Reception
In the introduction to the essay collection How to Be Alone, Franzen notes that he was frequently asked about the essay in interviews, and that may have aroused more interest than any of his fictional works.
In a review of How to Be Alone for the AV Club, Andy Battaglia called Franzen's conclusions "a lot more heartening than might be expected", and found that the collection of essays was made far more interesting by both Franzen's tone of anxiety, as well as the controversies surrounding The Corrections being selected for Oprah's Book Club.
Robert Rebein suggests that the original essay marks an intentional turning point in Franzen's style from early postmodern work to that of traditional realism. Rebein further notes that if Franzen's sales numbers are any indication, The Corrections certainly accomplished some degree of the cultural notoriety he desired.
Ruth Franklin, in a review of Freedom for The New Republic, found the essay to be unfocused and ultimately inconclusive as to what the goal of the Social Novel, or the novel in general should be. Her review found Franzen's novels as well as his essays to depict a great cultural urgency, but neither find ways of confronting it.
In an review of The Corrections for The eXile, John Dolan criticized the novel for not realizing Franzen's ambition as expressed in the essay. Dolan suggested that while Franzen believed himself to be writing in a style influenced by social realism, he was in fact relying on film and television clichés in the construction of his novels.
Read more about this topic: Why Bother? (essay)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)