Tournament of Books: my uninformed opinion on matchup one

How many Tournament of Books entries have I read? One! Does that make me qualified to make my own picks? Of course. What's the internet for if not to spread half-assed opinions on things you're not qualified to judge?

Round One, Matchup One

Judging begins March 7.

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, v. Kapitoil, by Teddy Wayne

Judge: Sarah Manguso.

The parties involved:
Jonathan Franzen: Literary heavyweight, Time Magazine coverboy, liberal intellectual with funky glasses who was best friends with literary martyr David Foster Wallace, Franzen is the 800 pound gorilla of American literary fiction. This is to the detriment of American fiction, in my opinion, as there are plenty of writers with Franzen’s guts and chops, and plenty of writers whose work shows more respect and compassion for the human condition. Franzen can write a good sentence, and weave the personal into the historical like few writers of this era, but he works just as hard to make you hate his characters. I found The Corrections to be a beautiful achievement, but it was filled with just as many needless stunts as it was transcendent moments. What I’ve read of Freedom, with its condescending attitude to aging liberals, and one excerpt of a man digging through his own shit to find a wedding ring he swallowed, seems to be more of the same.

Teddy Wayne: Kapitoil is the debut novel of magazine writer Teddy Wayne. From its summary on Amazon, I can tell the ideas he works from are close to Franzen’s. A young Qatari citizen moves to New York in 1999, and writes a computer program that can predict oil futures, unsettling the industry and the world. There is romance, politics, and the specter of 9-11. From the sample, also on Amazon, I can tell that Wayne’s prose is precise and readable, and that he should be a good matchup for Franzen in round one.

Judge Sarah Manguso is the author of a memoir, some poems, and several novels; how she became the judge of these two novels I don’t know, but I’m going to sense that she’s got some resistance to Franzen, since the women in his novels don’t fare very well - there’s always a whiff of anger when Franzen writes about women, and I think that’s going to play against him in round one.

Summary: The first round of the TOB is carefully structured to pit like books and authors against each other. Also noteable is that every bracket but one pits like-gendered opponents against each other. I don’t know if this is a conscious effort to achieve gender parity through at least round two, or if it is a side-effect of pairing up like-themed novels. This pair up is a duel of ‘dense social novels,’ and, as such, I can’t see anyone stacking up against Jonathan Franzen - it’s hard for me to see Wayne out-plotting, or flat-out writing better than Franzen. But there’s the issue of character and likeability - from the first page of Wayne’s novel, I liked his narrator, kind of an earnest sad-sack I wanted to win.

Winner: My uninformed guess is that Franzen pulls out a win in round one, but it’s going to be a closer call than you’d think at first glance.