So-so Skinny Latte

James Francken

  • Zanzibar by Giles Foden
    Faber, 389 pp, £12.99, September 2002, ISBN 0 571 20512 7

Those who argued that 11 September could change the direction of contemporary fiction soon had a facer. The Corrections, published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway bestseller, and the case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in the introduction to his new collection of essays, How to Be Alone,[*] Franzen acknowledges that ‘within 48 hours of the calamity’ he was giving author interviews once more: ‘business,’ he concedes, ‘is business.’

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[*] Fourth Estate, 281 pp., £16.99, 7 October, 0 00 714725 2.

Vol. 24 No. 18 · 19 September 2002 » James Francken » So-so Skinny Latte (print version)
Pages 30-31 | 2478 words