On Monday, May 11, an elite few began receiving advanced copies of Purity, the latest release from Great Male American Author, Jonathan Franzen. “Oh pussycat,” the novel begins. “Oh god, no,” the public begs.
Few authors carry weight with the literary establishment like Franzen while also maintaining such a large posse of fanboys within the public at large. So imagine my surprise when, last summer, I finally picked up Freedom—winner of the John Gardner Fiction Award, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LA Times Book Prize, Obama-approved selection for Oprah’s Book Club—only to discover that it’s not very good.
Freedom, if you were lucky enough to miss it, is the 576-page story of a wife who cheats on her husband with her husband’s best friend. The husband then gets into birds, and Franzen spends the rest of the book complaining about how iPods are destroying society and hey, isn’t being comfortably middle-class the real American tragedy? No? Well, if you want his characters to seem selfish and interesting rather than selfish and boring, you’d better pretend that it is.
But being dull—a perception that, admittedly, is totally subjective—isn’t the true crime of Franzen’s craft. It’s his stilted, erotic fan fiction-esque descriptions of sex, descriptions that imply that he doesn’t really understand how sex works or what feels good, particularly for women—as well as his continued deployment of sexual metaphors that should condemn him to life in Literary Sex Jail.