There's a great conversation starting in the comments to my review of Freedom. First JoeSnow says:

I have three friends who hate the Corrections because the characters are assholes. That's a dumb reason to dislike art. The lifetime channel is full of wholesome, uplifting characters. Tom Waits sings about alcoholics, low lifes, and creepy philanderers, does that mean his songs suck? The movie Fargo has a whole roster of assholes. Does that make it a bad movie?

Also I'm going to advocate for some reasonable SNOBBERY. Saying that there is no good and bad in art is democratic bullshit. I'm not going to put the Celestine Prophecy on the same level as the Brothers Karamozov, bitches. I'm not going to put the Gin Blossoms on the same level as Radiohead. I concede that ultimately such distinctions are subjective, based on arbitrary assumptions but a dude's gotta have standards. So yes, "serious" and "un-serious" are useful concepts.

And then Lo says:

Being about assholes and being a good book (or movie, or Tom Waits song [I'd argue that good Tom Waits songs are few and far between, but that's another comment thread]) aren't mutually exclusive at all.

What Franzen fails to do, though, is generate any sense of pathos around his characters. They're not boring because they're assholes, they're boring because I spent 500 pages waiting for a reason to actually care about them. I'm not sure what's supposed to be appealing about watching Bad People Make Bad Choices for the sake of nothing but a tired statement about the upper middle class (though there are certainly sentences worth sticking around for).

I think the problem with SERIOUS versus NON SERIOUS is that it carries much less water when the author is the one traipsing around, going on and on about how SERIOUS he is. It becomes smug, and off-putting, and more than a tiny bit laughable when the book IS certainly serious — but it isn't much more than that.

There's so much more, including Roscoe's mid-Freedom and post-Freedom thoughts, ideas about calling art bad, and whether Franzen is the "self-serious fifteen year old who carries around a copy of The Iliad in order to impress the hoi polloi." I hope you'll go and jump in.