November 02, 2004

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!
Posted by DrMabuse at November 2, 2004 06:28 AM
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