Studies in American Fiction

America’s financial system is intricate and complex. But behind all the technical terminology and statistics is a critical human factor—confidence.

—George W. Bush, September 19, 2008¹

Although Jonathan Franzen’s Karl Kraus Project (2013) is intended largely as a literary-historical effort to bring the German satirist’s work to public attention, it has received more attention for Franzen’s by-now-familiar screeds against his literary forbearers. In one such footnote, Franzen reflects on his own moralizing arguments about art and bristles at John Updike’s self-obsession. He confesses that he “spent a lot of time assembling a moral case against John Updike” because “Updike had tremendous, Nabokov-level talent and was wasting it” by being “too afraid . . . to take the kind of big literary risks” serious novelists ought to take. Franzen’s criticism continues: Updike’s “lack of interest in the bigger postwar, postmodern, socio-technological picture marked him . . . as a classic self-absorbed sixties-style narcissist.”² Updike’s fiction supplants post-war social concerns, Franzen argues, with an abiding concern for the “minutiae of daily life”—what Updike calls giving “the mundane its beautiful due.”³

More harshly, Franzen asserts that Updike’s self-obsession derails “otherwise fine stories” with the “anal-retentive preciousness of his prose,” challenging Updike’s “virtuosity” as a chronicler of postwar society.⁴ Numerous scholars and authors who regard high postmodernism as the postwar literary high-water mark would surely agree with Franzen’s assessment. Perhaps for this reason, Franzen’s criticisms of Updike seem [End Page 97] far less likely to start a row in the pages of Harper’s than his criticism of William Gaddis. Nevertheless, these footnotes are interesting for what they betray about commonly-held views of what constitutes literary engagement with the “postwar . . . picture,”⁵ as Franzen describes it.

In his critique of Updike, Franzen marshals support from a similar argument David Foster Wallace had made in his review of Toward the End of Time, Updike’s disastrous and assuredly narcissistic foray into speculative fiction. There, Wallace thinks Updike is such a narcissist that he calls him an “asshole.” Yet Wallace writes that despite the fact that Updike’s characters “seemed to become more and more repellent” after Rabbit is Rich (1981), he admires “the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.”⁶ Though Wallace loves what Franzen loathes about Updike’s fiction, he goes on to underscore Franzen’s critique in another sense, arguing that “the very world around [Updike’s protagonists] . . . seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.”⁷ So, although Franzen and Wallace differ in their taste for Updike’s minutiae, they both view Updike’s myopic focus on the everyday as a narcissistic refusal to engage bigger postwar arguments. Updike’s prose, Wallace and Franzen argue, hangs on problematic and indulgent self-obsession.

These acerbic critiques of Updike and his characters suggest a reversal from the previous generation’s critical accounts of Updike’s fiction, including Rabbit Angstrom.⁸ In his 1981 New York Times review of Rabbit is Rich, John Leonard praises Updike for his cultural and economic insights.⁹ And Michiko Kakutani notes that in Rabbit is Rich Updike’s “keen sociological eye” captures the degree to which “America has become an ugly, materialistic place . . . the controlling metaphors of which are shortages of gas and runaway inflation.”¹⁰ Yet both Leonard and Kakutani quickly turn away from these economic concerns and instead produce criticisms that prefigure Franzen’s charges of self-obsession and Wallace’s assertion that these economic insights exist primarily as a canvas for “impressions . . . inside the self.”¹¹ Kakutani asserts that in Rabbit is Rich, “Updike . . . seems more interested in delineating his character’s state of mind” than confronting Rabbit’s social and economic moment.¹² For his part, Leonard exclaims that he “likes Rabbit very much” and gushes that above all else what makes Rabbit is Rich so compelling is Rabbit’s “radiance.”¹³ Leonard and Kakutani here agree with Franzen and Wallace to the extent that they...