Some people think Jonathan Franzen is a literary giant; others think he’s just another talent with gigantic arrogance—the kind that enables him to turn down Oprah when every other writer in the country would do headstands for the chance to get that kind of audience.
What you think of him will probably affect what you think of the surprisingly nasty anti-Updike rant he went on in one of the “footnote excerpts” from Franzen’s translation of Austrian writer Karl Kraus that was posted September 6, 2013 on the Paris Review Daily.
What set him off was “Updike’s famous comparison of a writer’s work to excretion: you take in life, digest it, and shit it out in paragraphs,” and that leads him to a remarkably long and vitriolic rant which feels in part like a confession and part shotgun blast that also manages to shower a few buckshot pellets in Philip Roth’s direction.
It all sounds terribly Freudian, doesn’t it? Kill the [literary] father(s), and all that . . . . Some may smile that he also may have confirmed the excrement analogy with an example of his own.
In the Depression 1930s, anything Jazz Age was wilfully refused, with Fitzgerald selling a total of, what?, 6 copies of his books the year of his death. Conversely, artists who liked a time which humbled human possibilities — as it’s all dirty human beings deserved — thrived. DFW and Franzen have given Gen X’s take on Updike, and the millenials will probably ascribe him worse–what a self-inflated douche! However, when times turn golden again, he’ll be brought back, and probably take Fitzgerald’s current position … the guy’s firmament, like Shakespeare.
Notice the giveaway line in Franzen’s ridiculous rant. Franzen was upset by “[Updike’s] lack of interest in the bigger postwar, postmodern, socio-technological picture…”.
In other words, politics. Franzen is a transparently political writer and attention whore (who pretends he loathes attention) who ultimately judges literature using a political criterion.
What bothers Franzen is that he is trying to write “the suburban literary novel” and producing work that is vastly inferior to Updike’s. Hence, the temper tantrums.