Is this a good read? I only know that it's an Oprah Book Club book, so I can't assume so, but figured I'd ask anyway

>I grew up in a friendly, egalitarian suburb reading books for pleasure and ignoring any writer who didn't take my entertainment seriously enough. Even as an adult, I consider myself a slattern of a reader. I have started (in many cases, more than once) "Moby-Dick," "The Man Without Qualities," "Mason & Dixon," "Don Quixote," "Remembrance of Things Past," "Doctor Faustus," "Naked Lunch," "The Golden Bowl," and "The Golden Notebook" without coming anywhere near finishing them.

never read an author who is this plebby. Some writers have lapses in taste, but this is unacceptable.

>ignoring any writer who didn't take my entertainment seriously enough
Holy shit, does he really think his writing is entertaining?

You can definitely tell the author is an asshole. None of the characters are really likeable. I liked it though. It gets at some truths about family life, business, and existence in general.

excellent
much better than the Brothers Karamazov

Corrections is GOAT, Freedom is dogshit

Mody Dick is a piece of shit. Nobody reads it apart from US HS pupils, and US nationalist researcher desperately looking for "the great american writer".

I wouldn't put "entertainment" so high, but I find he's mostly right. Pretentious authors are too lazy to write decent books. They should try to construct before pretending to be geniuses of deconstruction.

Don Quixote is both good and entertaining tho.

Please be joking...

It's Franzen's first novel and a strange thriller of sorts (far from perfect) also very reminiscent of Pynchon at times but still worthwhile. Twenty-Seventh City and Corrections are the only books worth reading by Franzen IMO.

I read the Corrections more than 10 years ago, so I don't remember a lot. But the plot is centered around the oppositions between 2 brothers and a sister. Each represent an archetype, the money life, the drugs life, the arts life (?).

The topic is really covered, never avoided. You understand a lot about the rivalries between brothers and sisters. There's both style and substance.

Brothers Karamazov, I found it boring, dated, pretentious.

I'm not someone that feels the need to constantly complain about protagonists not being "likable" enough but it does seem like his stories are populated almost exclusively by characters that are jerks and/or assholes and it can become grating after a while.

OP if you're still here, these are the type of people who like Franzen.

OP if you're here, this is the type of people who don't like The Corrections.

On the one-hand, there are the hard-working students, who try to read the classics to escape the fear that their dumb. They go to forums to talk about Joyce or Melville, hoping to do the same thing to impress girls one day. They soon give up reading, as they never really liked it. Or they read classics their whole life, hoping they'll get a medal at some point.

Then there are the people who really like to read. They soon move beyond the classics and read lots of contemporary stuff. Might be writers too.

OP here, still lurking.

I see the validity in both of these. I'm conflicted.

OP if you're here...

this is the type of person who posts here. Some fundamentalist who can't process that categorizing things is fucking retarded.

>there's three types of readers....

go wipe your ass with franzen's environmentally friendly toilet book paper

The fact that Corrections was chosen by Oprah is both a blessing and a curse. It's actually not at all easy-reading chick-lit. It's serious and ambitious, and the opening scene is not easy.

What I consider cheap easy-reading would be things like World according to Garp and probably all John Irving

The critic James Wood does a good job explaining this book's faults and Franzen's too as a writer. Forgot the name of the essay, but its a quick read and probably easy to find. Basically there's merit in it, but also a lot of postmodern masturbation - like the constant need to show the reader how smart you are by writing about obscure and technical things.

I'd say if you were looking for some "po-mo light" read Zadie Smith's new novel Swing Time. Far reaching without being self-indulgent.

I found it banal, uninteresting, and the product of a deeply unimaginative and undisciplined mind. A wanker, to borrow an explicitly non-American term to describe an all-American mediocrity. Updike's Rabbit series was already bombastic low mimesis, and this is a step down. I wanted all of these characters to be forced to work and die in a coal mine or as war refugees to teach them something about humanity.

Instead i got a family dinner (spoiler!!!) See even the major spoiler of the climax sucks dick.

If he was trying to look smart he sucks at that too. I kept waiting for some signs of intellect. Saki and oscar wilde would crucify this guy in witty rejoinder. He has no wit or intellectual agility.

Someone here recommended it as a good introduction to PoMo lit, boy were they wrong.

I really liked Purity. Going to read Freedom next. I don't know what to think about Franzen yet but Purity had a good story and good thoughts on idealism

Oh my god his fucking brain anatomy shit was so retarded

It's great, so is Freedom. Both her big influences on the later DFW. I think Franzen is one of the better writers of the 21sr century for sure.

Franzen, after is first two novels, is not PoMo. Not even close. And he's not really that intellectual in his novels. Sorry you can't handle realistic aspects that go over your head.

Franzen CAN'T go over anyone's head.

newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/18/farther-away-jonathan-franzen/amp

He spends most of it talking about himself though.

He wrote this book when feelings of inferiority clutched his heart, which was right after reading Infinite Jest. Go figure.

He also claimed the title was an homage to The Recognitions.

Which he never finished

>the -tions
Garbage
mom*

He said he finished it in that Mr. Difficult essay. It's J R, Carpenter's Gothic, A Frolic of His Own, and Agape Agape that he couldn't get through.

A JR, that's right

theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/09/fiction.reviews
Are you talking about this? It's a very positive review where he says nothing of the sort.

Well, well, well, if it isn't reddit.

this would be my stance.
you are an idiot.

Purity is straight GARBAGE though compared to his other stuff.
>recommending Zadie Smith
If you're into James Wood, just read his critique of White Teeth, in which he rips her a new one. Her most famous works are so overrated just due to her stature as a woman in lit, which is a shame since she has talent. NW was pretty decent but I haven't tried Swing Time. White Teeth and On Beauty are cringeworthy, and On Beauty, despite being a po-mo retelling of Howard's End, feels like a shitty version of the Human Stain instead.

OP here.

Update: I bought both Corrections and Freedom. Only because both cost me a combined $1.50 lmao.

Thanks for the input!

I enjoy them, if you are told not to like something you like and tailor your reading habits to that you will not have fun reading.

To be fair, I'm going into these blind with the exception of They at least sound somewhat interesting in terms of plot though. Reading mixed reviews.