A triple lutz with a camel: Franzen, Goodman and "The Great American Novel"

An interesting article by Gabriel Brownstein, comparing Franzen's "Freedom" to "The Cookbook Collector" by Allegra Goodman. 

"Part of what makes Franzen so exciting to his admirers and so frustrating to his critics is his attempt to wed whacked-out and dark postmodern irony to sympathetic humanist realism (...) Franzen’s novel—his whole career, really—is a struggle with this postmodern ironical trap, a struggle to inhabit it and get out of it, to be humane and to be ironic.  At the end of Freedom, when the Berglunds, Walter and Patty, huddle together after 500-plus pages of humiliations, affairs, failures, and addictions, and in the ruins of their marriage find some comfort from the horrid world all around—well, it’s proof (if proof was ever needed) of Franzen’s extraordinary gifts.  This final section succeeds movingly. (...) But he never can quite turn it off, and you feel it, the televisual irony, all throughout the course of Freedom. Franzen is dancing with you, sure, and with Walter and Patty as well, and his moves are wild and Tony Manero dazzling—but he’s not wholeheartedly on the floor with his partners. (...) Franzen’s characters meanwhile exist somewhere beneath the glory of his prose.  His book is not so much addressed to the intimate reader, it’s addressed to the judges and the crowds.  His characters are anxious, but he is supremely confident.  He has managed to shuck the difficulties of postmodern fiction while retaining much of its cool and distant pose.

The rest of the article here: http://www.themillions.com/2011/02/the-big-show-franzen-goodman-and-the-great-american-novel.html