Jonathan Franzen's 10 rules for novelists

5 and 8 may piss people off.

I agree with 5.

I think 8 is poorly worded and thus pretentious.

Jonathan Franzen’s 10 Rules for Novelists

 

The “best” comments are glorious.

The leading one at the moment, with 10 up carets (not arrows) is:


The answer to the question, "Is Franzen still an unbearably arrogant, pretentious twat?"

It is indeed a resounding YES!

 

Mr. Franzen is certainly one of our best novelists.

The list is harmless. Generic. It's the kind of thing you'd see posted in the commons room of your local MFA program.

 

Disappointingly sound. Even 10 - You have to love before you can be relentless - is too little too late.

I wanted to hate. I could not.

 

I don't really get why people hate Franzen so much. He seems very good at his job to me. If he sounds a little arrogant, he has every right to be a little arrogant. He's earned it by writing massive, critically acclaimed, popular novels. Don't want the advice of an expert? Don't read it. Write your less successful book, or write no book at all, and then blame luck.

 

Or write your own way, and be very successful.

If every composer followed the same style, we would be listening to the same fucking music over and over with very little variation.

The process of trying to define something often destroys the very thing it is trying to define.

See Quality and Pirsig, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

 

Sure. But, like I always say, if Martin Scorsese wants to give me some advice about how to make a movie, I'm probably gonna listen.

 

I always liked what Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote about Franzen: “On a sunny day it would be raining on Jon Franzen.”

And his digs and attempts to undermine DFW’s non-fiction in death seem petty and full of jealousy. Reminding us a dead man was mortal and flawed is one thing. He took glee in it.

 

I agree. This list struck me as pretty banal. I don't care for Franzen's novels, but he's obviously talented and they appeal to others.

 

They were good friends, weren't they? Wallace and Franzen?

 

I’m a DFW fanboi (aka used to be an unbearable sad sack white young man) so I’m biased. But he’s taken so many petty shots at him in death that I wonder what that friendship was really like.

 

The cynic would say that Franzen is a punching bag largely because he is a straight white yuppie American male who rose to stardom writing about straight white American male yuppie things. I've heard criticism of his female characters, and my sense is that the literary community as a whole skews pretty heavily female, so maybe it is as simple as that. I'm sure that he comes across as a pretentious blowhard, but I'm not sure that he deviates greatly from the baseline of the literary community in that regard.