Art & Creativity Quote by Jonathan Franzen

A throwaway compliment can be a grenade if you toss it in the right room. Franzen calling The Silence of the Lambs “a really smart book” isn’t just praise for Thomas Harris; it’s a little jab at the cultural sorting hat that decides what counts as Literature and what gets banished to the airport paperback rack. Franzen’s reputation is built on seriousness, on the thick novel as a moral instrument. So when he vouches for a cannibal-thriller famous for its film adaptation and pop-cultural afterlife, he’s also stress-testing his own camp’s snobbery.

The phrasing matters: “really smart” is casual, almost adolescent, the opposite of the reverent language that usually escorts “important” books. That looseness is strategic. It suggests that intelligence in fiction isn’t owned by prestige genres; it’s a property of craft - structure, psychological acuity, narrative economy. Harris’s book is a procedural that’s also an essay on power: how institutions look at bodies, how predators read desire, how Clarice navigates a maze of male gaze and bureaucratic rot. Calling it smart is a way of defending pleasure as a legitimate readerly value without surrendering the idea of standards.

The subtext: Franzen wants permission to be omnivorous. In a culture where taste is a social ID card, he’s signaling that seriousness doesn’t require joylessness, and that “high” and “low” are often just marketing categories pretending to be ethics.