Difficult", subtitled "William Gaddis and the problem of hard-to-read books", is a 2002 essay by Jonathan Franzen that appeared in the 9/30/2002 issue of The New Yorker.
[2] Novelist Cynthia Ozick mentioned the Franzen/Marcus disagreement as part of a larger picture on the nature of reviewing.
One letter writer, identified as "Mrs. M— from Maryland", had a list of 30 vocabulary words (like "diurnality" and "antipodes") and some flowery phrases (like "electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces") from the novel that she did not approve of.
Franzen then proceeds to list nine books that he has never been able to complete, including Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, and Mason & Dixon.
At some point, looking for distractions, Franzen purchased a copy of the Gaddis novel, and then made it his daily job, reading it six to eight hours a day for a week and a half.
He also mentions that he failed to notice at the time the many parallels between the novel's main character and his own life and art.
Franzen returns to how in college he was trained to read and admire complicated texts, finding fault with modern systems, and his ambition became that of creating literary art: I took for granted that the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading, and merited sustained study.Franzen then identifies 13 authors that he determined in his early post-college days as "a canon of intellectually, socially edgy, white-male American fiction writers" who "shared the postmodern suspicion of realism".
Franzen tells how a few years later he then attempted to read J R. He had less free time, only putting in one or two hours a night.
Somewhere past the halfway point, he put the book down for too long a stretch, and then found it impossible to return to the novel.
He claims he thought of himself as the ideal Systems/Status reader, and for him to give up was like quitting a cult, as opposed to quitting a mainstream church, where people come and go all the time: Nothing in my Congregational experience had prepared me for the fanatical fervor, the guilt-provoking authority, of Mr. Difficult.A book review of a new book by Joseph McElroy, one of the "hard-to-read 13" mentioned by Franzen, began by citing "Mr.