Had I recently digested a condescending, casually colonialist, and lightly misogynist interview with the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Corrections, Freedom, and the forthcoming Purity, and decided to write something about it, I probably would have winked in my headline, as the Guardian does, by simply quoting the boneheaded phrase, “considered adopting Iraqi orphan to figure out young people,” as if it perfectly encapsulated the disconnected worldview for which the author is known. But the Guardian has already beat me to it.
I would have wanted more, though. In the subhead, I would have liked to include the fact that his editor talked him down from choosing to adopt an Iraqi war orphan in order to figure out what’s going on in the heads of these cynical kids nowadays—as if the decision to adopt a child and the decision to cut the first 10 pages of the first chapter were one, as if all decisions were really about trying to write the next book anyway, and as if war orphans existed only to satisfy the passing curiosity of famous American writers—if only to support the implicit critique I’d hidden in plain sight in the headline. But, again, the Guardian was two steps ahead of me.
And yet still I would have wanted more. I would have somehow wanted to communicate my frustration, to essentially call him a dumb-dumb for being such a dumb-dumb, but in a tricky, understated, sort of British way. But then I look at the video caption and see that, again, the Guardian‘s beaten me to it, finding its snub in the mouth of Franzen himself: “My face looks fat to me.”
Alison Flood is the author of this fun little bit of journalistic punking, and it isn’t her first rodeo with Franzen. Back in 2012, she wrote up a similar piece under the headline “Jonathan Franzen: ‘Twitter is the ultimate irresponsible medium,'” and this after Twitter facilitated revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.
