Jonathan Franzen
Subtitle: the comedy of rage
By: Philip Weinstein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 230
ISBN-13: 9781501307171
Subjects: American Authors; Biography
Description: "Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is the first critical biography of one of today's most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and a private interview (along with published ones), Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen's voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and his art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity. Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a broad mass of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has staying power, is high art? Even more acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the two 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"--

"The first critical biography of Jonathan Franzen, exploring the trajectory of his career and the intersections of his life and work"--
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Chapter One: Introductory; title: Chapter Two: Becoming Jonathan Franzen; title: Chapter Three: A Bugged World: The Twenty-Seventh City; title: Chapter Four: Something Wrong in the Underbrush: Strong Motion; title: Chapter Five: Status and Contract, Collapse and Arrival; title: Chapter Six: All in the Family: The Corrections; title: Chapter Seven: Taking and Mistaking: Freedom; title: Chapter Eight: The New Yorker; title: Index.