The discourse around Jonathan Franzen is the most revealing thing about literary culture

Franzen has become a kind of Rorschach test for how you think about literary fiction, cultural authority, and the relationship between art and social obligation. The people who hate him mostly hate that he seems to take the novel seriously as an art form and himself seriously as a practitioner of it — in a cultural moment that finds both of those things vaguely embarrassing. The people who love him (of whom I'm mildly one) mostly like that he writes novels where things happen to people who feel like they were conceived by a writer rather than assembled by a algorithm optimising for contemporary sensitivity. The Great Oprah Controversy of 2001 was genuinely revealing: he was uncomfortable being in the Oprah reading club, said so awkwardly, got dogpiled. The response to his discomfort was more revealing than the discomfort itself — there's a strand of literary culture that is only comfortable with highbrow pretension if it's sufficiently camouflaged. (Crossings and Purity are both better than their reception. The Corrections is as good as its reception. Freedom is overpraised.)