By Rachel Sugar

With the recent Franzen-induced (but largely Franzen-irrelevant) fracas about the critical establishment’s coverage of women authors, one important gender-related point has been largely overlooked: Patty Berglund, the central female character in Franzen’s latest novel, is one of the most fully realized women in recent American fiction.

A monolithic Midwestern family saga, “Freedom” begins with Franzen’s characteristically arch tone—impeccably observed satirical portraits of suburbia and its inhabitants, hilarious and unforgiving: “There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.” He keeps a scientific remove from his subjects: “There were people with whom her style of self-deprecation didn’t sit well—who detected a kind of condescension in it, as if…[she] were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers,” he writes of Patty, Berglund wife and mother. And with the cool reserve of Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager, he reports on the sexual habits of the youngest Berglund: “When exactly Connie and Joey started fucking wasn’t known.” (An avid birder in his extra-literary life, Franzen could be describing the family lives of sparrows, assuming he didn’t care for sparrows much). Franzen has a superhuman eye for detail, and he finds endless targets for his smugly unforgiving commentary; were the next 500-plus pages to follow in a similarly critical vein, “Freedom” would be a coldly comic condemnation-by-ethnography. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: David Shankbone

The reviews are in and the critics have spoken: “Freedom,” Jonathan Franzen’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2001’s “The Corrections,” good. Really good. Presidential good (Obama’s been spotted with an advance copy). And sill the debate rages on: just how good is it?

In the New York Times newsroom, for example, chief book (and noted Franzen) critic Michiko Kakutani and NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus double down over the novel’s recurrent allusions to “War and Peace.” “Laughably conceited” cries she, in an otherwise unexpectedly enthusiastic review. Quoth Tanenhaus, soothingly: the Tolstoy cameo is “a self-mocking acknowledgement that not even the greatest literature can save us from ourselves.” Oh, the debates they must have over at the Gray Lady!

The Times is not alone in its praise. While “Freedom” is not officially out till the end of the month, New York magazine, Esquire and the LA Times (among others) rank the novel somewhere between “great” and “total genius.” And although the boyishly middle-aged notorious curmudgeon seems to have lost out Halle Barry for the cover of Vogue’s September issue, he’s a coverboy at Time (first author in ten years! One of only eighty-three ever!), and is extensively profiled in both magazines. Read the rest of this entry »

If success is a coin-flip, aspiring writer Ian Minot seems destined to perpetual tales. At 31, he’s too old for precociousness—the wunderkind ship has sailed without him—and yet even the growing stack of rejections can’t entirely mask the dregs of his Midwestern earnestness. And so he toils away, submitting his narrowly autobiographical short stories to all the right agents and editors (“Good luck placing this and all your future submissions elsewhere,” reads one particularly vicious response), lurking in the periphery of all the right parties, busily networking with no one. The majority of his energy, it seems, goes into stoking his hatred of Blade Markham, whose obviously fake, tales-of-the-‘hood memoir has captured the hearts and minds of Manhattan’s media elite.

That his unnervingly whimsical girlfriend is on the brink of New Yorker-sized success for “We Never Talked About Ceausescu,” a story collection chronicling her impoverished childhood as a Romanian orphan, only exacerbates Ian’s anxieties. (“Maybe if I were a beautiful Romanian orphan, I’d write better fiction too,” he muses.) Ian is not, you might say, at the top of his game when he finds himself taken under the wing of “The Confident Man,” a dandyish ex-editor with a vendetta against the industry that betrayed him. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it wrong to feel optimistic? You couldn’t be blamed if you didn’t. Yet while the country’s economy crumbles around us and less and less funds are available for the producers of the printed word, those in the literary world are finding new and inventive ways to stay afloat. We will not go down without a fight, and progress, of course, is key. So is awareness—in order to get the word out more efficiently (and, likely, to untether itself from the uncertain future of the paper form), Printers Row Book Fair changed its name from “Book Fair” to “Lit Fest” to have a title that better fully represents the weekend’s events, in time for its twenty-fifth anniversary edition. As is our custom, we time our annual Lit 50 list to the weekend’s events; this year’s list of local behind-the-scenes literati—no straight-up authors or poets this time—covers a large spectrum of Chicago’s world of words. As with past years we sought out those behind the smaller presses as well as the monumental figures. Some new names have emerged and many staples appear again, but all tirelessly labor to bring this ancient art to the community at large. Read the rest of this entry »