The folks at the National Book Award put it on their shortlist. (Don DeLillo's "Underworld"? David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"? Something by Irving or Doctorow or Pynchon or Donna Tartt?) His publisher took the time to write an introductory letter of tribute to reviewers. well, since the last great popular literary novel. He's not here to save the day - or even the modern literary novel.īut try telling that to the publishing industry, which has made his new novel, "The Corrections," The Book of the fall.Įven before its publication in early September, "The Corrections" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was being hailed as the greatest popular literary novel since.
He didn’t write it for his mother, who he says “became a full, amazing person in the last years of her life,” exactly, but he’s taken a significant departure with it-keeping an eye on the sort of story she might have enjoyed by taking a kinder tack toward his characters.(CNN) - Jonathan Franzen is not Superman or Mighty Mouse or William Shakespeare or William Faulkner.
His upcoming novel, Crossroads, is meant to be different. The anger he’s long harbored, manifested in everything from his self-admitted road rage to his vocal hatred of social media, informed his five previous novels, from his 1988 debut, The Twenty-Seventh City, to 2015’s Purity, he says. A homemaker who died of cancer in 1999, his mother, Irene, continues to be influential in the author’s life. “You must have observed the person carefully and you must have identified what’s likely to hurt the most, and then there’s the rhetorical challenge of delivering the painful blow without having your fingerprints on it,” he says.
“It requires a high level of subtlety,” says the 62-year-old novelist from his home in Santa Cruz, California. Jonathan Franzen’s mother knew how to wound him in just the right way.
0 kommentar(er)
