At the LA Times Festival of Books last weekend, we overheard plenty of talk about Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker article.  Much of it was pretty damning, suggesting Franzen may have suffered a breakdown in perspective while attempting to braid travel narrative, reflection on David Foster Wallace’s suicide, a thumbnail history of the novel along with a number of other things into a coherent whole.  One perspicacious blogger describes the essay this way.  In his Los Angeles Review of Books piece on Monday, David Shields is even more stinging.

Let me see if I have this right: Weary of converting past experience into currency, Jonathan Franzen goes on a vacation, which he immediately converts into a lengthy article. The article, “Farther Away,” which eviscerates his “friend” David Foster Wallace, appears very nearly on the publication date of Wallace’s unfinished novel. Franzen, who claims that Wallace committed suicide as a career move, responded to Wallace’s suicide at the time by asking, “Does it look now like David had all the answers?” Franzen is horrified on behalf of all of us that there’s a difference between Wallace’s persona and his actual existence; perhaps the difference that Franzen should contemplate instead is the one between Wallace, who delved, heroically, into the darkness of his own soul, and his “friend” Jonathan Franzen, whose oeuvre (and this article in particular) is devoted to fighting off any insight into himself and locating instead all shade and shadow elsewhere, out there, the next precinct over.

To this, the ever on-point Christopher Sorrentino (whose outstanding Trance you should read immediately) responds in an email:

But yes, you do have it right.  I’m sure many agree, of course.  The (unaccustomed) silence that greeted Franzen’s “essay,” his latest foray into high-profile grave defiling, may be the closest New York City comes to embarrassment.  At least the Gaddis piece actually treated Gaddis’ work, albeit unfairly.  You got it exactly right.  As my father, and probably yours, might have said, “With friends like this…”

As today’s twin essays on the LA Review of Books preview site focus, in part, on the difficulty readers may have in gaining perspective on books (like Freedom) that arrive in a hailstorm of critical attention, it’s worth remembering that problem of perspective never goes away, for anyone.