Jonathan Franzen’s latest essay collection finds the novelist in a cranky mood, said Amelia Atlas in Salon.com. Farther Away assembles 22 nonfiction pieces Franzen has written since 1998, including grumpy rants about the narcissism encouraged by social media and the insidiousness of consumer technology. Few of those essays are memorable. Yet the title piece is a work that we’re still going to be reading decades from now. In “Farther Away,” first published in The New Yorker in 2011, Franzen “directs the current of anger that runs through his nonfiction at a subject actually worth it”—the 2008 suicide of his best friend, David Foster Wallace.
“I didn’t much like” that essay when I read it a year ago, said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. What angered me was the way Franzen seemed to turn Wallace’s tragedy into a story about himself. Franzen wrote that Wallace’s suicide was “calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most,” and that the act took the person they knew away by turning him into “a very public legend.” But in the context of these other essays, which assail self-flattery in all forms, “Farther Away” looks like both a courageous confession and a justified indictment of his friend for bailing out on a shared quest to stand always for personal authenticity.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Cicada-geddon: the fungus that controls insects like 'zombies'Under The Radar Expert says bugs will develop 'hypersexualisation' despite their genitals falling off
-
'Voters know Biden and Trump all too well'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Is the Gaza war tearing US university campuses apart?Today's Big Question Protests at Columbia University, other institutions, pit free speech against student safety
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”