Jonathan Franzen is totally overrated!

Apparently, very big things are happening in American Literary Fiction (ALF). In August, Time Magazine put author Jonathan Franzen on its front cover and the whole of the ALF establishment went bonkers. I confess that I haven’t read Franzen’s new ‘masterpiece’, but last year I did force myself through his previous work, 'The Corrections'.

Franzen is in a difficult spot at the moment. Proclaimed, as he is, as the doyen of ALF, he sneered at and refused his Oprah Winfrey Book Club nomination and yet on the front of my copy of 'The Corrections' it reads ‘360 billion copies sold’. For someone so widely popular (there are probably only about four people who really care that Franzen is on the front of Time) how can he maintain his hubris?

Perhaps it is all an act and he doesn’t really need those thick, black-framed glasses and he doesn’t really work in a dark room with ear plugs in. His image has been as finely crafted as that of Katie Price, whose book I also haven’t read yet so can’t fully comment on its merits, so it seems to me that the ALF world is just a highbrow version of the Asda Price bargain book bin.

For a novel centring on a family reunion I found myself totally unaffected by 'The Corrections'. The characters (a Schopenhauer-quoting, Parkinson’s-suffering Dad, a bitter but hopeful mother, a pseudo-lesbian daughter... oh I can’t go on – read it if you must) were parodies of an age that was too knowingly constructed by Franzen to feel in any way real.

With Franzen’s books, as perhaps with the entire ALF genre, there is a huge amount of brain, but if his new novel 'Freedom' follows in a similar vein, and it does again have as its focus American middle class family life, I can’t help wondering where its heart is.