Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books (2002)

Summary

The following essay by Jonathan Franzen appeared in The New Yorker. The following text has been transcribed from the 30 September 2002 issue. Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books Jonathan Franzen For a while last winter, after my third novel came out, I was getting a lot of angry mail from strangers. What upset them was not the novel � a comedy about a family in crisis � but some impolitic remarks I'd made in the press, and I knew that it was a mistake to send more than bland one-sentence notes in reply. But I couldn't help fighting back a little. Taking a page from an old literary hero of mine, William Gaddis, who had long deplored the reading public's confusion of the writer's work and the writer's private self, I suggested that the letter writers look at my fiction rather than listen to distorted news reports about its author. A few months later, one of the original senders, a Mrs. M�, in Maryland, wrote back with proof that she'd done the reading. She began by listing thirty fancy words and phrases from my novel, words like "diurnality" and "antipodes," phrases like "electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces." She then posed the dreadful question: "Who is it that you are writing for? It surely could not be the average person who just enjoys a good read." And she offered this caricature of me and my presumed audience: The elite of New York, the elite who are beautiful, thin, anorexic, neurotic, sophisticated, don't smoke, have abortions tri-yearly, are antiseptic, live in lofts or penthouses, this superior species of humanity who read Harper's and The New Yorker. The subtext seemed to be that difficulty in fiction is the tool of socially privileged readers and writers who turn up their noses at the natural pleasure of a "good read" in favor of the invidious, artificial pleasure of feeling superior to other people. To Mrs. M�, I was "a pompous snob, and a real ass-hole." One part of me, the part that takes after my father, who admired sc...