How did Franzen become so notorious among millennial American readers? His books are mostly inoffensive, in fact that's what more discerning critics tend to charge him with, but reading some of the stuff about him in the new literary media you'd think he was a raging misogynist.
On a related note, what does it say about American literary culture when thoughtful criticism is so often replaced with blunt moralizing? Readers seem only to want wholly sanitized work. Like they think reading is somehow morally beneficial, as if it will make you a good person or change the world or some shit, and so they demand writing has pure and noble aspirations. Even the absolutely minor transgressions of Franzen are somehow too much to allow.
White CIS male who doesn't have twitter. Like, eww. Seriously.
I think it's just boredom.
Bored people pick the stupidest fights/crusades about the most asinine things. When there's not much going on in your own little sphere, "minor transgressions" are big deals.
he's white
he's male
he's straight
he's not a feminist lapdog
thus he's the debbil
>>7406063
Debbil? What does that mean?
>>7406079
It's a quirky mispelling of devil, come on.
People in this thread baka.
It's not his books, it's his essays and interviews where he comes of like a dick. Plus he got a lot of hate for the time he got invited to Oprah's show and apparently commented to someone on how he thought her show and the audience was too middlebrow for him so he got disinvited.
>>7406426
How does he come off as a dick? He just seems like an upper-class Houellebecq without all the women shit.
He writes realistic women. In today’s environment, writing anything less than a Mary Sue makes you a "woman hater."
>>7406432
the women in his universe pretty much all are begging to be fucked by dominant men, and keep going back to men who lie to them over and over again. I think thats accurate for some women, but not all of them, and it gets rather stale.
>>7406444
>>>/reddit/
>>7406455
No YOU go back to r/RedPill
>>7406534
I'm already here bud
>>7406854
Where are you conjecturing all of that from?
>>7406854
Who are you quoting?
he shit-talked Fredrick Barthelme, which is reason enough to consider Franzen a limp-dicked hack
>>7406444
Why do his female characters have to be generalizable or universal? He's just writing a slice of life type deal, so what
>>7406871
At least it wasn't Don.
I'm usually a pretty good bellwether for this sort of thing, so I assume everyones as mad as I am that he never finished Moby Dick.
