I sit alone at a reproduction antique table under a fake chandelier in the dining room at the Gore Hotel in Kensington. There is no sign of Jonathan Franzen; nor of anyone else. The place is entirely empty.
While I wait, I look at what people are saying about Franzen on Twitter. There is a Times columnist moaning thatPurity is a load of tripe. Someone else points out that Franzen has no black people in his novels. Others are incensed by his recent performance onNewsnight, in which he did what he often does — disparage the internet.
All this loathing is baffling. I have read and loved The Corrections (2001),Freedom (2010) and now Purity, the latter billed as a cross between Charles Dickens and Breaking Bad. It has kept me up every night for a week, and now that I’m done, I’ll miss its wit, its messed-up characters and its emotional complexity. It is a mystery how the man who wrote it could have become, in the words of the Los Angeles Review of Books, “with the possible exception of Kanye West — the most bitched about artist in America”.