There seems to be a bit of a culture war going on at Time magazine. First it praised a novelist and his novel, a work containing what has to be one of the most disgusting sexual passages ever written in a work of “literature.” Then its online Newsfeed service mocked that praise.
Here’s how the magazine reviewed Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom on August 12, 2010:
Franzen isn’t the richest or most famous living American novelist, but you could argue — I would argue — that he is the most ambitious and also one of the best. His third book, The Corrections, published in 2001, was the literary phenomenon of the decade. His fourth novel, Freedom, will arrive at the end of August. Like The Corrections, it’s the story of an American family, told with extraordinary power and richness.
Hey, based on that review you might assume that Freedom is one hell of a novel. Yet there seems to be disagreement about that even within the Time family. On Friday, its online Newsfeed website said:
Jonathan Franzen has been lavished with praise — and if TIME says he’s good, he must be — so NewsFeed was ever so slightly disappointed to learn that he’s been nominated for the tongue-in-cheek prize, dished out by the Literary Review for — ahem — the most embarrassing passage of sexual description in a novel.
Our only dispute with Literary Review is that they deem the passage merely “embarrassing.” No. Accidentally leaving your fly open in public is embarrassing. Intentionally writing, in fact, taking nine years to carefully craft every word of this novel is not embarrassing, it’s an indictment of the author and any magazine that praises it.
Newsfeed notes that “Freedom, which is ostensibly about the breakdown of an American family, was singled out by judges for a depiction of a ‘phone sex’ encounter.”
CONTENT ALERT: The following passage from Freedom is graphic, disgusting and, considering that it took nine years to write, pretty poorly written. We are taking the liberty of italicizing and dyslexia-izing several words not because we want to censor it, but because we don’t want Google’s algorithyms to tag us as a porn site.
OK. Ready? Here’s the offending passage with key words italicized and dyslexia-ized.
One afternoon, as Connie described it, her excited lcitoirs grew to be eight inches long, a protruding pencil of tenderness with which she gently parted the lips of his pneis and drove herself down to the base of its shaft. Another day, at her urging, Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her utrds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since these were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate.
Literary Review said that Franzen exhibits a “propensity for innuendo which comes over a bit Benny Hill.” We say that is an insult to Benny Hill.
The tongue-in-cheek (perhaps a poor choice of words in this case) prize is awarded to ”draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
Is it a sign that we’re making progress in the culture war when the online edition of Time attacks the print edition of Time for praising this author and this novel? Or is the very existence of this novel a sign that we’re losing ground?
Source: Newsfeed
