Jonathan Franzen Must Be Stopped!

I've hated the whingeing little bastard ever since I heard his staggeringly self-important interview on Fresh Air (ah, Terry Gross is good enough for you, but Oprah? God forbid!), but now, heav'n be praised, the forces of civilization are rallying against this threat!

...Franzen has made a separate peace with the anachronistic calling of being a serious writer in America, a lighthouse keeper who refuses to desert his post. In the personal essays that make up his first collection ... Franzen fuses the roles of fiction writer, social commentator, and concerned citizen, qualifying earlier positions and making amends for being an impetuous hothead in his Shelleyan youth. "I used to be a very angry and theory-minded person," he half-apologizes. "I used to consider it apocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don't read much Henry James.... I used to think that our American political economy was a vast cabal whose specific aim was to thwart my artistic ambitions, exterminate all that I found lovely in civilization, and also rape and murder the planet in the process." In that order of importance.

Join the Resistance! Read the rest of James Wolcott's clear-eyed, funny, and savage review at The New Republic!

(Just for Tom.)