So. Let’s review: Jonathan Franzen writes a new novel called Freedom. Everyone freaks out. Time Magazine puts Franzen on the cover and talks about how writing is dying in the accompanying article. Then the NYTimes gives Freedom a good first review. Then some well-known women writers complain that the NYTimes is sexist and only likes books by white male writers like Franzen. (There is plenty of evidence that this is true, but that’s beside the point.) The NYTimes retaliates by writing another huge review of Franzen’s book, authored by the editor of the book review itself. The first line calls Freedom a “masterpiece of American fiction,” and goes on to compare Franzen to Dickens, Tolstoy, Mann, Bellow, and Roth.

Now, Washington Post’s fiction editor Ron Charles has reviewed the book on video, and I declare it the winner! The review is even-handed, and also, I like him, so here you go:

Honestly, what is it about Jonathan Franzen that inspires such controversy? He is a good writer. I think The Corrections is a very enjoyable novel and clearly, Freedom is also good. What is this urge to build the man up to such ridiculous levels in some quarters, and then to tear him down in other quarters? I don’t get it.

Anyway, I am always slow to jump on literary bandwagons. I bought The Corrections for ten cents at a thrift store long after all the hype was over and read it. I was surprised that I liked it. In a similar vein, I am sure I will get around to Freedom, eventually.

I am jealous of John Green’s bookshelves.

Someday, we will build my bookshelves, and I will organize this huge pile of books behind me.

I wish other writers would take us through a tour of their books.

Also, this video made me want to read.

I think it is so cool that Moscow has created a Dostoevsky-themed subway station. According to NPR:

The walls are gray and bare, except for murals capturing scenes from Dostoevsky’s famous novels: Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and of course, Crime and Punishment, the book where Dostoevsky digs into the mind of his lead character, Raskolnikov, exploring a young man’s path to murder.

In one famous passage, Raskolnikov cries out, “Good God! Can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an ax, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open … that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal and tremble; hide, all spattered in the blood … with the ax … Good God, can it be?”

The fictional character — poor, desperate for money to help his family and mentally tortured — ends up killing two women. And it’s all depicted in a mural right on the subway platform in which Raskolnikov holds an ax over a woman’s head, while a corpse lies on the ground.

The mural of this scene is causing controversy. Many mental health experts think it will cause suicide and violence. Here is a picture of the image that is causing all the ruckus:

Sometimes people boggle my mind with the dumb things they worry about. That is not a shocking image. And really, the fear of what the mural might do to someone else’s mind is precisely the kind of thinking that leads to banning books or preventing art from being put on display. The subway station might just as easily inspire pride among Russians for one of their great writers. It might even make them want to read more.

Or they might just want to pretend to be a cool guy in a cape:

And yeah, okay, maybe some people don’t want to think about dark topics on their morning commute, and maybe the gray walls might depress someone, but hey, it’s Russia. Isn’t everyone already depressed?

NPR has a list of funny books to read this summer. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that made me laugh–unless you count my recent perusal of The Anti-Christ by Nietzsche–so this has caught my interest.

I am particularly interested in Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir by Wendy Burden. “The Vanderbilt dynasty may not strike you as the stuff of great comedy, but Wendy Burden, a four-times-great-granddaughter of old Cornelius, captures the extravagant decline of her wealthy family with the bite of a standup comic, reminding you that your life and material are what you make of them.” Great title.

The Guardian digested read of The Humbling by Philip Roth calls him a dirty old man. It’s pretty funny. Sample:

After his release, Axler had retreated to his farmhouse in upstate New York and it was there that Pegeen had visited him. Her parents were old friends and he had known her since she was a baby, suckling at her mother’s breast. Now she was 40, a lesbian teaching at a progressive women’s college in Vermont. “Have you ever slept with a man?” he asked.

“Not for more than 20 years,” Pegeen replied. “But there’s something about your arthritic body I find irresistible.”

“I can only make love if you’re on top of me because my back’s playing up,” he said, fondling her heavy breasts.

“You’re a smooth talking lesbo-converter, Philip . . .”

“It’s Simon.”

“Whatever. No one else could make me want cock.”

(Via Bookslut)

NPR has a fascinating little snippet on the letters of Lord Byron, which are going to be auctioned off soon. They are to a clergyman Byron corresponded with, and are full of tales about cities he visited, thoughts on Christianity, stories of botched love affairs, and literary gossip–Byron called Wordsworth “Turdsworth.” Ha! It’s worth a listen.

The NYTimes likes Bright Star, the new movie about the life of Keats. It looks horribly sentimental and mushy, but not so, says AO Scott:

This is a risky project, not least because a bog of cliché and fallacy lies between the filmmaker and her goal. In the first decades of the 19th century, some poets may have been like movie stars, but the lives of the poets have been, in general, badly served on film, either neglected altogether or puffed up with sentiment and solemnity. The Regency period, moreover, serves too many lazy, prestige-minded directors as a convenient vintage clothing store. And there are times in “Bright Star” when Keats, played by the pale and skinny British actor Ben Whishaw (“Perfume,” “I’m Not There”), trembles on the edge of caricature. He broods; he coughs (signaling the tuberculosis that will soon kill him); he looks dreamily at flowers and trees and rocks.

But these moments, rather than feeling studied or obvious, arrive with startling keenness and disarming beauty, much in the way that Keats’s own lyrics do. His verses can at first seem ornate and sentimental, but on repeated readings, they have a way of gaining in force and freshness. The music is so intricate and artificial, even as the emotions it carries seem natural and spontaneous. And while no film can hope to take you inside the process by which these poems were made, Ms. Campion allows you to hear them spoken aloud as if for the first time. You will want to stay until the very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of each gaffer and grip, but rather to savor every syllable of Mr. Whishaw’s recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Sigh. Now I am going to have to see this movie…

Here’s a fascinating interview with Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson, most known for the short story The Lottery. Oates talks about Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I tooootttaaaalllllly want to read now. (In fact, I just ordered it off the Internet.) It is about two sisters who live isolated from the nearby town in a castle. It has a dark, gothic vibe similar to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

In the interview, Oates draws parallels between the themes of the book and Jackson’s life, which sounds awful. Jackson became agoraphobic, feared the people in the town around her, believed she was a witch, and probably had a some serious mental illnesses. It’s remarkable she was able to produce good writing in the middle of all that chaos. (Via Bookslut)