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Notes on the Franzen Wars

What more can be said about Jonathan Franzen? Much ink, both admiring and critical, has been spilled over his fourth novel, Freedom. Time magazine put Franzen on its cover, with the bold title “Great American Novelist.” At the Guardian, Jonathan Jones called Freedom the “novel of the century.” Even the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani, whom Franzen infamously insulted in public after she’d harshly criticized his memoir, The Discomfort Zone, called Freedom Franzen’s “most deeply felt novel yet” and “an indelible portrait of our times.” Oprah, another apparently former foe of Franzen’s, has chosen Freedom for her once-powerful Book Club in an ironic twist that neatly reconciled their ten years—I mean, their two weeks—of tension. Meanwhile, Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner led the backlash by criticizing the establishment’s anointing of the white, male Franzen as the reigning King of Literature, arguing that there exists a ghastly gender bias in literary criticism. And B. R. Myers published the requisite take-down of Freedom in the Atlantic, calling it “a 576- page monument to insignificance.”

Franzen, whose most pressing self-declared ambition has been to achieve cultural relevance, has indeed attained his Holy Grail— and then some. But is this the kind of discourse Franzen hoped to inspire? Is this the kind of discourse worth anybody’s precious time and attention?

Most of the talk has been pure hype—not that that’s a wholly bad thing. The worst of it was overly sensational. And much of it was, well, digressive. After the initial, mostly positive critical reception of Freedom reached a saturation point, the second, more negative wave of commentary focused on and often harshly criticized the overwhelming attention the novel garnered. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I found its twinning of the personal and the political intensely engaging. At Bookslut.com, I wrote a long, mostly admiring review, although I did lament Franzen’s complete transformation—to use his own terms—from a more experimental status novelist to a traditional contract novelist. At the same time, like most reviewers, I recognized the superior quality of the art of storytelling present on each and every page of this—yes, I’ll say it—modern masterpiece. Because the novel so moved me, I was delighted to see how the sheer force of good work could “heal” Franzen’s relationships with both Kakutani and Oprah, how an undeniably well-written novel and the concomitant experience and testimony of two of its most discerning readers could reveal those two awfully public squabbles as exactly that, squabbles: small, insignificant quarrels that the press blew out of proportion. To see good, serious work outlast the media hubbub was most satisfying.

As for the gender bias, I’m in a tight spot here: I’m white, I’m male, and I not only write fiction but also often write about fiction. What’s a guy to say? Gender bias is a serious issue that I (along with Franzen) think about often. It is fairly obvious that there exists a considerable gender bias in the world of literature. The canon consists mostly of men, and that’s because it’s still mostly men who write about and create the canon. Following the debate online, I appreciated Meghan O’Rourke’s nuanced perspective at Slate.com. Certainly women must face subtle forms of discouragement—a raised eyebrow, a passing comment—that make it doubly difficult to sit down and attempt to write the Great American Novel. The Double X blog astutely detailed the statistical inequalities of how many books by women the New York Times actually reviews, compared with how many books by men. Ruth Franklin at the New Republic was right to point out that the real shame is that the Times didn’t even feel that it was necessary to respond. The so-called paper of record should have responded. Because although perhaps Picoult and Weiner were unduly sensational in their Twittering approach to the issue, it is a legitimate issue—and the numbers speak loudly.

That said, things are getting better. Women are writing the Great American Novel these days. And women writers—not to mention blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and writers from all across the world—are getting more and more attention. To list great women writers seems trivial, but I’ll do it anyway: Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore, and Zadie Smith are definitely in my canon. And Franzen himself wrote a fervently positive review of the masterful Alice Munro for the New York Times Book Review in 2004. (I realize I threw a Brit and a Canadian in there.) But the discussion about gender bias quickly becomes a discussion about identity politics and literature in general. In other words, if we really want to get into it, I would first note that there was not a single black person in all 576 pages of Freedom