Mr. Ambivalent: Jonathan Franzen and the Masculinization of the Middlebrow

ABSTRACT

No contemporary author has spent as much time and energy theorizing the literary field than Jonathan Franzen, and no author has generated as much controversy over that theorizing. That controversy erupted most fully when Franzen responded so ambivalently to the selection of The Corrections for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. In this essay, I argue that Franzen is engaged in a reconstruction of the middlebrow, a masculinization of this historically feminized cultural formation. Situating Franzen’s essays in relation both to modernist debates about the middlebrow and more recent conversations about the rapidly changing shape of popular literary culture, I argue that both gender and genre are at the center of Franzen’s contradictory claims for his literary practice and his efforts to reimagine the middlebrow as a more congenial space for white male authors. In his novels, this ambivalence gets deflected onto interpersonal conflicts between men and women and onto fantasies of men’s disempowerment at the hands of women. We can see this in The Corrections, which reveals a desire to reclaim the middlebrow for an emotionally saturated, but still masculine, literary practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See, also, Richard Dorment’s review of Purity, titled “Jonathan Franzen Fights What He’s Become: The author doesn’t want to be middlebrow.” Franzen is the most public of public authors, not only because he has published widely in the popular press (mostly in The New Yorker), but also because, post-Corrections, he has done hundreds of interviews – with magazines, at literary festivals, on television, at colleges and universities. He is also the subject of countless magazine articles and blog posts, on topics ranging from the future of the literary novel, to the scandals he has occasioned by publicly dissing (mostly) women (Oprah, of course, but also Jennifer Weiner and Michiko Kakutani – whom he called, in print, “the stupidest woman in New York”). While it is tempting to draw on this vast body of Franzen-bashing because he deserves it, I have chosen to stay mostly away from it, as well as to stay away from the ridiculously positive reviews The Corrections, Freedom, even Purity have received. Suffice it to say that Jonathan Franzen is a figure who looms very large over popular culture, even the internet culture that he so snobbishly disdains. For a good overview of Franzen’s gaffs, see Constance Grady, “The rise and fall and rise again of Jonathan Franzen,” published on Vox

2. See her The Feminine Middebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism.

3. Franzen discusses the centrality of realism to his work in most of his interviews, and in the essays I will discuss here. On realism and Franzen’s relationship to postmodernism (and the postmodern social novel), see Rohr, Rebein, Green, and Irr.

4. When Oprah (graciously) selected Franzen’s next novel Freedom for her book club, she had an all-male book club from Tacoma, Washington, joining the live television audience via Skype. This very odd set-up had the women in the live audience gazing not only at the male author, but at the male readers on the screen, who, one assumes, were invited by Oprah to make the erstwhile whiny Franzen feel better.

5. See Dubey, and Jacobson.

6. See Rachel Greenwald Smith, Affect and American Literature, for a critique of Franzen’s Contract model as complicit with neoliberal economic logics.

7. See Brite Christ for a convincing analysis of John Irving’s 1975 novel The World According to Garp as a middlebrow bildungsroman. In some ways, Irving is a precursor to Franzen, as Irving also engages in a reinvention of realism after a rejection of the metafictional impulse of postmodernism; and has also written somewhat extensively about his own aesthetic credo.

8. The first unacknowledged reference to Lolita has Chip desiring to have physical contact with Melissa’s internal organs, as does Humbert Humbert with Dolly, as I will discuss. The second occurs in a scene between Enid and Dr. Hibbard on the cruise ship. The doctor, Clare Quilty-like, plays around with the names of the drug Enid seeks, and keeps calling her by different names (213–222). The scene goes on, one feels, just a bit too long.

9. In an interview with Slate, Franzen says that he won’t write a novel about “race” because he’s never been in love with a black woman. Although the interviewer does not push him on this, the fact is that he has created two South Asian female characters, Lalitha in Freedom and Jammu in The Twenty-Seventh City. In the same interview, he is asked the following question: “You must know that a lot of the response to you is surely that you are this white guy writing about white guy things.” He answers quite glibly, “And yet some people like it, so you can’t please everybody. You should worry if you are pleasing everybody. I write for the people who like the kind of books I like.” Although interviews do not constitute solid evidence of a particular orientation toward gender and race, I think it’s fair to say that these comments threaten to undermine Franzen’s well-cultivated persona of a writer who wants to write for everybody.

10. See my Marked Men. See, also, Kathy Knapp, who argues that Freedom is one of many post-9/11 novels that aim to reinstall an “American Everyman” at the center of US culture by making the trials and tribulations of suburban white men an analogy for the “illness” of American culture itself.

11. Maddu Dubey comments on the Harper essay’s passage about the “inner city” of American fiction and the “black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, and women’s communities which have moved into the structures left behind by the departing straight white male” (“Perchance” 39), and points out the “in the mapping of the post-1960s literary field as analogous to an earlier period is US urban history – the suburbanization of the post-war decades – Franzen elides and mystifies the processes of urban redevelopment and gentrification that were well underway at the time he published this essay” (33–34). Franzen’s ambivalent embrace of what he terms “depressive realism” against the “therapeutic optimism” of multi-cultural and women writers functions, as Dubey points out, as a way to claim “literary seriousness of the white male novelist” and his supposed marginalization (34).

12. Teresa Requena Pelgrí’s article on The Corrections does focus on the novel’s representation of masculinity, but does not take a particularly critical stance on such representation. Instead, she argues that the “strict duality” between hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities is “transcended” in the novel because both Alfred and Chip struggle with this duality. Kristin Jacobson also briefly addresses masculinity in the novel, and argues that Chip eventually embraces a masculine domesticity, and thus, departs from the dominant mode of masculinity that requires the rejection of domesticity. She devotes only two paragraphs to the novel, however, concluding without sufficient argumentation that the novel is “transgressive” and that its “hybrid domestic masculinity troubles or otherwise ‘queers’ conventional gender roles, spaces, and readings, particularly as they relate to men and homemaking” (219). She is primarily interested the Oprah affair and how Franzen’s response shows him to be “stuck between choosing a feminized popularity or a masculine respect for both himself and his novel. He cannot seem to carve out a successful hybrid identity,” unlike Chip (219).

13. Several essays included in the collection Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880–1930, focus on middlebrow novels by men. In a very interesting article comparing the reception of Grace Metalious's Peyton Place to James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Anna Creadick analyzes the highly gendered response to the two novels, arguing that James’s novel was praised for its realism, while Metallious’s novel was denigrated as “trashy” – this despite what Creadick convincingly shows are a whole host of similarities between the two novels. The difference emerges through how the books were marketed.

14. See Grady for one account of this fracas.

15. The most recent VIDA count available online is from 2019, so it’s not clear that data is still being gathered. In that count, reviews of books by women still lag behind reviews of books by men, a disparity that is more marked in small literary journals than in large mainstream publications. That data, and more, can be found at: https://www.vidaweb.org/the-count/2019-vida-count/

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Sally Robinson

Sally Robinson is Professor of English and an Affiliate Faculty Member in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. Her most recent book is Authenticity Guaranteed: Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Anti-Consumerism in American Culture (UMass Press, 2018). She teaches courses on contemporary American fiction and popular culture and feminist studies.