever read. Thanks Mallory. I’m in tears.
This is fucking brilliant.
Say what you will, but I loved his new book “White Whines.”
“The most he will do is throw is write novels at you,” but he’s always a Franzen to me.
Wah! So good!
Franzen gripe or Youtube comment about saggy pants? http://hudsonhongo.com/franzen/
You’re a goddamn genius. The only good thing he ever wrote was that Sammy Davis Junior Junior chapter in “Everything is Illuminated.” The rest was a snoozer. Gaaaaaaahhhh. He’s so douchey!
I don’t want him to write novels at anyone either.
Um, that’s Jonathan Safran Foer.
“I no longer have collaborators. I used to be envious of them. They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself.”–Karl Kraus
Oh my god, this is the funniest thing I’ve read all week.
I once met him and somehow managed to say, “NJ Transit is for Lovers” needless to say, he was not amused, and we did not sleep together.
A close reading of his “story” reveals that he did not have sex with the pretty German girl because she shut him down cold. Thus the flinging of coins,the disrespect of nice German grandmas, and an altogether thoroughly unattractive pique induced by a denial of male privilege. I won’t be sleeping with you either, Jonathan, and maybe I’ll write articles about THAT.
“Every woman must decide how not to sleep with Jonathan Franzen in her own way. I learned from my grandmother, a wise woman who lived in the forest and only very rarely slept with Jonathan Franzen.”
Your grandmother is so wise!
“Or when a politically committed print magazine that I respect, N+1, denigrates print magazines as terminally “male,” celebrates the internet as “female,” and somehow neglects to consider the internet’s accelerating pauperisation of freelance writers.”
Why it’s almost as if perceivedly female occupations pay less than perceivedly male ones! What a dreadful tragedy it would be if freelance writing went the way of school teaching and was LOST TO US FOREVER.
I wanna know why #neverhadsexwithfranzen isn’t trending!
Pithy and shooting fish in barrels but at least acknowledge your David Lynch quote. Even David Shields (trending way worse than Franzen right now) sucked it up and cited his sources.
Check the tags, my angry darling!
Steal his glasses at a reading. It has worked before.
Remember: his real power is in his glasses.
Did no one else at all read this not as “Franzen is pissed because he turned down his chance to fuck some fraulein” but “a young Franzen’s first recognition of deep-rooted anger/depression issues (made abundantly clear in more or less all his fiction) and violent and admittedly juvenile power fantasy”? Sure, the man is an easy target — and makes himself an easy target, especially for the kind of knee-jerk reactionary criticism the Internet allows (maybe why he hates it so much?) — but really he just strikes me as a grump with some depression and esteem issues, not an active misogynist.
Excellent Music Man reference.
I don’t understand how every single comment here is supporting this misreading. Franzen didn’t state that he was upset for not having sex with ANY girl, or that he was upset that any or all girls didn’t want to have sex with him, he was upset because he CHOSE to not have sex with a particular pretty girl. He regretted his decision, which made him angry. Sounds fairly human to me. But yeah, burn him at the stake with digital hashtag fires.
The reference to The Music Man made me literally laugh out loud.
I was just getting all fired up about the anti-feminist slant of Purity and happened to stumble on this again. Then spent the next three minutes cackling to myself.
May this article always come to woman’s hand when Franzen lurks nearby.