Jonathan Franzen: The comedy of rage

Description

Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is the first critical biography of one of today’s most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private interviews, Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen’s voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity. Franzen’s work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one’s fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests? Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer-from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Preface Introductory Chapter 1 Becoming Jonathan Franzen “a small and fundamentally ridiculous person” Combat in the discomfort zone “HONORS PROGRAM” “Blood on the floor” “Deploring other people . . . had always been our sport.” Chapter 2 A Bugged World: The Twenty-Seventh City “somewhat like 1984” “stranger marrying stranger” Devi dervish Writing Barbara “seven miles off the ground” Chapter 3 “Something Wrong in the Underbrush”: Strong Motion “some eighth, nameless day of the week” “blindly and determinedly resistant to her touch” “keep walking” “the smell of infrastructure” Chapter 4 Collapse and Arrival, Status and Contract Status versus Contract “angry young man” “My Father’s Brain” Chapter 5 All in the Family: The Corrections Endgame: Alfred Laughing at shame: Chip Nothing is funnier than unhappiness: Gary “She gave him a little of what men liked”: Denise “A larger malaise, a painful emptiness”: Enid “corrections” and corrections Chapter 6 Taking and Mistaking: Freedom “Free Space” “With an easy hand” “Niceness” “The clairvoyance of the dick” (243) Crossing to safety Chapter 7 The New Yorker “public writer” de mortuis: Franzen and Wallace Screening The Corrections: The HBO fiasco “our media-saturated, technology-crazed historical moment”: The Kraus Project Afterword—“Hungering for Clean”: Purity Paradoxes of purity “The crime of love” “Rearranging chronologies” Taking chances “The terrible fluidity of self-revelation” Rage, impurity, and comedy Index