This man has excellent prose Only pseuds will disagree

Guess I'm a pseud

>>8658845
Seems like it

>>8658839

Honest to God, I've never read him. Can you post some of his excellent prose?

>>8658854
No

>>8658867
k

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>>8658839
Anyone prefer Franzen to DFW or am I alone in this?

>>8658903

I think DFW was better, but others may disagree with me and agree with you. I can only really relate you my personal experience.

>>8658903
Yea. Wish DFW had lived to produce some more books though. And memes too.

>read Franzen.pdf
>ctrl-f "discernible talent"
>0 results

>>8658839
Sigh, this again. Let's pick a paragraph at random and see if it's meritorious...

From Strong Motion:

"Eileen," her mother said. "Honey. You let the car roll in the lake. Nobody stole the car. I just got a call from Mrs. Wolstetter. You didn't set the emergency brake and you didn't put the car in Park. It rolled across the Wolstetters' lawn into the lake."
"Park, Eileen?" Louis's voice was glassed-in and adenoidal.
"The little 'P' on the far left? N for Neutral? P for Park?"
"Louis," their mother said.
"Or is it N for No and P for . . . Proceed? D for Desist?"
After this trauma Eileen could no longer retain information about where Louis was or what he was doing.


There's nothing glaringly wrong here. The speech is a touch lame. I like the descriptors glassed-in and adenoidal, even if the "N for No..." punchline fell flat. Repetitive use of the word "car" was strange, avoidable, and drab while adding nothing stylistically. The use of the word "retain" in the last sentence feels horribly out of place. Uninspired.

>>8658839
mark hamil is a terrible actor

Franzen makes me feel like I could be pidgeon-holed, walking around college reading The Corrections atm, as an aspiring pomo English major white dude which is a gay feeling if I am being honest.

>>8658917
The only book worth quoting for him is the corrections, it has his best prose

appreciate the effort in quoting and criticising that though, you are making lit a better place, only thing is that the particular quote you chose is hard to see the context of.

>>8658917
You're well on your way to becoming a literary critic. One day kids will meme with screen caps taken from your interviews and lectures.

>>8658917
What the fuck does "adenoids" mean?

>>8658839
This man, in my country, he is nothing.

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>>8658965
It was ripped from google books and I skipped to a random page in the interest of fairness. Here's the paragraph immediately before it. Note the following stylistic bed-shits:
"suddenly needed to use the car"
"she made her mother go ask Louis to be selfless"
"even less nice"

>>8658990
nasal

>>8658994
How the fuck does something like this even get published? This is amateur hour stuff.

>>8659005
You people are ruthless, you can choose any random paragraph in the greatest work and it will read like total shit. There is something about a work putting you in a trance that allows it to work its magic.

>>8659013
I'm willing to bet most of this book reads like total shit. Franzen is a bad joke.

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>>8658917
>Louis's voice was glassed-in and adenoidal.

I just feel like housewives and soccer moms love Franzen. Good for him, don't ge me wrong. They're like the only ones actually buying books nowadays and the milf pussy can be great. The blowjobs, in particular.

He just doesn't do it for me.

>>8659057
Meh, I like it. It has a well balanced cadence, describes her tone creatively, and adds to her character. What's your objection to it?

>>8658839
I wouldn't deign to evaluate him

I know he is mostly famous for being hard-core NYT middle-brow and having some connection with DFW... sounds really really boring

>>8659086
For me all it does is distract and obfuscate. I can't synthesize in my head the way a "glassed-in and adenoidal" voice sounds, and because of that I have no idea what it's meant to convey about Louis or Eileen or the tone of the scene. Even spending an extended period of time now mulling it over isn't making the wording any clearer.

What is it even supposed to mean? The voice sounded muffled and nasal? Distant and congested? I think "glassed-in" is a visual adjective and it doesn't work well at all in describing a sound, and "adenoidal" sounds more descriptive of someone with a cold more than anything else, which doesn't seem fitting in this context.

>>8659218
I'm assuming it's supposed to be like they're zoning out of the conversation. Like suddenly it's as if they're parting is try to speak to them through a window or something.

>>8658867
kek
I'm assuming this wasn't OP but either way great post

>>8659228
I think it would have been better to have a qualifier that conveyed the sense of change in that case. Something like "increasingly glassed-in and adenoidal", maybe.

>>8659218
Totally valid. Infinitely more than a smug picture of Penn Jillette accompanying the quote in greentext, heh.

Fwiw I read glassed-in with adenoidal to convey a poorly concealed, frustrated tone with a hint of condescension, but perhaps I'm giving this fucker too much credit in light of the previous paragraph.

>>8658854
it's copyrighted

>>8658984
prose critics are the worst kind of literary critics, they're a dime a dozen, they're boring snobs, and they have nothing worth saying

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>>8659833
They're not all bad. Besides, it's not like anyone explicitly specializes in prose critique ever.

Mmmmm ... the prose... the alliteration... oh my....

just wanna bask in it

the Nabokovian splendor, the supple little sentences....

....the delicate cobwebs of meaning... mmmm

the taps of the tacky tips flickering on the flap

mmm
licklicklicklicklick

>>8660257
Holy... I want more

the winding road between the willows... mmmmmm

his hand on the burnished banister

they grew marigolds in the summer.

quivering chicken eggs.

a felt-tip pen.

>>8659865
oh man, I hate Fish so much

read his work on Milton, it was awful