(Which, however unappealing, wasn’t quite unfair.) Nonwhite millennials could hardly have been said to manifest at all. White millennials in those novels manifested as virtue-sodden muppets destined to inherit their more fleshed-out parents’ most complacent properties. And after Freedom (2010 good, not great) and Purity (2015 bad), it was clear that the rift dividing Franzen from the fresher generations was largely of his own creation. The self-image of the male protagonist in Crossroads’ opening chapter as “a fatuous, obsolete, repellent clown” applies equally to the author’s public image in young eyes, and no one knows it better than the laureate of loathing himself. Like Norman Podhoretz, Lena Dunham, and Donald Trump, Franzen in the past two decades has been the sort of white who’s seemingly predestined to command attention (cringing condescension) through egregious error. Slick millennials and zoomer nihilists concur: he’s kind of a dork. For those under a certain age, confessing proudly to a taste for Franzen’s novels just isn’t done. His loyal yet aging audience, his millions, and his National Book Award for The Corrections (2001) are scant protection from the indifference of newer readers and critics that sank the postwar phallocrats, and today’s newer readers and critics have not seen much in Franzen. It’s a fate that Franzen, whose prominence is as close a thing as fiction in this time can offer up to equal Updike’s or Mailer’s Cold War stature, seems eager to acknowledge and avoid.
They can’t imagine how much they will lose. It’s 1972 the dinosaurs still stamp and bellow. WHEN, LATE IN JONATHAN FRANZEN’S NEW NOVEL CROSSROADS, a woman, reuniting with an ex-flame after thirty-one years, notes “recent Mailer, recent Updike” on his shelves, the shock of the old is both soft and profound.
0 kommentar(er)
