Overview

Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is the first critical biography of one of today’s most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private interviews, Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen’s voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity. Franzen’s work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one’s fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests? Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer—from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life.

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9781501307171

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Reviews

Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is a virtuoso performance, a triumph of rigorous thought, canny, profound insight, verbal prowess, creative imagination, and magisterial judiciousness. Weinstein's wise, sensitive, and witty account of Franzen's growth and development makes a compelling argument for Franzen's place as America's preeminent writer. Like Franzen's fiction, Weinstein contemplates issues that fascinate and vex us all: the nature of values, personal growth, pain and suffering, intimate relationships, failure and frustration, hope and happiness. Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is literary and cultural critique of the highest order. Robert H. Bell, Frederick Latimer Wells Professor of English, Williams College, USA Weinstein's rigorously critical approach to The Corrections and Freedom reminds us that while Franzen is a legitimate contender for the mantle of literary greatness, the jury is still out. Instead of simply declaring victory for his man, Weinstein invites the reader to engage in a serious conversation about the art of modern American fiction. What more could one ask? David R. Riggs, Professor Emeritus of English, Stanford University, USA, and author of Ben Johnson: A Life and The World of Christopher Marlowe Philip Weinstein's new book on Jonathan Franzen is a probing and incisive study of an American novelist who has become one of the most recognized figures of the millennial generation. In this convincing auteur study, biographical detail and intensive close readings of the work are seamlessly combined to produce illuminating discussions of Franzen's career and celebrity status, his difficulties with writer's block, the encyclopedic range of his novels, and his relationship with David Foster Wallace. Weinstein successfully establishes the centrality of Franzen's work at mid-career and at a moment when his image and capacities as an important writer are beginning to emerge more clearly from the chemical bath of contemporary canon-formation. Patrick O'Donnell, Professor of English, Michigan State University, USA

Author Information

Philip Weinstein is the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore College, USA. The recipient of several NEH Fellowships and an ACLS Fellowship, and past President of the Faulkner Society, Weinstein has written books that range from James to Faulkner and Morrison (in American literature), and from Dickens through Joyce (in British literature). These include Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (1992), What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (1996), Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (2005). Weinstein's Becoming Faulkner (2010) was the recipient of the Hugh Holman Award for the best book written on Southern Literature. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (1995).

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