The only thing I have to
say about Jonathan Franzen’s highly successful novel, The Corrections,
is to say that reading it is like being forced to listen to a really boring old
man tell boring stories, an old man who seemingly hasn’t had a single
interesting observation in his entire life, or at least not capable of relating
an interesting experience. To add to this tedium, imagine that you are in
a really boring situation while being a captive audience to the old man;
perhaps you are waiting to renew your driver’s license. I walked out of
Franzen’s literary DMV at around page 100 (I should explain that DMV stands for
Department of Motor Vehicles, a government agency not quite cheery enough to be
described as Orwellian).
And of course there is a
character in the book who is a writer and also a bit about academia, the two
most boring and over-used themes in modern American literature. Note to
writers: if you are writing about writers or college professors you need to
quit your easy job in academia and get out and fucking find something to write
about. Contrast the story of this piece of crap novel with Alone in Berlin
which I recently wrote about here.I found myself literally shouting at The
Corrections. Why the fuck should I care what kind of paper something is
typed on or that the coffee can in which the wife suspects her husband is
storing his own piss is from the Yuban brand? I just see this as frivolous
detail.
This is the first thing
that I have read by the author. In a Guardian article about ten rules for writing, I thought that Franzen had the weakest
examples.
1 The reader is a
friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
- More like the reader is
a creative writing graduate student interested in clever word play simply for
its own sake.
2 Fiction that isn't an
author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth
writing for anything but money.
- I don't understand this
at all. I can't say that I have ever liked or respected a novel because it was
"an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown".
3 Never use the word
"then" as a ¬conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose.
Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to
the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
- He has a problem with
the word "then" for fuck's sake. I care much more about the scope of
a novel than the language.
4 Write in the third
person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself
irresistibly.
- Many of my favorite
books are in the first person. How the fuck can he even say this?
5 When information
becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is
devalued along with it.
- So writers shouldn't
bother with research simply because it’s easier than it was?
6 The most purely
autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more
autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
-Does anyone know what the
hell he is talking about?
7 You see more sitting
still than chasing after.
- Zola would have
disagreed. He went out and worked for his stories, discovered them. Zola's
observation in Germinal about the horses in the mines being brought down
as colts and living their entire lives underground is something you couldn't
invent sitting behind your computer.
8 It's doubtful that
anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
-He may actually have a
point with this one.
9 Interesting verbs are
seldom very interesting.
-Huh?
10 You have to love
before you can be relentless.
-No fucking idea what this
means.
In every one of these
"rules" it sounds to me the Franzen is trying to be super-clever
which is what his writing sounds like to me, a trivial story wrapped up in 24
karat prose.
Compare Franzen's
silly rules with the straight-forward advice offered by Elmore Leonard:
7
Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in
dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able
to stop.
Or how about this
priceless tip from Will Self:
3 Always
carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains
information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an
idea for ever.
I actually learned that
one a long time ago from my younger brother and I have followed his rule ever
since.
Oh dear. This is one of the best books I've ever read. Excellent prose, historically vital and very funny (also quite moving). Maybe give it another go in a few months?
ReplyDeleteI loved it too. It's all satire. He totally trashes the self-importance and self-absorbtion of academia, and goes after the foodies as well. In fact, he takes the piss out of just about everybody. I think you should cool off and give it another chance. (Did you read it in English or in translation? I read part of it in the Spanish translation and I don't think they got the irony.)
ReplyDeleteI started reading it in English. I will try it again in a few months. I'll admit that he is a good writer I just didn't care about the characters or situations and I really hate it when writers talk about writers or writing. I would have read all of it in Spanish just because I am getting the benefit if improving my vocabulary. Now I'm reading Ventanas de Manhattan by Antonio Muñoz Molina which I have to say is brilliant at times.
ReplyDeleteGood to others, boring to some. That's your opinion anyway, let's give him the benefit of being a good writer.
ReplyDeleteI apologize for writing my opinion on my blog. What was I thinking?
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