What’s that, you ask? In Franzen’s purview, it’s a writer who operates under the assumption that There, Franzen took Gaddis to task for being too much of a “Status” writer. Difficult” (which is relevant again, anyway, with Dalkey Archive Press having recently reprinted The Recognitions and J R).
To understand what Franzen’s getting at here, we need to exhume his ten-year-old attack on William Gaddis, “ Mr. Um-huh? What do lipograms have to do with social networking? And how are they irresponsible? like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium. To grasp all of that, let’s look more closely at a different part of his complaint: Instead, I think Franzen is making a deeper, more disturbing criticism-the latest salvo in a decade-long attack on certain writers, certain kinds of fiction, and ultimately, a certain construction of art itself. But I’m less convinced that Franzen has “lost perspective,” as Attenberg puts it, or “doesn’t understand what Twitter is for,” as Roxane claims.
is of course right: small press writers and publishers need those tools to promote themselves and their works. This follows Roxane’s Tuesday post, and Jami Attenberg’s initial observation/criticism of something she heard Franzen say.
