Lo stato del romanzo in America

David Brooks, che non è un critico letterario, ma un fine osservatore della società americana e un politologo moderatamente di destra, editorialista del New York Times, commenta il nuovo romanzo di Jonathan Franzen, Freedom come emblematico dello stato del romanzo in America, e dice cose molto interessanti (questo articolo è da leggere insieme a quello di Batuman sulle scuole di scrittura creativa), tra cui: "Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation. This message caught on (it’s flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. If you judged by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly no fulfilled ones. ...
By now, writers have become trapped in the confines of this orthodoxy. So even a writer as talented as Franzen has apt descriptions of neighborhood cattiness and self-medicating housewives, but ignores anything that might complicate the Quiet Desperation dogma. ... The serious parts of life get lopped off and readers have to stoop to inhabit a low-ceilinged world. Everyone gets to feel superior to the characters they are reading about (always pleasant in a society famously anxious about status), but there’s something missing.

Social critics from Thoreau to Allan Bloom to the S.D.S. authors of The Port Huron Statement also made critiques about the flatness of bourgeois life, but at least they tried to induce their readers to long for serious things. Freedom is a brilliantly written book that is nonetheless trapped in an intellectual cul de sac - overly gimlet-eyed about American life and lacking an alternative vision of higher ground. nyt.