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Jonathan Franzen on Underappreciated Books

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Question: What is the most under-appreciated book?

Jonathan Franzen: You can’t count people who’ve gotten the Nobel Prize right because they’ve gotten the Nobel Prize. A book I’m surprised no one ever talks about, I’m not surprised, a book I’m disappointed no one ever talks about because I don’t really know of a better American novel from the last 20 years is Jane Smiley’s book “The Greenlanders” it’s her finest work to my knowledge, so I would mention that and while we’re talking about fine novels from the last 20 years, I would have to throw out “Infinite Jest” I know that it is much more spoken of but I still don’t think it got as much attention as it deserved, it’s a giant book, it’s a wonderful book. So these things are relative, David Wallace, nor Jane Smiley, they’re not exactly unknown writers. A little bit more in that category would be Christina Stead with “The Man Who Loved Children” which I’m on a bit of a personal crusade to call people’s attention to a genuine family novel masterpiece unlike any other book ever written, came out of America by an Australian ex-pat genius named Christina Stead and I’ll plug that too.

Recorded On: 4/1/08

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Jonathan Franzen is an award-winning American novelist and essayist. Franzen was born in Chicago, Illinois, raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Swarthmore College. He also studied on a Fulbright Scholarship in Germany. He lives on the Upper East Side of New York City, and writes for The New Yorker magazine. Franzen’s “The Corrections,” a novel of social criticism, garnered considerable critical acclaim in the United States. It became one of the best-selling works of literary fiction of the 21st century and won both the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

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