Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

J-Franz Returns

Rake points to a new story from J-Franz in the New Yorker. Our immediate impressions can be summed up as follows:

• Hey, J, ever heard of paragraph breaks?
• Was there ever a clunkier lead sentence wrought in Remnick's pages?
• This "young husband," does he have a name?
• "The divorce was done by mail." How convenient!
• "[H]he feared his only purpose on the planet was to insert his penis in the vaginas of the greatest possible number of women." Mock clinical language is so 1986, Franz.
• "But Ron insisted that he had never seen this word before, that her vocabulary was much larger than his, and, absurdly, that he had never in his life scored eighty-seven points in one Scrabble play." Dave Eggers-style nonsequiturs are a sudden influence on J-Franz?
• "..but he was forty years old, and it was time to grow up..." Or autobiographical?
• "In later years Antonia never, in her stocking-footed friends’ hearing, spoke of him with anger, always only pity, because, she said, he knew himself so poorly." Comma, comma, commala!