The New York types are falling over themselves to praise Jonathan Franzen and his new novel (cover of Time, rave by Sam Tanenhaus), but if an excerpt I read online is anything to go by, I'll let this parade pass me by. I actually couldn't finish the excerpt; it was that suffocatingly bad. A sample:
"In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture ...
"There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary?"
All of this seems expressly designed by Franzen to appeal to the very people who can logroll his product. It reeks of falsity.
I'll stick with my Honore de Balzac. At 15o years' distance, he knew more about people in the 21st century than Franzen ever will.
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