Today's Daily [Chuckle] comes from Tad Friend, who added this paragraph, a little ball of concentrated snark, to the Book Bench's series on The Year in Reading:
There was a novel by this guy Branzen, or Klanzen—you know the one. It had like a sparrow or a mean-looking bird on the cover, and it was about this uptight dude from Minnesota and how he was all into saving the sparrow or mean-looking bird and how his wife wasn't because she was all depressed from not having enough good sex. So he saves her, instead, at the end, and they have some good sex, presumably. Which was kind of profound, because that's how metaphorism operates in our daily lives, in books. There was other stuff in there that was pretty funny, too. Franzen! That's his name: Jonathan Safran Franzen. Total two thumbs up.
I really grew to enjoy Mr. Friend's writing this year, and I've been meaning to check out Cheerful Money, his latest memoir. It's currently ranked in the 70,000 bowels of the Amazon depth chart; Freedom is 15. Maybe Friend is friends with Franzen and this was a little bit of inter-office joshing. I would love it though if it's completely the opposite from that. In any event, it was a stark contrast to the hand-wringing and rhapsodic hoo-ha that preceded it. A palpable [chuckle].
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