In Praise of Jonathan Franzen (and the Valiant Vanguard of Literary Fiction)

Yes, he is the one that landed a powerful right hook to Oprah's jaw and lived to tell about it. Time Magazine calls him "The Great American Novelist." Mr. Franzen's books are engaging and ambitious beyond anything else in pop culture. I have to admit purchasing "The Corrections" a few years back, second hand, and still have not read it. I have, however, read his non-fiction ("How to Be Alone" and "The Discomfort Zone") and find it to be among the top among contemporary writers. What really gets lost in all of this praise is the fact that Mr. Franzen, almost single-handedly, is keeping literary fiction in the forefront of American mainstream media. Yes, he's made up with Oprah, luckily for all of us in her last season as a literary taste indicator and book mogul. Literary fiction--for the lack of a better definition--is that fiction that doesn't sell, is not consistently at the top of the NYT bestselling list, and does not create a super star novelist like John Grisham, or Dan Brown. What literary fiction will do for you, however, is help you find universal themes that apply to a plurality of issues in your personal life. Yes, it doesn't sell (and I really commend Time Magazine for describing Mr. Franzen's work the way they did on their cover) but literary fiction speaks to all of us, not just readers of mysteries or techno thrillers, or religious detectivesque pseudo-epics. It's as a simple as this: if you want to read books that knock your socks off again and again but you don't want to go back to the Classics because they caused permanent damage to you in high school, here's a short list of contemporary writers that do not negotiate their genre.

1--The Great White Jewish One: PAUL AUSTER

2--Haruki Murakami

3--The Late David Foster Wallace

4--Joyce Carol Oates

5--The Late (I canonized him with the Nobel Prize for Literature because I couldn't find anyone more deserving in the last 20 years than him, yet he never even make the short list)....

John Updike

6--Nicholson Baker

7--Thomas Pynchon

And of course, Mr. Jonathan Franzen. God bless you, Mr. Franzen, wherever you may be or go, for sweating out your new masterpiece "Freedom" at a time when the meaning of the title is not lost to all of us who commune with literary fiction.

The Whirlwind that was Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews' "Twenty Lines a Day" was supposed to be a fast-read, but it proved none of it was purposefully written to be a quick-fix. An established writer sets out to write (under the dictum of Stendhal) twenty lines a day. While most of them revealed a certain amount of connection with the other (especially when they were sequential), many of them were just random writings, the author switching between first and third person at will. They are snippets of brilliance--I take nothing away from Mathews as a genius, but I think I wasn't ready to read this book and only made it worst by persevering through it. Remember, I was still under the spell of Billy Collins when I picked up Mathews' book.

I think I remember the author of "The Corrections" (Jonathan Frazen) saying that he was inspired by Harry Mathews' "The Conversions." I didn't make the connection until much later, even if the connection actually exist. I think the book was Jonathan Frazen's collections of essays "How to Be Alone." I suddenly thought of this while driving back from the library last night, and swore to myself that I will look up the quote immediately after getting home, which of course I didn't do. So here I am now making a wild guess as to whether or not Frazen made that references in one of his essays. Will be reporting back on this later.

Writing continues but perhaps a bit slower than expected. This might be a super stretch, but I might put off the publication until August or September. I have failed to mention here that I will be taking a couple of trips this semester. Late March will find me in Barcelona, settling a group of students who will be studying there for a month or so. April 17 will find me in China for a ten day educational tour, including me teaching a class at a school in Changchung (Northern China). I will be sure to catch up with my reading during both flights, and might even re-work some issues of plot during my 16 hour flight to China. We'll have to see what happens. I never pictured myself the academic ambassador. Talk about a whirlwind.

ALERT: I mistakenly took Jonathan Frazen's reference to Mathews' "The Conversions." Frazen referred to William Gaddis' "The Recognitions." How in God's name did I take one for the other is beyond me. I am glad I checked rather than letting this be the way I wrote it.