For nearly thirty years, Jonathan Franzen has been telling the same story: not—or not only—the multigenerational Midwestern saga with its rigid or rudderless parents, its children messily fledging, but another story, about fiction.
In 1996, speaking on a televised roundtable about the “Future of American Fiction,” Franzen sketched a culture in which “people who read books, who seriously read books, who read a lot of books, nowadays, are just like a priori not of the mainstream,” such that novelists address “a weird audience who is defined in large part by their nonparticipation in mass entertainments of that kind.” This stands in contrast to “a golden hundred years before TV and movies had fully taken over,” during which “the novel was the only game.” “So, what,” cuts in David Foster Wallace, Franzen’s poptimistic copanelist on the segment, “the only people who read, like, serious fiction are people who don’t watch TV?”
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