Franzen v. Other Artists; Marcus Just Wants to Dance

Boo on this piece from Slate , which misrepresents Ben Marcus' essay in last week's Harpers, making it sound much more pompous and overblown then it was.

Indeed, Marcus never argues that Franzen's mini-piece in the New Yorker was what led to FC2's trouble with the NEA, he only drew the lines of a larger argument -- which is that hugely successful Franzen (and narrative/realist fiction elitism in general) picks out avant garde fiction for ridicule when it is already a small, tiny flea on the greater scene, constantly trying not to be drown by other more dominant (and totalitarian) culture forces.

I thought the emphasis on Franzen in the essay was too much and occasionally too personal -- but I also understood that Marcus was writing for a magazine who needed to have an angle. To have Franzen's sins stand in for the larger literary establishment (see: all the brough-ha-ha about the "unknown" nominees for the National Book Award) and the entire reverse-discrimination claim of experimental fiction being elitist which permeates mainstream literary discussions (see: New Yorker, Harpers, NYT Book Review, NY Review of Books etc.)

You can read the entire essay (finally I found it!) here. More discussion to come.

Meanwhile, read this interview with George Saunders:

"My political position at present is: Sick At Heart. I think you can see the idiocy of a lot of the administration's positions by observing the level of their inarticulateness."

It will clean your palate after that trash I led this post with.