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Jonathan Franzen's 10 rules for novelists

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Alma, Nov 15, 2018.

  1. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    Fair question about that.

    I mentioned Cormac specifically because he's got at least two great - maybe defining - novels in the 21st century.

    Worth asking what our criteria are.
     
  2. TheSportsPredictor

    TheSportsPredictor Well-Known Member

    Didn't realize McCormac wrote The Road and No Country just last decade. Thought they were much older.
     
  3. typefitter

    typefitter Well-Known Member

    This will make me sound like the poorly read moron I am, but... When I was a much younger man, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I read Charlie Pierce writing sports in Esquire and I remember having the clearest feeling: Oh, I didn't know you could do that. Like, I didn't know that's what sportswriting could be, or what non-fiction writing could be. Probably fifteen years later, a grown-ass man and a writer of some weariness and experience, I read The Yiddish Policemen's Union and had the same thought: Oh, I didn't know you could do that.

    I recognize that we're talking fiction here, and the easy line is that novelists can do whatever they want. But Yiddish was so far beyond the scope of my imagination, I hadn't even thought something like that was possible. Not because I thought that it was impossible. Because I didn't even know that it existed as a strain of writing. It was like discovering a new species of fish that changes your understanding of the entire ocean.
     
    Double Down likes this.
  4. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    Feel exactly the same way about Christopher Logue's "War Music."

    After a long lifetime of reading and writing, I had no idea anything like it was even possible.

    Took the top of my head right off.

    My book of the century so far, at least in those terms.
     
    Double Down likes this.
  5. CD Boogie

    CD Boogie Well-Known Member

    I liked almost everything about that novel except the title.
     
  6. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    Some of what we're talking about can come down to a matter of taste, and some of it depends on how we're classifying what generation each novelist belongs to.

    Greatest living novelist and Greatest novelist/fiction writer of their generation are two different categories, IMO.

    That's why the Weiner argument against Franzen always bugged me. She's not "in Franzen's class" anymore than she's in Margaret Atwood's class. Franzen is to Chabon and Lahiri as Roth was to, say, Pynchon and Don DeLillo and Marilynn Robinson. All heavyweights, all born within 10-15 years of one another, all authors of some of the greatest works of their generation or any generation.

    Atwood is a great, great writer. She's also 78 years old. One of the reasons Franzen gets so much more heat than, say, Cormac McCarthy is there has always been this pseudo-and-somewhat-ridiculous-probably-invented-by-Hemingway *crown* awarded to the best novelist in-his-or-her prime, and I think Chabon and Franzen are, at least arguably, in their prime in the way that McCarthy is not. (He's 85 and it seems like he's done writing.)
     
  7. CD Boogie

    CD Boogie Well-Known Member

    Chabon seems like his best days are behind him, too. He has written a lot more for movies, TV and even as a songwriter lately. Everyone has to attend to the exigencies of supporting a family and keeping themselves happy, but selfishly I wish he had stayed more focused because I think his fiction writing has suffered from the competing considerations. Franzen, too. He spent a lot of time writing adaptations of The Corrections and Purity, which never came to anything but as pilot for The Corrections.
     
  8. Small Town Guy

    Small Town Guy Well-Known Member

    I thought Moonglow was great return to form for Chabon after the bumpy Telegraph Avenue ride (though I liked Telegraph more than a lot of people).

    Yiddish is my favorite too. I go back and read this passage at least once a year:
     
  9. typefitter

    typefitter Well-Known Member

    Yiddish? Apparently its working title was Hatzeplatz. That was its name when it was optioned for film, five years before it was actually published. Which might be some kind of record. I'd love to see that movie, but I'm guessing if we haven't seen it by now...
     
  10. typefitter

    typefitter Well-Known Member

    That is a fucking fabulous paragraph. Fuck me.
     
    OscarMadison likes this.
  11. swingline

    swingline Well-Known Member

    Reading this thread, I feel incredibly stupid.
     
  12. TheSportsPredictor

    TheSportsPredictor Well-Known Member

    Neil Gaiman should be included on this list. He doesn't get the prime literary awards like others who have been mentioned, but he's won two Hugos and a British National Book Award (three different books). He's also written a bunch of children's books a bunch of comics and graphic novels. People that like him absolutely love him.

    Meanwhile, I just got my Franzen essay collection delivered to me at the library. Read a few pages of this first essay. He touches on a subject that's been discussed here -- mainly that the essay has become a vehicle by which people write about themselves ala a diary entry.

    BTW, 10 Rules for the Novelist is one of the essays.

    Which reminds me of this passage from the tome I just finished, Lost Empress. (Tome because it is 600 pages.) Bet this guy doesn't like Franzen.

     
    Slacker and OscarMadison like this.
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