My Book Report on the Jonathan Franzen TIME Cover Story

First of all, much has been made of the opener to this piece, in which
Franzen is in Santa Cruz watching otters -- "if the otters could
talk," etc. This kind of scene-setting is very common in TIME covers
these days, but of course most of the people reading this story have
given up their subscriptions so they wouldn't be aware.

Somewhere in the feature's doughy middle, writer Lev Grossman (an
author himself) contrasts the "typical" 20th-century novel, in which
the reader endures a degree of difficulty in order to receive a payoff
later, with FREEDOM's suspenseful plot and "characters you care
about." This is a false dichotomy in so many ways, but what I thought
was particularly eye-catching about it was that by this definition the
profile being written is very 20th century. Not that we don't care
about him -- I did -- but the lead photo features him in a dry field
with a pair of binoculars, looking off the page. We endure meaningless
turns like "(FREEDOM) is not a microcosm; it's a cosm" and an
incomplete rundown of the Oprah controversy. The first time Franzen is
quoted in the article he is complaining of FREEDOM: "It was
considerably more difficult. It was a bitch. It really was."

The payoff here, for me, was not only the glimpse into FREEDOM, but
also the detailing of Franzen's weird writing habits. I could have
done without the extraordinarily simplistic "Changing of the Guard"
infographic about where American fiction is Headed Today and I found
the section on Franzen's friendship with David Foster Wallace
(including a terrible photo of both) irreverent in its creepiness, but
I guess that's my own personal degree of difficulty. I think the
combination of TIME house style and outside kerfuffle will (and has)
cause(d) this piece to be held up as an example of How Not To Do It
and might have preferred him to save his one major interview for the
New Yorker or Esquire.