Franzen Gets Corrected

by Steven Zeitchik, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 9/8/2005

What is it with Harper's and Jonathan Franzen?

Nine years after his impassioned essay that helped define a career--and embolden his critics--The Corrections author will soon appear in the magazine in a different context: as a target.

In a fiery piece for the October issue, novelist and short-story writer Ben Marcus calls out Franzen for what he describes as a betrayal of Franzen's earlier principles of experimental and ambitious fiction in the author's recent journalism and criticism. Marcus' piece also indicts the literary establishment for closed-mindedness on said fiction.

The piece is ironically headlined "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen and Life As We Know It," with "A Correction" as the allusive subtitle." It will be published at the end of September.

A Harper's source described the pieces as Marcus being "troubled by the fact that Franzen is now using his position as pundit to discredit the literary style that failed him." Franzen's first two novels, Strong Motion and The Twenty-Seventh City, included elements of experimental fiction and, according to Marcus, didn't work very well as novels. The piece argues that Franzen turned to The Corrections (which Marcus likes, by the way) because Franzen couldn't do more challenging styles very well and, Marcus implies, because he craved fame.

Marcus singles out Franzen's piece on William Gaddis in The New Yorker and a review of Alice Munro for the NYTBR as among the places Franzen distances himself from more ambitious styles.

The piece's publication is made juicy because in the April 1996 Harper's Franzen wrote Perchance to Dream: In An Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels, in which he alternated between a polemic for the written word and his own ambivalence about modern culture. (Franzen once had a writing relationship with Harper's but he hasn't written for the magazine for some time.)

Whether the new piece will be received as a necessary come-uppance for a now-famous Franzen or sour grapes on Marcus' own part is of course the even juicier question.

Marcus also has more than Franzen on his mind. He generally assails critics "annoyed by literary ambition," and cites Laura Miller's famous essay in the NYTBR about this past year's National Book Award fiction nominees among others, he says pointedly, who "rushed to defend the industry from these unknown books."