In this month’s Prospect Elaine Showalter reviews Purity, the new novel by Jonathan Franzen—he is, she says, "a man with talent to burn." But Franzen is almost as good at sparking controversies as he is at crafting sentences. Here are four of the most memorable:Cat among the pigeons
Franzen is a keen birdwatcher and in April this year
suggested that tackling climate change quickly is incompatible with protecting birds, who are being killed by structures like wind turbines built to tackle global warming. He criticised a report by bird conservationist group Audubon, who allege climate change threatens birds. In reply, they called his essay a “Woody Allen-esque lament.” Former director of conservation at the RSPB Mark Avery (Aviary?), responded curtly to Franzen, saying “all the evidence suggests that climate change will be very harmful to birds."
Gender agenda
In 2010, Franzen's novel
Freedom was released to highly positive reviews:
one critic for the New York Times called it "a masterpiece of American fiction." In response, American novelist Jennifer Weiner complained that male authors received preferential treatment in the literary world. "When a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L", she said, "but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book." She even invented a hashtag, #Franzenfreude, to describe the pain she felt at Franzen's popularity. Franzen responded briefly in 2013, when he used the term 'Jennifer Weiner-ish self-promotion" in an essay, but gave a lengthier reply in February during
an interview with Butler University's literary journal, when he accused her of "freeloading on the legitimate problem of gender violence."
Tweets=twits
In a Guardian article in September 2013, and then again on BBC Radio 4 a month later, Franzen bemoaned the rise of social media sites. Initially writing that they are “intolerably shallow forms of social engagement,” he followed up his complaints on the
Today Programme. “I see people who ought to be spending their time developing their craft… making nothing and coerced into this constant self-promotion”, he said. The response—mainly on Twitter—was one of disbelief. Francesca Main, editorial director at Picador, wrote “It’s alarming that J-Franz believes this nonsense." One can only imagine how much he’d hate Twitter if he knew users had taken to calling him J-Franz.
Get Oprah it
In 2001, Oprah Winfrey picked Franzen’s
The Corrections—released that year—as one of the novels in her book club. In response, Franzen publicly insulted her literary taste, calling some of the books she’d previously picked “schmaltzy” and “one-dimensional,” and said his featuring on the programme didn’t fit with his place in “the high-art literary tradition." (One wonders how secure his place in this club is, if a quick appearance on a day time chat show is sufficient to undermine it). Oprah subsequently withdrew her invitation for him to appear on her show. The two repaired things, though, and In 2010 they finally shared a screen.
