Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen review

Jonathan Franzen is no stylist, but you have to applaud his impassioned plea for authenticity.

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9th June, 2012

Review

Before embarking on Jonathan Franzen’s new essay collection, Farther Away, I had it in mind that he wasn’t my ideal writer. Halfway through the book, as Franzen was sternly giving me a lesson on sentence writing, specifically that you must not use a comma followed by “then”, because if you do “you’re not listening to the English language when you’re writing”, I checked my shelves and found a copy of his novel The Twenty-Seventh City. It was covered in my own jottings from 2003. I had underlined this sentence: “They zigzagged around like the spoor of a rectilinearity ...

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