Jonathan Franzen

The legend of Mark Leyner started small. It quickly grew out of control.

“I was an infinitely hot and dense dot. So begins the autobiography of a feral child who was raised by huge and lurid puppets. An autobiography written wearing wrist weights,” Mr. Leyner wrote in one of the riffs—“chapters” would be too conventional a description of his style—in his 1990 book, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.

Mr. Leyner, who lived in Hoboken, had already published I Smell Esther Williams, a collection of experimental stories that The Times called “prodigiously original.” My Cousin was met with similarly favorable reviews by critics, who saw in Mr. Leyner’s punctuation-flouting, form-bending, au courant prose a reflection of television’s growing influence on a new generation of writers. In 1992, just before the release of his third book, Et Tu, Babe, he was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a tank top, hoisting an inflatable dumbbell beside the cover line “Mark Leyner Is America’s Best-Built Comic Novelist.”  read more »

Speaking at Harvard yesterday during a discussion with literary critic James Wood, Jonathan Franzen said that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times.”

He was referring, of course, to Michiko Kakutani, who presumably got on Mr. Franzen's bad side with her brutal review of his recent memoir, The Discomfort Zone. In that review, Ms. Kakutani wrote: "there is something oddly preening about [Franzen's] self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable." Also: "Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about [Franzen's unhappy marriage] or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery."  read more »

The National Book Awards were held last night at the Marriot Marquee, bringing hordes of agents and editors--along with authors like Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen, and Joan Didion, who received a lifetime achievement award--to Times Square.

As widely predicted, Denis Johnson won the fiction prize for Tree of Smoke. Mr. Johnson’s wife accepted the award on his behalf because he is on assignment in Iraq.

In non-fiction, New York Times reporter Tim Weiner won for Legacy of Ashes, and in poetry, Robert Hass won for Time and Materials. Sherman Alexie won in the young adult category for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  read more »

In the October Harper's, Ben Marcus offers a lengthy state-of-the-novel essay, subtly titled Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction, in which he spends 13 pages beating up Jonathan Franzen--snubber of Oprah and William Gaddis alike--and the middlebrow fiction establishment he represents.

Marcus' essay follows Franzen's own Harper's state-of-the-novel essay, Perchance to Dream, from 1996. And Franzen's essay had followed Tom Wolfe's Harper's state-of-the-novel essay, Stalking the Billion-footed Beast, from 1989.

Using time-travel technology, The Media Mob has moved on to the year 2014 to read the next Harper's state-of-the-novel essay: Reading Harry Potter to The Machines: Crisis of Metaphor and Meaning in the Time of Our Robot Overlords by Josh Schwartz.

How do they all stack up?

Marcus: Experimental fiction is just as valid as mainstream fiction and deserves to be read despite critics like Franzen who think it a) is insulting and unreadable; and b) makes writers like himself feel dumb.

Franzen: Why isn't anyone reading anymore? Specifically, why isn't anyone reading young writers like Jonathan Franzen? He's good, I tell ya.

Wolfe: Fiction writers need to leave their comfort zone and do some reporting if they want to salvage the novel from preciousness.

Schwartz: These robots we built that control all aspects of our lives just don't get fiction.

Marcus: "As a writer of sometimes abstract, so-called experimental fiction that can take a more active attention to read, I would say that my ideal reader's Wernicke's area [of the brain] is staffed by an army of jumpsuited code-breakers, working a barn-size space that is strung about the rafters with a mathematically intricate lattice of rope and steel, and maybe gusseted by a synthetic coil that is stronger and more sensitive than either, like guitar strings made from an unraveled spinal cord, each strand tuned to different tensions. The conduits of language that flow past in liquid-cooled bone-hollows could trigger unique vibrations that resonate into an original symphony when my ideal reader scanned a new sentence."

Franzen: "The library America in which I found myself after I published The Twenty-Seventh City bore a strange resemblance to the St. Louis I'd grown up in: a once-great city that had been gutted and drained by white flight and superhighways. Ringing the depressed urban core of serious fiction were prosperous new suburbs of mass entertainments. Much of the inner city's remaining vitality was concentrated in the black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, and women's communities that had taken over the structures vacated by fleeing straight white males."

Wolfe: There's no such thing as a billion-footed beast, OK?

Schwartz: "0100000111110000011110000100010000010010100011001111011100001010111100001 110000010101010010011001100001100100001001000100100001000010001000010000101010101 0100000001000000100000010100000000000001100101011110101010101010111110101101111 0111100100111111110010011110101111010101010110111101011100010010011110111010111110 10111010101010001010110100011100111110001111110111101111110111111001111100111011100 1001100011100111101110011001101010." (The essay, such as it is, is written in binary code and hard-wired onto a ROM chip.)

Marcus: Numerous citations by bloggers, most of whom only read the excerpt online.

Franzen: The continuing existence of Jonathan Franzen.

Wolfe: Melanie Griffith's accent in Bonfire of the Vanities; The thoroughbred sex scene in Man in Full; I Am Charlotte Simmons.  read more »

Schwartz: Robots punished mankind with a mandatory curfew; Destruction of Harvard's Widener Library.