America’s greatest most polarizing novelist strikes again. Aside from penning best-selling, Pulitzer-winning novels, Jonathan Franzen’s hobbies include birdwatching and grumpily critiquing everything from the looks of classic female authors to the Internet at large.
Among his long-standing feuds with things most people like is an ongoing back-and-forth with writer Jennifer Weiner, who called attention to the fact that the themes in his novels — family and personal relationships — would’ve rendered similar stories penned by women less important.
Today, Butler University’s journal Booth ran an interview with the writer, in which he said of Weiner, “To me it seems she’s freeloading on the legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon, and over the years in the major review organs, to promote herself, basically.”
Weiner quipped about the news on Twitter:
Jonathan Franzen is the worst Internet boyfriend ever.
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*Reads and enjoys Jonathan Franzen’s nonfiction.*
— Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) February 13, 2015
I loved The Corrections. He’s a great writer. That’s the disclaimer.
— roxane gay (@rgay) February 13, 2015
Perhaps the ongoing feud between the two writers will worm its way into the forthcoming biography of Franzen’s 55 years of life on earth, slated to release later this year.
