Franzen Passing Out Brownies?

Good buddies James Wood and Jonathan Franzen had a sit down in front of an audience last night at Harvard.  From the sounds of it, Franzen had a few things to get off of his chest about book reviews:

“The reviews tend to be repetitive and tend to be so filled with error that they’re kind of unbearable to read, even the nice ones,” Franzen said. “The most upsetting thing nowadays is the feeling that there’s no one out there responding intelligently to the text,” he said. “So few people are actually doing serious criticism. It’s so snarky, it’s so ad hominum, it’s so black and white.”

“The stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times,” he added, referring to controversial, Pulitzer-Prize winning reviewer Michiko Kakutani.

Speaking to the success of “The Corrections”—a National Book Award winner that examines how children want to correct the mistakes of their parents’ lives, and how parents live vicariously through their children—Franzen identified two types of readers: one who reads because it is the “right thing to do” and one of a more intellectual nature.

Franzen placed himself in the second category of what he termed the “resistant” or “isolated” reader.

“Some wrong turn was taken at some point between the age of eight and usually age 20, but often in junior high, where if things aren’t working out so well socially for you, for whatever reason, you spend a lot of time with books,” Franzen said. “Not surprisingly that pool of readers tends to give us most of our writers.”