Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
He is a No 1 bestseller who is also hailed as the foremost literary novelist of his generation. Nine years after the phenomenal success of The Corrections, has Jonathan Franzen pulled off the same feat with his new novel?

Blake Morrison, The Guardian, Saturday 18 September 2010

'It's scary," the poet John Berryman said to the friend who'd just informed him of the death of Robert Frost, "Who's number one? Who's number one? Cal is number one, isn't he?" Cal was Robert Lowell, generally considered to be a better poet than Berryman, though the hoped-for answer was "No, John, it's you." And perhaps the friend would have told Berryman he was number one if he hadn't been so shocked by his competitiveness.


"Who's number one?" might be a trivial game, but it isn't only poets who play it, and since the deaths of Saul Bellow (2005), Norman Mailer (2007) and John Updike (2009) it's a question that's inevitably come up in relation to American fiction. Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, and Philip Roth, surely the greatest living writer not to have won the Nobel, might head most lists. Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Marilynne Robinson are names to contend with too, and Annie Proulx, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, Paul Auster, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Joyce Carol Oates have all written highly acclaimed novels. And then there's a younger generation coming through – Jhumpa Lahiri, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Foer.
A wide range of talents, each with claims to have written, or to have the potential to write, the Great American Novel. But for now the only show in town is Jonathan Franzen, whose new novel, Freedom, received glowing reviews when published in New York last month ("brilliant", "a masterpiece", "an indelible portrait of our times") and earned him that ultimate imprimatur, an appearance on the cover of Time magazine.

Back in 1996, with two novels behind him but blocked in his efforts to write a third, Franzen wrote a gloomy essay for Harper's magazine about the difficulty of being a novelist in a culture dominated by television – and cited the cover of Time as clinching evidence of "how much less novels now matter to the American mainstream than they did when Catch-22 was published". Once (indeed twice) the face of James Joyce had appeared there. So, too, James Baldwin and John Cheever, which meant that Franzen's father, though not a reader, got to hear about them. But nowadays, Franzen complained, Time was giving its covers to the likes of Scott Turow and Stephen King, novelists better known for the size of their contracts than for their literary talent. "The dollar is now the yardstick of cultural authority," Franzen lamented, "and an organ like Time, which not long ago aspired to shape the national taste, now serves mainly to reflect it."

When Franzen appeared on the cover of Time in August, his earlier putdown wasn't mentioned in the accompanying interview. But he was described as "uneasy", and perhaps the unease arose from a suspicion of Time's rationale for choosing him. Was he being put forward as the foremost literary novelist of his generation, one whose best-known work stands comparison with The Naked and the Dead, Gravity's Rainbow, American Pastoral, Beloved and Underworld? Or because that book, The Corrections, has been a phenomenal commercial success, with sales – nearly 3 million copies worldwide – that put him up there with King and Turow? Unease about being categorised as a popular novelist – "schmaltzy and one-dimensional" – was what led to his being disinvited by Oprah Winfrey's book club in 2001; since he was "uncomfortable and conflicted", she said ("a pompous prick", as someone else put it), it would be wrong to have him on the show. And yet it's clear Franzen wants to reach a large audience – to be the kind of writer his father might have read had he been a reader, a Tom Wolfe as well as a Thomas Wolfe, a No 1 bestseller who's also a literary heavweight.

The full story at The Guardian.