The Great American (White Male) Novel

I have to be honest: I really liked Freedom, the book that landed author, Jonathan Franzen the cover of Time magazine and the title "Great American Novelist." More than once I've attempted to slog through The Corrections, a novel which garnered similar acclaim over a decade ago,  and all I was left with was an intense feeling of self-loathing. I'm probably in the minority, but Freedom felt like everything I wanted The Corrections to be: a meditation on a privileged faction of an aging generation-X population and its inability to grow up. (Although I though the cat/Katz pun was a little too precious.) Franzen is also from my city, and I've always felt a weird sense of loyalty to him, even when he infuriates me. What left a sour taste in my mouth, though, was the "great American novelist" crown.

Because that almost always translates to the "great, white, middle-class male" novel praised for its "universal" appeal.. Freedom is anything but universal.

Of all the professional reviews I read of Freedom in the last year, this, from a Goodreads member stood out, and I think it illustrates the problem of labeling the book's appeal as universal:

I'd been given to thinking of Franzen as a great writer of people, but in this novel the people all seem to be him, and all of them--especially the women--are deeply concerned about the feelings of the middle-aged men who surround them. I got in the habit at some point of dog-earing every page in the galley that features some subtly (or not so subtly) misogynistic turn of phrase--most commonly "female bullshit," a generic term used as though it were highly descriptive, because men don't have bullshit, and because we all know the specific and universal ways in which women are always wasting our collective time with their feeeeelings--but gave up as the constant grind of the cranky-old-man machine became ever more mind-numbing (to say nothing of disheartening). The portions of the novel putatively written by Patty Berglund as a therapeutic autobiography, are, I think, the least believable of all

I think this also dovetails nicely with Franzenfreude meme after the Time cover story. Truth is, I don't fault Franzen himself for being dubbed "the great American novelist," but critics and readers for not asking the question "what does that really mean in the first place?"