Thoughts?

Read his godawful "Mr. Difficult" essay and shut the fuck up.

bretty good

can't fault the writing. it gets slow sometimes, but you always get what he's going for. some scenes hit more close to home than anything i've encountered in media

>the way chip feels when he tries to kick his presents up the stairs
>the flashback to the kid stranded at the dinner table picking boogers off the bottom of the table

Best review out there:
exiledonline.com/jonathan-franzen-will-rim-bobos-for-book-of-the-month-fame/

purity is my favorite of his novels. strong motion second. Corrections is excellent too, and more interesting and idiosyncratic than Freedom, to my mind. i had a lot of thoughts while reading it. I do think it's very prescient, and I really relate to a lot of Franzen's ideas and his general relationship with the postmodern condition and such. His memoirs and his books of collected essays are highly recommended

that sites hate for DFW and Franzen is hilarious

Franzen deserves all of it. DFW only deserves about half.

Franzen is probably the most talented and perceptive mainstream author of the last twenty five years. the hate for him on Veeky Forums is totally unwarranted.

>Franzen is probably the most talented and perceptive mainstream author of the last twenty five years.
If that's true then that's just because of the cataclysm in literature, and we're all fucked.

>all the sexual innuendos when the whore daughter fucks the boss, her boss, her boss's wife, and implicitly wants to fuck their children.

What a ride.

Being a "talented" and "perceptive" mainstream author means about as much as being smeared with slightly less shit then everyone else on the dung heap. And that's only if you're willing to give him credit for being that, which I'm not.

Idiotic book for idiotic American housewives.

You're right of course, but you have to realize the pseuds of Veeky Forums don't want to read somebody who reminds them of their dad. They want wacky pothead hi-jinks, big scary doorstoppers they can bravely read at Starbucks, Eastern Europeans whose names they practice pronouncing, and an academic superhero who dispenses Oprah-esque platitudes wrapped in a veneer of jaded self-consciousness. Mature topics like commentary on middle class milieu, satires of domestic melodrama, and digging into the psychological and moral complexity of marriage are frankly too advanced for this board.

This.

Franzen is good. Is he GOAT or God-tier? No. But he's talented. And he's well worth reading. He writes family dramas. Zeitgeist stuff. He represents our time better than 99% of other authors out there. Plus, he's "literary" and popular, which means (for you, as an aspiring author), he's probably worth reading. He's competition, and formidable competition at that. Learn from him.

Weapons grade retardation.

Bringing up Oprah especially in the context of a post defending Franzen shows just how clueless you are.

>pothead hi-jinks, big scary doorstoppers

is franzen really better than these authors

Boring. The greatest sin a novel can commit.

It was enjoyable to read.

I could care less about middle class plebs.

No better than alright, had it moments.

There he is! The small angry Jew who yelled at the trumpet player in New York City! I found him!

book of the century so far