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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / Speaking of cliches

Speaking of cliches

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I doubt that I’ll read the new Jonathan Franzen book. I thought that “The Corrections” was fine, but it was mostly like a longer, less funny “White Noise” in the same way that Frank Rich columns are mostly like longer, less funny Wonkette posts. But I’m pretty excited about the book anyway, because I think that it has the potential to generate a lot of ridiculous critical reaction. Bobo is up to the challenge, not just because he capitalizes almost every noun in this column but because of stuff like this:

ferociously seeking some universal truth that can withstand the tough scrutiny of their own intelligence…

[….]

Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond…

[….]

low-ceilinged world…

God damn that warmonger can bring the overwrought wanking. There’s a chance we’ll see one of those week-long “Book Club” things that will blow this out of the water, but the bar has been set pretty high.

Reader Interactions

63Comments

  1. 1.

    stickler

    Utterly offtopic, but damn! I’m getting a McDonald’s ad just below this post. Holeee shite, Balloon Juice has hit the big time. The Golden Arches!

    and… Jonathan Franzen, BoBo, and Oprah(!) can all bite me. One at a time.

  2. 2.

    Steve

    I have no idea who Jonathan Franzen is, but I recognize this species of wanking from when the last Tom Wolfe book came out.

  3. 3.

    Nemo_N

    I’ve noticed that people rely more and more on fiction (books, movies, etc.) to signal their intelligence and/or maturity. Disturbing.

    Also too, “literary fiction”.

  5. 5.

    geg6

    Sorry, but I loved, loved, loved “The Corrections” and will be purchasing “Freedom” or anything else Franzen writes the minute I know I have cash to blow. He’s an amazing writer, IMHO, and I can never resist such talent.

    OT, but speaking of talent (but moving in the opposite direction of amazing) I see that Howard Fineman is now no longer Newsweek’s Howard Fineman and can be safely characterized as a DFH. Or, more realistically, a PUMA. Or whatever the fuck HuffPo is these days. I really don’t know because I haven’t been there since late 2008.

  6. 6.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @stickler:

    I don’t dislike Jonathan Franzen, I just think he’s good, not great. I like that he takes himself so seriously, I like when novelists do that.

    EDIT: Anyway, I can how some people like him better, that’s not my point.

  7. 7.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I thought the Corrections didn’t live up to the hype, myself. There were parts I liked, but it could’ve used a ruthless editor. I don’t know if I’ll read the new one.

    Bobo’s kind of an interesting figure in matters like this. Enamored of his own UofC “Great Books” education, a bit deluded as to how rarified a thing that is. It’s at once snobbish and naive that he was ‘impressed’ that Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard) had actually read that obscure Neibuhr fella! What would you call him? A pedigreed middlebrow?

  9. 9.

    El Cid

    Okay, but there are — to my great surprise — some insights by Bobo on what he suggests the novel to be. Right or wrong on his slant on the book and its portrayals, there’s this:

    Social critics from Thoreau to Allan Bloom to the S.D.S. authors of The Port Huron Statement also made critiques about the flatness of bourgeois life, but at least they tried to induce their readers to long for serious things. “Freedom” is a brilliantly written book that is nonetheless trapped in an intellectual cul de sac — overly gimlet-eyed about American life and lacking an alternative vision of higher ground.

    I’m sure he’d quickly append his apparent praise of the moral focus via literature of SDS to denounce their goals as extreme and fringe and unsilly.

    Of course, it says a lot about Bobo that he feels a novelist should give him an alternative vision of higher ground. I dunno, The Dispossessed.

    In any case, had Obama ever included in his writing a positive reference to the writings of the SDS and their vision of a greater America, it would have closed the Bill Ayers — Saul Alinsky — SDS Triangle of Leftist Terrorism.

  10. 10.

    Tom Levenson

    Damn it, Mr. Business and economics editor…I foolishly jumped out of the boat and read that just before going to bed — and now I want to stay up for several hours rereading Thoreau and ripping Bobo a new one for exceptionally fatuous misuse of a real thinker. Oh f***. Maybe some bourbon will help.

    Seriously — Bobo, of all people complaining of writers stereotyping the suburbs? That same guy who wrote Bobos In Paradise? Salad bars in Applebee’s Bobo?

    If Satan bought Brooks’ soul in exchange for his inexplicable career, he got mobbed.

  12. 12.

    gbear

    It already gotten a glowing review on Fresh Air w/ Terry Gross, so everything else is just icing.

    Local reviews of the book were annoyed that he botched a lot of the details about Crocus Hill in St. Paul. From the clips I’ve read, I agree.

  14. 14.

    Harley

    Gosh. And I thought anti-intellectualism was for Republicans. It’s a very very good novel, sometimes a great one, by one of the best novelists we have. Reading it need not signal anything other than the desire to read a good book. Scorning novels for being literary is no different than Sarah Palin hating New York for not being part of the Real America. Both are empty boasts, narcissism parading as criticism.

  15. 15.

    Glenndacious Greenwaldian (formerly tim)

    So true, this.

    I might give the Franzen a read when I can pick it up at the local thrift store for a buck.

    The hype over this book has been vomitatious. He has a hell of a publicity machine.

  16. 16.

    Glenndacious Greenwaldian (formerly tim)

    @Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:

    Why do you think Sully gets a tingle up his leg over Obama?

    Sully gets a tingle up his leg over Obama because he would totally like to do him. Not much more or less of a reason.

    He was completely hot for Cheney and Rumsfield during the very manly runup to the Iraq invasion, if you recall, and I would venture to guess their alleged daddy type hotness at the time was a substantial reason for Andrew’s war lust.

  17. 17.

    JGabriel

    DougJ:

    I don’t dislike Jonathan Franzen, I just think he’s good, not great. … Anyway, I can see how some people like him better, that’s not my point.

    That pretty much sums up my feelings towards Franzen too. I enjoy his work, which I think is very good, and his seriousness, but I don’t quite get the claims to greatness that other people make for him.

    Anyway, I’ll probably get around to reading Freedom at some point within the next six or twelve months, but there’s no rush.

    .

  18. 18.

    Sly

    Social critics from Thoreau to Allan Bloom to the S.D.S. authors of The Port Huron Statement also made critiques about the flatness of bourgeois life, but at least they tried to induce their readers to long for serious things.

    Is he referring to the original Port Huron Statement, or the compromised second draft?

  19. 19.

    geg6

    @Harley:

    I would agree. And I really can’t think of another contemporary American fiction writer that writes as well, with the single exception of Michael Chabon.

    But then, too few people read enough today to even know good writing when it smacks them right in the face. Personally, I cherish and honor it.

  20. 20.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @Harley:

    I’m sorry but I think “literary fiction” is a silly term. And I love a lot of stuff like Franzen though I don’t love Franzen so much.

  21. 21.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @geg6:

    I liked Wonder Boys a lot but it started to grate after a while. I can’t put finger on it and I’m no literary critic, but Chabon and Franzen just don’t move me the way Don DeLillo or Denis Johnson does. Chabon writes beautifully, but it has a bit too much of an Iowa workshop feel to it all sometimes.

  22. 22.

    Harley

    Agree re “literary fiction.”. But I’m fine with either word on it’s own. Obviously I’m a big Franzen fan. But JFTR? There’s no one I’d rather read than Denis Johnson. Already Dead? Tree of Smoke? That’s as good as it gets.

  23. 23.

    El Cid

    A take on a different 19th Century American writer who focused on freedoms of varying types, by George Orwell in 1932’s “Inside the Whale“, a review of Tropic of Cancer. Orwell sees Miller as having an “affinity” for Walt Whitman.

    There’s a really striking parallel between Orwell’s review of Miller and Bobo’s review (column on) Franzen. And not just the references to earlier literary movements speaking on Freedom.

    …[T]here is something rather curious in being Whitman in the nineteen-thirties. It is not certain that if Whitman himself were alive at the moment he would write anything in the least degree resembling Leaves of Grass.
    __
    For what he is saying, after all, is ‘I accept’, and there is a radical difference between acceptance now and acceptance then. Whitman was writing in a time of unexampled prosperity, but more than that, he was writing in a country where freedom was something more than a word.
    __
    The democracy, equality, and comradeship that he is always talking about arc not remote ideals, but something that existed in front of his eyes. In mid-nineteenth-century America men felt themselves free and equal, were free and equal, so far as that is possible outside-a society of pure communism. There was povery and there were even class distinctions, but except for the Negroes [Note: well, yes, except for that!] there was no permanently submerged class.
    __
    Everyone had inside him, like a kind of core, the idea, a knowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it without bootlicking. When you read about Mark Twain’s Mississippi raftsmen and pilots, or Bret Harte’s Western gold-miners, they seem more remote than the cannibals of the Stone Age.
    __
    The reason is simply that they are free human beings. But it is the same even with the peaceful domesticated America of the Eastern states, the America of the Little Women, Helen’s Babies, and Riding Down from Bangor.
    __
    Life has a buoyant, carefree quality that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your belly. If is this that Whitman is celebrating, though actually he does it very badly, because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to feel instead of making you feel it. Luckily for his beliefs, perhaps, he died too early to see the deterioration in American life that came with the rise of large-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap immigrant labour.
    __
    Miller’s outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and nearly everyone who has read him has remarked on this. Tropic of Cancer ends with an especially Whitmanesque passage, in which, after the lecheries, the swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the imbecilities, he simply sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical acceptance of thing-as-it-is.
    __
    Only, what is he accepting? In the first place, not America, but the ancient bone-heap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and regimentation.
    __
    To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films [;)], and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but, those things among-others. And on the whole this is Henry Miller’s attitude.

    Now, maybe there’s the kind of ambitious, guttural look at Freedom in America and in Our Special Relationship Nation that Bobo wants to see.

    Anyone who has never read Orwell’s essays, reviews, letters, and journalism — for free at the linked site, and published in a 4 volume set — have never read George Orwell.

  24. 24.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @Harley:

    I really need to read “Tree Of Smoke”. I bought it hardcover and books always look so foreboding in hardcover. So I never start it. “Already Dead”, “Jesus’ Son”, and “Fiskadoro” are all brilliant and literary in the best sense of that word.

  25. 25.

    J

    @El Cid: Agreed. It’s amazing to see a sequence of sentences in a Brooks piece that (at least appears) to make as much sense as these. Hard to believe they’re by the man who wrote those Mr. Hobbes/Mr. Hume columns, which were pure drivel.

    DougJ: surely this post deserved a ‘Burkean bells’ tag?

  26. 26.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @J:

    Sorry I missed the Burkean Bells tag. I’ll add it.

    I think that Brooks makes sense here, I just can’t take how hard he sells it. And name dropping Thoreau without naming it? Totebag catnip obviously, but very annoying.

  27. 27.

    tomvox1

    Bobo sez:

    The political world is caricatured worst of all [in Franzen’s new novel]…The Republicans talk like the warmonger cartoons of Michael Moore’s [imagination].

    Um, yeah…

  28. 28.

    El Cid

    @El Cid: OOPS! Huge mistype. Anyone reading the thing would have noticed. Published in 1940 actually.

    And the last bit of Orwell for the evening, from the same review essay:

    “When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.”

  29. 29.

    El Cid

    @tomvox1: Good thing there were no TeaTard neighbors for Bobo to be horrified at about their simplistic portrayal and their paranoid conspiracy minded dialogue and shouts of imagined betrayals.

  30. 30.

    MikeJ

    In Madison who cares about Beaujolais nouveau?

    The only time I ever met people in the US who cared about it was when I lived in DC and the french embassy had a yearly party to celebrate. Fortunately, midnight in Paris corresponds to right after you get off work in DC.

  32. 32.

    Harley

    @DougJ

    Tree of Smoke is pretty daunting. It’s a big book in every way, and a pretty bold attempt to navigate a world that resists navigation by definition. It’s like one of Ellroy’s American history novels rewritten by Thomas Pynchon. Then rewritten by Robert Stone.

    Or something like that. It’s also damn entertaining.

  33. 33.

    WaterGirl

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice

    I’m sure there’s a story behind this. What did I miss?

  34. 34.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @MikeJ:

    No one anyone cares about beaujolais nouveau. It’s a minor fad from 25 years ago. You can only get about three of them in the United States without going nuts on wine-searcher and in most areas you can only get the Dubouef, which isn’t that good.

    Franzen misses too many details like that, same way as he had it be a big edgy thing for the sister in Corrections to have a short ribs specialty. That wouldn’t be an edgy thing, they’re a classic of French cuisine. He shoves in these “telling details” but he fucks them up, the same way Bobo does in his magazine articles.

    I like Franzen, don’t get me wrong, but the details feel thought-about yet incorrect, in the same way some of the writing feels worked-on yet not rigorously edited. That’s why I say good but not great.

  35. 35.

    Anne Laurie

    @DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
    __

    Do people really use the phrase “literary fiction”?

    People who defend Jonathan Franzen do, to separate Very Serious Literature that happens to be made-up prose stories from all that popular lowbrow crap — ‘chick lit’ and ‘genre’ — that gets bought & read by people who… you know… watch Oprah. The use of the phrase ‘literary fiction’ is one of those ‘tells’ advertising a BoBo wanna-be.

  37. 37.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @Harley:

    Those Ellroy books are really something. I loved the LA quartet, but had a tough time with American Tabloid.

    Ellroy’s writing is one of the reasons I don’t like the label “literary fiction”. A lot of what he writes would be classified as “genre fiction” but it’s much better than a lot of the stuff that gets labeled “literary fiction”. A world where the guy who wrote Snow Falling On Cedars gets a higher-toned label than James Ellroy is a fucked up world.

  38. 38.

    mcd410x

    “What a mess” “Part of it’s good, right?”

    Some wonderful individual episodes and moments — The Wheel, Meditations in an Emergency — but this season of Mad Men has been consistently, stunningly brilliant.

  39. 39.

    ally

    Not that Franzen needs me to help fuel his PR machine, but I just finished “Freedom” and hugely enjoyed it. It’s funny, humane and very satisfying.
    I’d hated “The Corrections,” so wasn’t planning to read the new one, but found out the opening chapter of “Freedom” had appeared in the New Yorker last year as a most entertaining short story. So I took a chance on “Freedom.” Now, it’s my husband’s turn — he’s in the living room laughing out loud over it.
    How many books bring you bird-watching, gentrification, war profiteering, and indie rock in one package?
    Its only real flaw, I suppose, is that the wingnuts who pop up here and there are portrayed pretty negatively. This was OK by me, however.
    (If anybody wants a free sample, that first chapter is still on the New Yorker’s web site:
    http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/06/08/090608fi_fiction_franzen?printable=true)

  40. 40.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @ally:

    Maybe I’ll check it out if I get my work in order and finish “Tree Of Smoke”.

  42. 42.

    MikeJ

    OT: but I watched about 30 second of that NBC event thing. Is the big secret that the blackblackblackityblack president isn’t really from the US?

  44. 44.

    General Stuck

    Sometimes they write it down for you. Meet Jim Russel, NY congress critter hopeful and his really interesting ideas.

    The comments about preserving ethnicity – and lauding eugenics, a social movement that’s become yoked to practices by the Nazis – put Russell far to the right in the state, and are not likely to play well in the suburban district, predicted Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist.

    Dude thinks he lives in Alabama.

  45. 45.

    Harley

    @DougJ

    Spot on about Ellroy. And yes, a nice antidote to Snow Falling on Fucking Cedars. The LA Quartet is one of my favorite reads.

    One last thing re Freedom. Franzen does a fair job writing about indie rock and roll, and that’s a very tough nut — hell, even Jonathan Lethem ran aground trying to get it right. And JFTR, William Gibson gets it even righter in Zero History — so that’s something, two books in a month that both take a good swipe at the music business and the business of music. (That Gibson’s rock and roll avatars are women makes it even more interesting.)

    Novel-wise? That’s a black swan.

  46. 46.

    D-boy

    I will second (or third) the Denis Johnson love. Jesus’s son is great (as is the movie) and so is Angels.

  47. 47.

    hamletta

    Jonathan Franzen is an enormous douchebag. (h/t Aunt B.)

    Doesn’t mean he doesn’t write good; just sayin’.

    I heard him reading on NPR a week ago. Didn’t find his description of angst-ridden totebaggers terribly compelling.

    Best novel I’ve read recently was The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman.

  48. 48.

    xochi

    I liked the Corrections, and will read this one, but am not convinced that Franzen is a great, rather than just a really good, writer. I wouldn’t call him warmed over DeLillo (Franzen is better at writing richly developed characters, DeLillo is better at writing eerie prophecies), but I see the connection. Reading White Noise in college was definitely an eye opener, but I’ve admired more than loved DeLillo’s books since Libra. All I’ve read of Franzen’s (other than a few errant essays that make him look like someone I wouldn’t want to have a beer with) is the Corrections, and that I enjoyed without loving.

    On another note, the cover of Freedom is hilarious and ridiculous. Cerulian Warblers represent!

  49. 49.

    Xenos

    @ally: You beat me to the link to the New Yorker. Was that really just the first chapter? Maybe he should have just stopped it there – I like the story but it seems awfully thin to stretch out the characters after the fundamental irony of their son turning wingnut on them. So these dreadful, smug enviro-yuppies go on to have a love triangle? Yeesh. Spare me.

  50. 50.

    Xenos

    @DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:

    No one anyone cares about beaujolais nouveau. It’s a minor fad from 25 years ago.

    I think the point is that she makes wine her hobby, but she does not realize that her love is for a third-rate grape that is usually best used to mix with other grapes to make a decent but generic vin de table. But since she comes from east coast money, how could she not know this? Her whole character seems false, just designed in such a way as to be screwed around with in ever more ironic ways.

    When an author shows this sort of contempt for a character the reader stops giving a damn about them, too.

  51. 51.

    John Bird

    Ooh! ooh! Was it Thoreau? Henry David Thoreau? I bet it was Thoreau. –David Brooks, University of Chicago freshman

  52. 52.

    Princess

    @Xenos: You’ve nailed it. I can admire Franzen as a technician, but I can’t be bothered to read a book by an author who has such contempt for all his characters. Contempt is easy and boring. Couldn’t finish The Corrections, and won’t pick this one up.

  53. 53.

    aimai

    @Tom Levenson:

    No, I love that line as is. Its just perfect. Also, are you breaking your fast with whiskey? that’s very bourgeouis of you.

    aimai

    I love Brook’s insistence, btw, that every book come with an obvious moral. Makes me think that at middle brow U he started with the “readers questions” at the back ever time. “Plato says that he thinks a philosopher king would…” “Niebuhr’s point that…” Reminds me of the scene in the fourth season of the Wire when the teachers start trying to teach the kids how to write a coherent essay and insist that every paragraph begin “I will show you how…” and end “in conclusion I have shown that…”

  54. 54.

    debbie

    I finished “Freedom” last week and was just as disappointed by it as I had been by “Corrections.” Neither book was particularly bad, but neither lived up to all the hype. NYT called “Freedom” a “masterpiece”! It’s not the writing that has made this book; any success it gets will be due to the publisher’s Marketing Department. Just like in politics, it’s now the marketing message that has replaced real substance.

    Franzen is being portrayed as the guy who has written the Great American Novel. If so, then we are a society with rapidly decaying standards. There’s nothing special about the characters or the situations they face, and very little reason to care about what happened to any of them.

  56. 56.

    Josh

    If you wunna ridicule inflated prose by a conservative journalist, Tanenhaus on Freedom, especially the first half of his piece, can’t be beat. The novel

    seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life . . . Franzen cracked open the opaque shell of postmodernism, tweezed out its tangled circuitry and inserted in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic humanism . . . data flowed through the arteries of narrative, just as it had done in the novels of Dickens and Tolstoy, Bellow and Mann. Like those giants, Franzen attended to the quiet drama of the interior life and also recorded its fraught transactions with the public world.

    And so on for many paragraphs.

  57. 57.

    DPirate

    I’ve never heard of Franzen. If I didn’t think David Brooks was inconsequential, this sentence would make me reject the book outright:

    Very few novels make clear and provocative arguments about American life anymore, but Jonathan Franzen’s important new book, “Freedom,” makes at least two.”

    Hahah, so awesomely crazy. At least two! Count em: two! At LEAST!

    Anyhow, “literary fiction” is a valid designation. It’s the difference between a story and a tale. BTW, when was the last time you read such a great sentence in a novel as this:

    And the moods in others awakened responsive moods in her, those rearranging chemisms upon which all the morality or immorality of the world is based.

    from An American Tragedy, Dreiser. An “aggressive editor” would have cut this book into stupid little bits.

  60. 60.

    ally

    Well, I’m about 12 hours late to jump back into this book chat, but now I’m provoked. Franzen did NOT show contempt for his characters except possibly a few wingers who deserved it. He’s brilliant at assuming different points of view. (That wasn’t so true in the opening chapter, which was just enjoyable social satire.)
    The book is long, and there’s time for everyone to be maddening, or likeable, by turns. Which they are. I cared about nearly everyone in “Freedom.”
    This is the first “green” novel I’ve read that really works as fiction. It’s got some rants about over-consumption that are just classic.
    Anyway — I read “Freedom” straight through over the weekend and will keep it, because I’ll want to read it again someday.

    PS Bobo completely misses the point, but what else is new?

  61. 61.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @Josh:

    As overblown as it is, I still think that is better criticism than what Brooks writes. Brooks reduces it to ideas, which is always a mistake with novels. At least Tannenhaus discusses how the book is written.

  63. 63.

    Mattroid

    @DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.: I found the botched details and occasionally inconceivable dialogue to also be annoying. He refers to a character sulking in depression while watching college bowl games over Thanksgiving. As a matter of cultural literacy, every American should know that there are no college bowl games over Thanksgiving. It’s more idiomatic to sulk depressively over New Year’s when you can watch bowl games of colleges that might not actually exist. Too much time in the literary fiction ether is my guess.

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