Jonathan Franzen Assails the Internet (Again)

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Jonathan Franzen.

Jonathan Franzen, the sometime critic of Oprah Winfrey, Facebook likes, non-birdwatchers and overly difficult novels, is at it again.

In a 5,600-word essay in the Guardian on Friday titled “What’s Wrong With the Modern World,” Mr. Franzen anatomized our “media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment,” taking swipes along the way at book world figures including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (“one of the four horsemen” of the apocalypse), Salman Rushdie (a novelist who “ought to have known better” than to “succumb” to Twitter) and the editors of the literary journal n+1 (an otherwise respectable magazine guilty of “denigrating” print magazines as “terminally male”).

Mr. Franzen’s essay, a curtain-raiser for his coming book “The Kraus Project,” about the early 20th-century Austrian essayist Karl Kraus (known as “The Great Hater”), immediately prompted much eye-rolling and enough-alreadys on blogs and social media.

“Jonathan Franzen Still Doesn’t Like the Internet,” New York magazine proclaimed. Mic Wright, a blogger for the Telegraph of London, compared the essay to “the transcribed thoughts of a Saturday night Chardonnay bore,” warning: “Prepare for a really, really bad book.”

Mr. Rushdie â€" apparently unaware of the New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum’s stern injunction: “Now that Yom Kippur is over, no more tweeting about Franzen” â€" hit back early Monday, writing: “Dear ‪#Franzen, ‪@MargaretAtwood ‪@JoyceCarolOates ‪@nycnovel ‪@NathanEnglander ‪@Shteyngart and I are fine with Twitter. Enjoy your ivory tower.”

Mr. Franzen may despise the ephemeral social-media slipstream that conveniently blasted news of his book out into the world. But how much is timeless dead-tree literary discourse really paying attention to him or other literary novelists of his generation?

Perhaps not much, a graphic posted on Twitter over the weekend by the critic and novelist Kurt Andersen suggests.

To create the graphic, Mr. Andersen (who made no reference to the Franzen fracas in his post) plugged the names of eight literary novelists â€" Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, John Irving and Mr. Franzen â€" into Google’s Ngram viewer, which allows users to track the occurrence of words and phrases in the millions of books in the Google Books corpus. (The Google corpus includes books published up to 2008, after Mr. Franzen’s breakout novel, “The Corrections,” but before “Freedom.”)

According to the Ngram, Mr. Franzen, at 54 the youngest on the list, has garnered fewer mentions than any of the other novelists, and significantly fewer than Updike or Mailer had by the same age. And compared with mentions for Toni Morrison, 82, the most-cited novelist in the chart by far, his fever line is more of a flatline.

“I knew literary novelists born before 1935 got more famous than those born later,” Mr. Andersen wrote. “But I didn’t know how much more.”