Great American Novelist. He's not the richest or most famous. His characters don't solve mysteries, have magical powers or live in the future. But in his new novel, Freedom, Jonathan Franzen shows us the way we live now.
The fact that the person placed on the Time's cover is a living novel writer was so surprising, that a number of other media sources dedicated a news entry for it. It appeared that Jonathan Franzen is the first writer for 10 years to get to the cover of this magazine (the previous one was Stephen King in 2000).
In my opinion, this fact is not a worse illustration of the way we live now than the mentioned book. For 50 years (1951-2000) as many as 42 living writers were honoured to get to the Time's cover, ~8 authors per decade. The first decade of 2000's was not that rich. However, I cannot say that the shelves of bookstores have become smaller. Conversely, they obviously have become much larger than ten years ago. And the books have become much more colourful and pretty than before (right now I'm looking at my good old Catcher in the Rye, 1975 edition, and I'm sure it would have never been sold in today's bookstore due to its ugly cover).
The abundance on the bookshelves hides the scarcity of modern literature. It is the same entropy loss problem I wrote about some time ago. The problem is that we produce a lot of form, while forgetting about the sense. A typical book available in a store today is nothing more than a coloured pack of printed paper whose life is limited by a trip from New York to San Francisco. What a difference to my Catcher, the Catcher I've bought at bibliopole's, whose pages become yellow with time, who has some wrested pages pasted back in wrong order, who spent his best years being read by a dozen of my friends (and their friends), and who is still alive and carefully dusted once a week on a dedicated bookcase shelf, waiting for succeeding readers.
