Lol he remains the only man to have his Oprah status revoked after he dunked on the book club and refused to appear on her show.
Hes based for that alone in my books
True but Mac dunked on her in his own way. Took a phat check to Thot Patrol all her stupid ass basic b***h questions and give her zero back when she all bit insulted him for being dirt poor as a young man
Was based when she asked why he didnt write female characters and he laughed in her face and said “I dont pretend to understand women”
9 months ago
Anonymous
>“I dont pretend to understand women”
This is one of my biggest gripes about McCarthy and one of the areas where Franzen shines, you don't need to understand women or even people to write them, you just need to understand your own perception of them well enough that you can write about them as more than just a stereotype or reaction. Franzen ultimately builds his characters off of those flat stereotypes and uses their interactions to give them depth, we primarily learn about his characters through the other characters.
But McCarthy is not really about characters, they are abstractions for him which makes his response to that question all the more irritating and not really an answer. He never really demonstrates an understanding of anyone through his characters so why not use women more? He has always seemed to play it safe in a weird way, sure he will push the boundaries of literature but I never got the sense of his pushing his own boundaries outside of Suttree.
9 months ago
Anonymous
gayzen has some of the worst female characters in modern male literature. Even I was offended when I read Freedom.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Cormac was always more into trannies.
9 months ago
Anonymous
This makes it seem a bit ironic that McCarthy rejected Tolstoy and Henry James, as both of these have written novels about women with great success
The "franzen is based for never appearing on oprah unlike mccarthy" gays (
Lol he remains the only man to have his Oprah status revoked after he dunked on the book club and refused to appear on her show.
Hes based for that alone in my books
,
He did what McCarthy lacked the balls to do.
) got real quiet after this post
9 months ago
Anonymous
It is besides the point and that was just shitposting, obviously. McCarthy gays got rather quiet after I actually discussed things on a level deeper than "based" and attempted to engage a McCarthy gay in discussion.
9 months ago
Anonymous
McCarthy is a much better writer. Franzen simps, good lord...
The "franzen is based for never appearing on oprah unlike mccarthy" gays ([...], [...]) got real quiet after this post
It is besides the point and that was just shitposting, obviously. McCarthy gays got rather quiet after I actually discussed things on a level deeper than "based" and attempted to engage a McCarthy gay in discussion.
lmao, so let me get this straight, he apologized to oprah and then went on anyway?
what a cuck
9 months ago
Anonymous
Yes. Here's a snippet: https://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/jonathan-franzen-on-women-and-relationships-in-freedom-video
Franzen regularly does things like unapologetically and sympathetically have character rape his pregnant wife while thinking about Schopenhauer.
“Even just to invest two thousand,” she murmured. “With a four-dollar differential—ack!”
Alfred had come to his senses and forced the succubus away from him.
(Schopenhauer: The people who make money are men, not women; and from this it follows that women are neither justified in having unconditional possession of it, nor fit persons to be entrusted with its administration .)
The succubus reached for him again but he grabbed her wrist and with his other hand pulled her nightgown up.
Maybe the pleasures of a swing set, likewise of sky-and scuba-diving, were tastes from a time when the uterus held you harmless from the claims of up and down. A time when you hadn’t acquired the mechanics, even, to experience vertigo. Still luxuriated safely in a warm inland sea.
Only this tumble was scary, this tumble came accompanied by a rush of bloodborne adrenaline, as the mother appeared to be in some distress—
“Al, not sure it’s a good idea, isn’t, I don’t think—”
“The book says there is nothing wrong—”
“Uneasy about this, though. Ooo. Really. Al?”
He was a man having lawful sexual intercourse with his lawful wife.
“Al, though, maybe not. So.”
Fighting the image of the leotarded teenaged ΤWAT. And all the other c**tS with their breasts and their ASSES that a man might want to FRICK, fighting it although the room was very dark and much was allowed in the dark.
“Oh, I’m so unhappy about this!” Enid quietly wailed.
Worst was the image of the little girl curled up inside her, a girl not much larger than a large bug but already a witness to such harm. Witness to a tautly engorged little brain that dipped in and out beyond the cervix and then, with a quick double spasm that could hardly be considered adequate warning, spat thick alkaline webs of spunk into her private room. Not even born and already drenched in sticky knowledge.
To provide some context. A page prior to this Enid attempted to manipulate Alfred by giving him head despite his not wanting it and not even liking oral sex. Franzen plainly suggests the Enid not only tried to rape Alfred but that her rape was worse since it was for manipulation, Alfred's rape was only removing her ability to manipulate him by addressing the arousal she caused. Franzen is filled with situations like this which make it difficult to pick a side and the context provided by the previous 300 pages makes it even more difficult to pick a side. We never feel like people are victims or abusers, we see there is more too it and that the victim hood which Franzen does address is of a larger sort well beyond that of an individual. Franzen always holds his characters accountable for their actions regardless of the consequences.
The people who b***h about Franzen here have never read him.
On the contrary these passages and the one on imaginary chocolate turds make me want to read him.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Cool?
9 months ago
Anonymous
Cool?
A small animal, a mouse, scurried in the layered shadows at the foot of Enid’s bed. For a moment it seemed to Alfred that the whole floor consisted of scurrying corpuscles. Then the mice resolved themselves into a single more forward mouse, horrible mouse, squishable pellets of excreta, habits of gnawing, heedless peeings—
“butthole, butthole!” the visitor taunted, stepping from the darkness into a bedside dusk.
With dismay Alfred recognized the visitor. First he saw the dropping’s slumped outline and then he caught a whiff of bacterial decay. This was not a mouse. This was the turd.
“Urine trouble now, he he!” the turd said.
It was a sociopathic turd, a loose stool, a motormouth. It had introduced itself to Alfred the night before and so agitated him that only Enid’s ministrations, a blaze of electric light and Enid’s soothing touch on his shoulder, had saved the night.
“Leave!” Alfred commanded sternly.
But the turd scurried up the side of the clean Nordic bed and relaxed like a Brie, or a leafy and manure-smelling Cabrales, on the covers. “Splat chance of that, fella.” And dissolved, literally, in a gale of hilarious fart sounds.
To fear encountering the turd on his pillow was to summon the turd to the pillow, where it flopped in postures of glistening well-being.
“Get away, get away,” Alfred said, planting an elbow in the carpeting as he exited the bed headfirst.
“No way, José,” the turd said. “First I’m gonna get in your clothes.”
“No!”
“Sure am, fella. Gonna get in your clothes and touch the upholstery. Gonna smear and leave a trail. Gonna stink so bad.”
“Why? Why? Why would you do such a thing?”
“Because it’s right for me,” the turd croaked. “It’s who I am. Put somebody else’s comfort ahead of my own? Go hop in a toilet to spare somebody else’s feelings? That’s the kinda thing, fella. You got everything bass ackwards. And look where it’s landed you.”
“Other people ought to have more consideration.”
“You oughtta have less. Me personally, I am opposed to all strictures. If you feel it, let it rip. If you want it, go for it. Dude’s gotta put his own interests first.”
“Civilization depends upon restraint,” Alfred said.
“Civilization? Overrated. I ask you what’s it ever done for me? Flushed me down the toilet! Treated me like shit!”
“But that’s what you,” Alfred pleaded, hoping the turd might see the logic. “That’s what a toilet is.”
“Who you calling shit here, butthole? I got the same rights as everybody else, don’t I? Life, liberty, the pussuit of hot-pussyness? That’s what it says in the Constitution of the You Nighted—”
This goes on for a few pages.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Take it from me, read pynchon instead
9 months ago
Anonymous
This might be a shock to you but you can read both.
To provide some context. A page prior to this Enid attempted to manipulate Alfred by giving him head despite his not wanting it and not even liking oral sex. Franzen plainly suggests the Enid not only tried to rape Alfred but that her rape was worse since it was for manipulation, Alfred's rape was only removing her ability to manipulate him by addressing the arousal she caused. Franzen is filled with situations like this which make it difficult to pick a side and the context provided by the previous 300 pages makes it even more difficult to pick a side. We never feel like people are victims or abusers, we see there is more too it and that the victim hood which Franzen does address is of a larger sort well beyond that of an individual. Franzen always holds his characters accountable for their actions regardless of the consequences.
The people who b***h about Franzen here have never read him.
Damn, that's pretty edgy with some satirical layer of dark comedy. I expected Franzen to be more of a well-behaved social realist.
He does not fool around or play into ideologies, everyone and everything is fair game. Freedom is closer to straight realism but really it is a more refined and less blunt revision of The Corrections.
For the Oprah audience. Never post this dwarf-faced fraud again
Lol he remains the only man to have his Oprah status revoked after he dunked on the book club and refused to appear on her show.
Hes based for that alone in my books
He did what McCarthy lacked the balls to do.
True but Mac dunked on her in his own way. Took a phat check to Thot Patrol all her stupid ass basic b***h questions and give her zero back when she all bit insulted him for being dirt poor as a young man
Was based when she asked why he didnt write female characters and he laughed in her face and said “I dont pretend to understand women”
>“I dont pretend to understand women”
This is one of my biggest gripes about McCarthy and one of the areas where Franzen shines, you don't need to understand women or even people to write them, you just need to understand your own perception of them well enough that you can write about them as more than just a stereotype or reaction. Franzen ultimately builds his characters off of those flat stereotypes and uses their interactions to give them depth, we primarily learn about his characters through the other characters.
But McCarthy is not really about characters, they are abstractions for him which makes his response to that question all the more irritating and not really an answer. He never really demonstrates an understanding of anyone through his characters so why not use women more? He has always seemed to play it safe in a weird way, sure he will push the boundaries of literature but I never got the sense of his pushing his own boundaries outside of Suttree.
gayzen has some of the worst female characters in modern male literature. Even I was offended when I read Freedom.
Cormac was always more into trannies.
This makes it seem a bit ironic that McCarthy rejected Tolstoy and Henry James, as both of these have written novels about women with great success
Like a petulant gay lmao he's still part of that book club
Cormac is actually great and bigger than that, though.
>I'm sorry if, because of my inexperience, I expressed myself poorly or unwisely
The "franzen is based for never appearing on oprah unlike mccarthy" gays (
,
) got real quiet after this post
It is besides the point and that was just shitposting, obviously. McCarthy gays got rather quiet after I actually discussed things on a level deeper than "based" and attempted to engage a McCarthy gay in discussion.
McCarthy is a much better writer. Franzen simps, good lord...
lmao, so let me get this straight, he apologized to oprah and then went on anyway?
what a cuck
Yes. Here's a snippet: https://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/jonathan-franzen-on-women-and-relationships-in-freedom-video
You can watch the full interview on oprah.com
embarrassing
He’s better than most of the shit posted here which is barely literature
nah
He is pretty great, who cares what IQfy thinks. The Corrections and Freedom were fantastic, looking forward to reading more of him.
>great
Too big a word
No
Frick him and frick birds
gayzen is a shitty author. Go back.
Franzen regularly does things like unapologetically and sympathetically have character rape his pregnant wife while thinking about Schopenhauer.
“Even just to invest two thousand,” she murmured. “With a four-dollar differential—ack!”
Alfred had come to his senses and forced the succubus away from him.
(Schopenhauer: The people who make money are men, not women; and from this it follows that women are neither justified in having unconditional possession of it, nor fit persons to be entrusted with its administration .)
The succubus reached for him again but he grabbed her wrist and with his other hand pulled her nightgown up.
Maybe the pleasures of a swing set, likewise of sky-and scuba-diving, were tastes from a time when the uterus held you harmless from the claims of up and down. A time when you hadn’t acquired the mechanics, even, to experience vertigo. Still luxuriated safely in a warm inland sea.
Only this tumble was scary, this tumble came accompanied by a rush of bloodborne adrenaline, as the mother appeared to be in some distress—
“Al, not sure it’s a good idea, isn’t, I don’t think—”
“The book says there is nothing wrong—”
“Uneasy about this, though. Ooo. Really. Al?”
He was a man having lawful sexual intercourse with his lawful wife.
“Al, though, maybe not. So.”
Fighting the image of the leotarded teenaged ΤWAT. And all the other c**tS with their breasts and their ASSES that a man might want to FRICK, fighting it although the room was very dark and much was allowed in the dark.
“Oh, I’m so unhappy about this!” Enid quietly wailed.
Worst was the image of the little girl curled up inside her, a girl not much larger than a large bug but already a witness to such harm. Witness to a tautly engorged little brain that dipped in and out beyond the cervix and then, with a quick double spasm that could hardly be considered adequate warning, spat thick alkaline webs of spunk into her private room. Not even born and already drenched in sticky knowledge.
To provide some context. A page prior to this Enid attempted to manipulate Alfred by giving him head despite his not wanting it and not even liking oral sex. Franzen plainly suggests the Enid not only tried to rape Alfred but that her rape was worse since it was for manipulation, Alfred's rape was only removing her ability to manipulate him by addressing the arousal she caused. Franzen is filled with situations like this which make it difficult to pick a side and the context provided by the previous 300 pages makes it even more difficult to pick a side. We never feel like people are victims or abusers, we see there is more too it and that the victim hood which Franzen does address is of a larger sort well beyond that of an individual. Franzen always holds his characters accountable for their actions regardless of the consequences.
The people who b***h about Franzen here have never read him.
Soap opera tier
I was excited to read Franzen, but now this has completely turned me off.
On the contrary these passages and the one on imaginary chocolate turds make me want to read him.
Cool?
A small animal, a mouse, scurried in the layered shadows at the foot of Enid’s bed. For a moment it seemed to Alfred that the whole floor consisted of scurrying corpuscles. Then the mice resolved themselves into a single more forward mouse, horrible mouse, squishable pellets of excreta, habits of gnawing, heedless peeings—
“butthole, butthole!” the visitor taunted, stepping from the darkness into a bedside dusk.
With dismay Alfred recognized the visitor. First he saw the dropping’s slumped outline and then he caught a whiff of bacterial decay. This was not a mouse. This was the turd.
“Urine trouble now, he he!” the turd said.
It was a sociopathic turd, a loose stool, a motormouth. It had introduced itself to Alfred the night before and so agitated him that only Enid’s ministrations, a blaze of electric light and Enid’s soothing touch on his shoulder, had saved the night.
“Leave!” Alfred commanded sternly.
But the turd scurried up the side of the clean Nordic bed and relaxed like a Brie, or a leafy and manure-smelling Cabrales, on the covers. “Splat chance of that, fella.” And dissolved, literally, in a gale of hilarious fart sounds.
To fear encountering the turd on his pillow was to summon the turd to the pillow, where it flopped in postures of glistening well-being.
“Get away, get away,” Alfred said, planting an elbow in the carpeting as he exited the bed headfirst.
“No way, José,” the turd said. “First I’m gonna get in your clothes.”
“No!”
“Sure am, fella. Gonna get in your clothes and touch the upholstery. Gonna smear and leave a trail. Gonna stink so bad.”
“Why? Why? Why would you do such a thing?”
“Because it’s right for me,” the turd croaked. “It’s who I am. Put somebody else’s comfort ahead of my own? Go hop in a toilet to spare somebody else’s feelings? That’s the kinda thing, fella. You got everything bass ackwards. And look where it’s landed you.”
“Other people ought to have more consideration.”
“You oughtta have less. Me personally, I am opposed to all strictures. If you feel it, let it rip. If you want it, go for it. Dude’s gotta put his own interests first.”
“Civilization depends upon restraint,” Alfred said.
“Civilization? Overrated. I ask you what’s it ever done for me? Flushed me down the toilet! Treated me like shit!”
“But that’s what you,” Alfred pleaded, hoping the turd might see the logic. “That’s what a toilet is.”
“Who you calling shit here, butthole? I got the same rights as everybody else, don’t I? Life, liberty, the pussuit of hot-pussyness? That’s what it says in the Constitution of the You Nighted—”
This goes on for a few pages.
Take it from me, read pynchon instead
This might be a shock to you but you can read both.
Damn, that's pretty edgy with some satirical layer of dark comedy. I expected Franzen to be more of a well-behaved social realist.
He does not fool around or play into ideologies, everyone and everything is fair game. Freedom is closer to straight realism but really it is a more refined and less blunt revision of The Corrections.
>“With a four-dollar differential—ack!”
As an ESL who knows "ack" mainly from IQfy memes it feels weird to see it used in a serious literary novel
Wait... This "Ack" was in the book? LMAO. Memes become reality or reality births memes?
Not him but it seems to be real
Anon, I think your paraphrasing ruined it. Can you post the original and quote it in his own words? I'd like to see how his prose is.
the short bus must have sprung a leak, fricking thing is like a clown car and the moron just keeps pouring out.
Yes, quite strange of McCarthy. For what he said about James and Proust, he really is a frickass in a lot of way.
He's Oprah approved
Insipid in the flesh as well.