Four friends who wrote books: Karr, Eugenides, Franzen, Wallace
Those writers seem even more a distinct literary cohort now in the wake of Wallace’s suicide in 2008; Wallace was the youngest of the bunch and the one most openly at war with himself over the way forward for fiction, and his death seems to have galvanized them all. Karr, who had a stormy relationship with Wallace in the early nineties, wrote him into her memoir-in-progress, Lit, though she used only his first name. Franzen sat down and channeled his anger over his close friend’s death into a fourteen-month sprint to write his sprawling 2010 novel, Freedom, which features a character with a likeness to Wallace. He also published a raw and searching New Yorker essay on their complicated friendship. “The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed,” Franzen wrote. “Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend.”
Read Just Kids by Evan Hughes in New York magazine. Thanks to Butch for the alert.
We wish The Marriage Plot had more to recommend it than Wink wink, guess who this character is based on. (We’d probably be kinder to its clunky, belabored prose if we hadn’t been blown away by The Virgin Suicides.)
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
November 21st, 2011 at 05:40
Hahaha! I’m still loving it, JZ. I don’t know much about clunky writing since I’m only a reader but I guess you were absolutely right when you said The Virgin Suicides was “incandescent”. I devoured the book in three hours. I’ve been trying to finish reading The Marriage Plot for 3 weeks now. For some very odd reasons, it reminds me so much of my “Mills & Boon” days. Yes, I did read Mills & Boon and I am not ashamed to broadcast it. BWAHAHAHAHA!