The flattened American landscape of minor writers

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Guy Pursey wondered:
 
 
> If Mason & Dixon was too difficult for Jonathan Franzen then 
> what are we to expect of a writer like McEwan?

and malignd replied:

> This is very unlikely. Whatever you think of McEwan and Franzen, 
> unintelligent they are not. If Franzen said that, he likely mumbled it 
> over a tongue stuck in his cheek.
 
Not necessarily. If we read Franzen's statement in light of the essay 
"Mr. Difficult," his vicious putdown of William Gaddis, his use of the word
"difficult" carries a lot of weight, and is hardly tongue-in-cheek.
 
When Franzen calls a work "difficult," he does not only mean that it 
is "hard to read" - rather, he means that it is shit. In "Mr. Difficult"
he draws a distinction between "Status authors" (writers like Joyce,
Pynchon, and Gaddis who write merely to show off) and "Contract authors"
(writers like himself and Tolstoy who aim to please the reader). Contract
authors are good, Status authors are shit. This may sound like a parody
of an argument, but I'd say that it's a pretty accurate representation of
Franzen's ideas in this essay, where his main argument for pissing all over
Gaddis is his own inability to finish JR. You may call this sort of argument
many things. Intelligent it is not.
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