![]() ![]() He wanted to write books that would be too angry for most readers, too chilly, exhausting and self-conscious. Money, fame, the imprimatur of Oprah’s book club: all were to be disdained if they required the approval of middle-aged women who read novels on planes or while recovering from knee surgery – women like his mother. ![]() ![]() In essays and interviews, he acknowledged that his over-full sentences and abstruse metaphors were intended to impress graduate students and his father. For years he dedicated himself to the conspiratorial plot of the ‘systems novel’, which would ‘capture the way large systems work’ so that readers would ‘understand their place in those systems better’. W hat would the young Jonathan Franzen – an acolyte of Gaddis and Pynchon who identified with Kafka – make of the novels he would go on to write? That man was determined that ‘Franzen’ should connote ‘high art’, his own portmanteau of ‘high modern’ and ‘art fiction’. ![]()
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