Nov 19, 2015
KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here
with the delightful Philip Weinstein about his latest
work Jonathan
Franzen: The Comedy of Rage. This 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Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private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.
As Weinstein relates, 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.