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Tremendously difficult to know whether or not any text is one of the best of the last decade (whatever the decade). We don't have the historical distance yet to know. Moreover, there are undoubtedly hidden gems out there that will take time to emerge, given the nature of publishing. After all, Franzen had the advantage of Oprah and writers like Paul LaFarge and William Vollman have not.
Moreover, I find Franzen to be of a breed of New Conservative writers who, rather than taking up the attempts of modernist and postmodernist writers (Joyce, Pynchon, Woolf, Acker) to throw off the influence of the past and experiment with new forms and styles, embraces what I find to be outdated notions of character and straightforwardness. His characterization of William Gaddis, whose novel JR is without a doubt one of the most important American novels of the last fifty years, as "Mr. Difficult" in order to dismiss him is unconscionable. Difficult does not equal good, but it should not be denigrated as being inimical to the point of writing, a point which becomes prescription for a writer like Franzen. Certain themes and issues are best explored (perhaps) in certain genres or with a certain style. Franzen's exploration of the family in contemporary America works very well in the form/style/genre he has chosen for it: s fairly straightforward melodrama. The exploration of economy, music, artistic production, etc. that is JR works very well in the form of a nearly 800 pp novel without any chapter breaks composed almost exclusively of dialogue without the benefit of phrases like "s/he said." So while I applaud Franzen's efforts (I do, in fact, like the novel quite a bit), I am not yet ready to call it the best novel of the past decade because I don't think we are ready yet to make that call (if I were to make that call I would give the nod to Don DeLillo's Underworld, with the Corrections somewhere between #s 5 and 15). Moreover, I don't think that it does rank near the top of fiction of the last fifty years, even if we were to limit ourselves to just American lit. After all, we have the major work of Pynchon, DeLillo, Acker, Auster, Barth, McElroy, Mailer, Heller, McCarthy, Vonnegut, Morrison, Walker, Hawkes, Mathews, Gaddis, Gass, Roth, Cooper, and Burroughs to remember (and those are the one's I can think of off of the top of my head). This list does not reflect the burgeoning recognition of the importance of contemporary science fiction either, with writers like Delany, Le Guin, Gibson, Tiptree, Leyner, Disch, Cadigan, Stephenson, Dick, etc. producing of having produced novels that rank right up there with the best mainstream fiction around. Throw in writers from other countries--Murakami, Calvino, Sebold, Coetzee, Ondaajte, Naipaul, Achebe, N'gugi, and a slew of others--and I just don't see the case for Franzen or his novel.
All that said, The Corrections is very good. |
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