This was a surprisingly interesting (if long) read, which I'll summarize briefly here. The essay starts with Jonathan Franzen taking offense with a reader accu

This was a surprisingly interesting (if long) read, which I'll summarize briefly here. The essay starts with Jonathan Franzen taking offense with a reader accusing him of elitist writing, and turns into an overview of William Gaddis and his elitist writing. Franzen presents the idea that great fiction writing is great art, and great art may take some work on the part of the reader to properly appreciate. In this light, he talks about reading and appreciating Gaddis's impenetrable first novel, The Recognitions, which was "great art" but also a commercial flop. This failure forced Gaddis to take a 20-year hiatus before returning with a second novel, which was even more impenetrable, but which, thanks to some PR, achieved commercial and critical success. Franzen reviews this and the subsequent novels, none of which he was able to finish reading; his conclusions about Gaddis as a writer are basically summarized in the last paragraphs: > Literary difficulty can operate as a smoke screen for an author who has nothing interesting, wise, or entertaining to say. You'll find not one reference (in Gaddis's own essays about writing) to the pleasure of reading fiction. [After] "The Recognitions," however, something happened to Gaddis. Something went haywire....he gave the grownup world one chance to recognize him. When the world, inevitably, failed this test, he took his talent to the archetypically phony work of corporate P.R., as if to say, "You'll never catch me hoping again." My wannabe literati days are long behind me, but I suspect this approach to marketing literature (if enough of the "right people" say it's good, people will buy it like it is) still applies in force today. I wonder how people find actually good new literature, if none of the usual discovery avenues are trustworthy.