Jonathan Franzen has made the news this week, by berating digital media and corporate capitalism. Those were themes of his most recent novel, Freedom. His previous book, The Corrections, played with the fashionable phrase ‘dysfunctional family’, and exposed how the term has been bastardised by misuse. He re-emphasises that final point in the clip above.
The abuse of language and the prevalence of bad writing exercises most writers, especially the good ones. VS Naipaul and Martin Amis, for instance, are severe on the subject. Naipaul advises those who misuse words to ‘look for other work’, while the content of Amis’ The War Against Cliché is arch: this sentence on Cervantes is merciless, ‘While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw — that of outright unreadability.’
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