Some people think Jonathan Franzen is a literary giant; others think he’s just another talent with gigantic arrogance\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some people think Jonathan Franzen is a literary giant; others think he’s just another talent with gigantic arrogance\u2014the kind that enables him to turn down Oprah when every other writer in the country would do headstands for the chance to … Continue reading