Goodman, Franzen, and Brownstein

           In Gabriel Brownstein’s article, “The Big Show: Franzen, Goodman, and ‘The Great American Novel,’” the author attempts to explain the differences in reception between two relatively similar novels published during the summer of 2010 – Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector.  He accounts for Freedom being hailed as “the Great American Novel” and The Cookbook Collector as simply “good,” in part, because of their authors’ personalities.  Freedom, Brownstein writes, “swaggered out and demanded the response it received,” whereas The Cookbook Collector “comes on quite modestly.”  The “literary elegance” of Goodman’s novel is countered by Franzen’s “roaring crassness.”  In short, Franzen rarely, if ever, lets the reader forget that her or she is reading his novel.  Goodman shows what could be construed, I suppose, as a healthy respect for her characters and their stories, and allows them to intercede between herself and the reader.

            To begin to touch on the differences between Franzen and Goodman – and what, in turn makes their stories not only so disparately similar, but also so differently received – I examined some of the scenes in the first few pages of each book, when Franzen and Goodman describe the neighborhoods in which their characters first find themselves.  At the opening of Freedom, Franzen describes a young Patty and Walter Berglund’s gradual gentrification of a down-at-heel St. Paul neighborhood, in which they find themselves up against “sunburned bikers” who “descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours” (3-4).  Jess’s area of Berkeley, by contrast, features a “People’s Park, where bearded sojourners held congress at the picnic tables” and a local restaurant actually protests the anti-loitering laws with a chalked message (6, 37).  While both Franzen and Goodman are describing a similar set of persons, Goodman’s prose is permeated with something almost approximating a sense of wonder, a general awareness of a sort of magic present in the world.  Goodman revels more in the beauty of moments, seemingly of language for its own sake, while everything seems to be a means to an end for Franzen.  Franzen’s personality is present in his prose – something we know because Franzen is simply so vocal and his writing is so spare.  While Patty struggles with “how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox,” Jess lives in an area that the reader wouldn’t so much mind, a “neighborhood which boasted the best burrito in the city and the best hot dog in the known universe” with bookstores, music shops, and fanciful sidewalk vendors (Franzen 4; Goodman 6).  It is also highly unlikely that Goodman would use the word “shit” outside of dialogue.

            The question remains – which of these voices more or better represents 21^st century America?  Are they competing visions, or complimentary ones?  What do these two distinct voices do to the novels that are so completely shaped by them? Does their reception, in turn, say something about modern America?