Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage

by Philip Weinstein

Overview

Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is the first critical biography of one of today's most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private interviews, Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen's voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity.

Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests?

Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer-from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501307171
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/22/2015
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Philip Weinstein is the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore College, USA. The recipient of several NEH Fellowships and an ACLS Fellowship, and past President of the Faulkner Society, Weinstein has written books that range from James to Faulkner and Morrison (in American literature), and from Dickens through Joyce (in British literature). These include Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (1992), What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (1996), Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (2005). Weinstein's Becoming Faulkner (2010) was the recipient of the Hugh Holman Award for the best book written on Southern Literature. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (1995).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Introductory

Chapter One – Becoming Jonathan Franzen

Chapter Two – A Bugged World: The Twenty-Seventh City

Chapter Three – Something Wrong in the Underbrush: Strong Motion

Chapter Four – Status and Contract, Collapse and Arrival

Chapter Five – All in the Family: The Corrections

Chapter Six – Taking and Mistaking: Freedom

Chapter Seven – The New Yorker

Afterword – Hungering for Clean: Purity

Index

Editorial Reviews

08/17/2015
Delivering a solid but less than revelatory critical biography of “the best-known American novelist of his generation,” Weinstein (Becoming Faulkner) begins by depicting Franzen as the son of “earnest and ambitious parents” in the Midwest. The author covers Franzen’s early years at Swarthmore, time as a Fulbright scholar in Berlin, and ambitious yet little-noticed early novels The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, before coming to the spectacularly successful The Corrections and Freedom. Though clear and entertaining, the book falls into clichéd prose; when discussing the entrance to a challenging university honors program, Weinstein writes that “Franzen heard and heeded the call.” In Franzen’s early fiction, Weinstein explains, rage was the main emotional note, and Franzen would only later see that his true style and talent lay in sympathetically capturing the intricacy and complexity of family drama. The book also delves into Franzen’s essays, focusing on “Mr. Difficult,” which asserts that writers fall into two categories (“Status,” who write complex but prestigious novels, and “Contract,” who write more accessible, less ambitious books) and expresses Franzen’s wish to encompass both. According to Weinstein, “my book centers on the impossibility of Franzen’s negotiating seamlessly both these positions.” Although eminently readable and at times enlightening, Weinstein’s book adds little new information about the well-known Franzen. 8 color illus. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

...synthesizes from Franzen's conversations and correspondence with Weinstein, extant interviews, and Franzen's own writings a convincing psychological portrait of an author who recovered from depressive years of being angry with himself by projecting that anger and rage outward and then finding love of himself and others.

The Daily Beast

Philip Weinstein's new book on Jonathan Franzen is a probing and incisive study of an American novelist who has become one of the most recognized figures of the millennial generation. In this convincing auteur study, biographical detail and intensive close readings of the work are seamlessly combined to produce illuminating discussions of Franzen's career and celebrity status, his difficulties with writer's block, the encyclopedic range of his novels, and his relationship with David Foster Wallace. Weinstein successfully establishes the centrality of Franzen's work at mid-career and at a moment when his image and capacities as an important writer are beginning to emerge more clearly from the chemical bath of contemporary canon-formation.

Patrick O'Donnell

Weinstein's rigorously critical approach to The Corrections and Freedom reminds us that while Franzen is a legitimate contender for the mantle of literary greatness, the jury is still out. Instead of simply declaring victory for his man, Weinstein invites the reader to engage in a serious conversation about the art of modern American fiction. What more could one ask?

David R. Riggs

Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is a virtuoso performance, a triumph of rigorous thought, canny, profound insight, verbal prowess, creative imagination, and magisterial judiciousness. Weinstein's wise, sensitive, and witty account of Franzen's growth and development makes a compelling argument for Franzen's place as America's preeminent writer. Like Franzen's fiction, Weinstein contemplates issues that fascinate and vex us all: the nature of values, personal growth, pain and suffering, intimate relationships, failure and frustration, hope and happiness. Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is literary and cultural critique of the highest order.

Robert H. Bell

★ 10/15/2015
Weinstein's (Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English, Swarthmore Coll.; Becoming Faulkner) critical biography of this "Great American Novelist" is not so much about the man Jonathan Franzen (b. 1959) but the writer. From The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) to Freedom (2010), and with some reference to Franzen's newest novel, Purity (2015), Weinstein traces the author's oeuvre to uncover its creative impulse. He asserts that Franzen's artistic drive rests on his ambivalence, his simultaneous desire to both critique his world and be accepted and loved by it, a conflict that Weinstein defines as the "comedy of rage." Chapter-length close readings and biographical details frame, contextualize, and expand upon Franzen's major works. Drawing on the novelist's essays and previously published interviews as well as personal interviews and emails (Weinstein met Franzen when both taught at Swarthmore College), Weinstein assembles a careful and convincing argument. VERDICT Fluent and immersive, Weinstein's criticism will interest not only scholars but also writers. Strongly recommended for academic libraries.—Meagan Lacy, Guttman Community Coll., CUNY

Library Journal

Weinstein's Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is a must read for writers who want to understand how a novelist puts a body of work together. Weinstein (Swarthmore College) looks at how Franzen’s obsessions become the threads of his novels. Franzen—whose breakout novel was The Corrections (2001)—taps into all the anger, rage, disappointment, and insanity of an American family. When one reads Franzen, one is entertained. Weinstein reveals the building blocks of that entertainment—sex, bad parenting, misogyny, and the miserable pain that family members can perpetrate on each other. Being human is a messy business, and writing about how messy it is can be messy. Weinstein unravels how writing about that messy process takes place—how Franzen takes all that is wrong in the US and writes domestic novels that make him both a best-selling author and the darling of the literati. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.” -K. Gale, University of Nebraska, CHOICE

From the Publisher