Dustin Kurtz: Hello Samuel. So, introductions of our various stances, maybe?

Sam: Maybe! We are both sad young white literary men, yes?

Dustin: Emphasis on the sad and white, yes. Our manliness being in dispute at times.

Sam: At times. I do carry a tote bag. And: you're not a female novelist, are you?

Dustin: No, so I think we can agree that my dislike of this book won't come from anything as disagreeable as politics. Unless there is a political party fighting for better prose?

Sam: Which book!

Dustin: THE book, young sir, the book of our generation!

Sam: The book that takes the datum of our shared millennial life, and limns, like, mostly everything that needs a limning?

Dustin: The tome, generations hence, that people will use to judge your immortal white literary soul.

Sam: Freedom!

Dustin: Freedom!

Dustin: I wish we could have done that simultaneously.

Sam: It was pretty simultaneous.

Dustin: So you would choose this book over the life of your firstborn, yes? Whereas I think it has flaws (so nuanced)! Sometimes little but.

Sam: I think it has flaws, too, but I would say that this is a great book. I am not an enemy of Freedom.

Dustin: Can we actually get seriouschat here and make a distinction between a great book and a great novel?

Sam: Let's. I bet you have ideas.

Dustin: I do! Greatness aside (very much aside) this book is a successful novel in many ways.

Sam: Agreed.

Dustin: When we talk about The Novel (all the time, I'm sure) we're talking about a specific layering of detail, adherence to some rules, all of which this does very well.

Sam: But?

Dustin: But if we want to talk about the worth of a book more generally, we have to look at the quality of the writing, and maybe it's value to readers. Did I say seriouschat? Apparently I meant didacticchat.

Sam: They are probably the same thing. Does didactic-chat need a hyphen? That one is harder to read.

Dustin: What I'm saying is that if all it takes to be a good (honestly, not great, and definitely not Great) novel is the creation of this dense clay flesh around the frames of these characters, then Franzen is good.

Sam: And yet, as a member of the backlash (how does it feel?) you are denying greatness and Greatness. On what grounds? I'm still trying to figure out how it's possible to hate Freedom. Also Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

Dustin: Well, so let's not get too much into whether he accomplishes his goals of a greater worth outside of that book, because I'm not Emerson and anyhow we both believe pretty soundly in the value of literature for its own sake. At least for well-fed bastards like you and I.

Sam: You want to talk about the book itself then? That's what you want to talk about?

Dustin: You are the worst Socratic interlocutor I've ever had, Zingerman McZing.

Sam: Zingerman MacZing, please.

Dustin: What I'm trying to do is throw out the idea that you and the rest of the damn world are not necessarily wrong, that this might be a good novel. But I'm maintaining that it's a pretty bad book.

Sam: Oh. Snap.

Dustin: Franzen is not a detailed writer, but an incidental one.

Sam: Right: I could make the same joke I always make about Anna Karenina: 700 pages of gossip.

Dustin: And I think that is some of what people are talking about when they call him old-fashioned. Well, that and the codpiece.

Sam: Always the codpiece. What an odd choice.

Dustin: With Franzen it comes out in a flat omniscient third that just sort of smears everyone and everything with his clunky segue phrasing.

Sam: I was re-reading some last night, and the first line of every chapter (saving the Patty chapters, but probably even those) could be: "Did you hear?"

Dustin: But I don't even dislike that about him.

Sam: You do dislike something. I still have no idea what it is.

Dustin: He's very good at the floating narrator who also gives us hints of the attitudes, if not as much the voice, of many characters in quick succession.

Sam: Free indirect discourse! My English degree is worth something. He's very, very good at that.

Dustin: Easy with that second very. He's okay.

Sam: I'm still trying to figure what you don't like!

Dustin: The writing. So, the book.

Sam: Like, sentence by sentence, you dislike this book?

Next: Does Dustin dislike the book sentence by sentence???

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Signs of the Recession:

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