Is this crap even worth the hassle?

>I make some disparaging remarks about the restaurant’s frumpy decor but he declines to join in. For him its unpopularity is an advantage. “There’s a certain sameness to high-end restaurant experiences, at least in New York, I’m kind of nauseated by the clientele. They’re total 1 per centers and they’re doing it every day and there’s something kind of just disgusting and like the pigs in Animal Farm about the whole thing.”

Imagine taking an imbecile like this seriously

>“I don’t like to hire people to do work that I can do,” he says. So that means he does his own dusting in the New York apartment he shares with his girlfriend? Franzen looks slightly shifty. “We do have a cleaner, although even that I feel some justification because we pay her way more than is standard and she’s a nice Filipino woman who we treat very well and we’re giving her work.”

>The Madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.

>Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he'd been sleeping since lunch. He'd had his nap and there would be no local news until five o'clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong table, listening in vain for Enid.

>capitalizes Madness
>writing "something terrible was going to happen" like a child
>three descriptives separated by commas ("sun low, a minor light" > "trees restless, temp...., the whole..." > "the dront and hiccup.., the ripening...., the smell...") repeated a bunch of times in the first paragraph alone
>storm windows "shuddered"?! come on dude
>"gerontocratic suburbs" is gay and tryhard to include so early on. If you're going to go with a calm, omniscient angle then talk in a simple way not like some gay demographer
>"making it clear Alfred is OLD by referencing a wicker chair, a nap, sinus infections - nigger we KNOW he's old he lives in a "gerontocratic" suburb after all like duuuuuh

I don't know why but Franzen just annoys me. I can't place it. People say he is smugly mediocre and I'm tempted to agree. It's like he knows he's going to be read.

>It's like he knows he's going to be read.

And by no one discerning at that

franzen's books take about 30 minutes to read. just read it and decide for yourself. don't worry, you'll have plenty of time to get high and pretend to read pynchon

i like this dude

I thought it was a fun read up until the last 150 pages or so.

reading pynchon while high is pretty cool, though.

yeah it's actually pretty good. Great imagery, well-written and believable characters

Imagine looking like this

He looks like Ray from Achewood.

Veeky Forums has hope with this true shitposts

This thread makes me remember what water is

what do you mean?

Halfway through it, already regretting ever starting it. A talking turd just called an old man suffering from Parkinson's a bigot.

I enjoyed it a fair amount. It's super well written and pretty funny/witty at times, but sort of tame--about a white upper-middle class American family

if pynchon did it, you'd love it... i know because he did it

Fuck Gary.

Pretty much everyone else in the book has broadly sympathetic flaws, but Gary's just a vapid, prideful, cunt.

Desu Gary was the character who made me the most uncomfortably aware of my own flaws

based on that greentext alone i like him more than you

you're always better off reading Pynchon and smoking weed

>Chip
>sympathetic flaws

/thread