Jonathan Franzen Receives a Rejection Letter from the Estate of Stan & Jan Berenstain
“A 643-page book does not fit with previous entries in the franchise.”
Dear Mr. Franzen,
Thank you for your recent submission, titled The Berenstain Bears Learn About Late Capitalist Cultural Malaise. I regret to inform you that, at this time, we will be unable to include it in this season’s line-up. Our editorial staff offers the following suggestions, which might be helpful for any future submissions:
Length
The Berenstain Bears series is geared toward new readers, and each book is meant to be of appropriate length for a bedtime story, or for a child to read to themself. While we appreciate the note you included with your manuscript saying that you “would be willing to shorten” the scene in which Brother Bear’s crisis of faith compels him to destroy Farmer Ben’s watermelon patch with the axe that Papa gave him for his 8th birthday “as a symbol of the family’s proud history of lumberjacking and carpentry,” we still must insist that a 643-page book does not fit with previous entries in the franchise.
Appropriateness of Content
Furthermore, while The Berenstain Bears has never shied away from potentially upsetting or even “grown-up” material — -our earlier titles The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers and The Birds, the Bees, and the Berenstain Bears ought to be ample evidence of this — -our editors were troubled by the lengthy subplot in which Sister Bear abuses psychiatric medications provided by a shady associate of Dr. Grizzly.
We remain unconvinced that this is, as your notes suggested, “a logical continuation of Sister Bear’s tendency toward debilitating addiction as demonstrated in her pathologically compulsive nail-biting, as canonically established in The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Habit.” While we appreciate your desire to reference earlier books in the series, you may recall that that habit is successfully broken when Sister wisely follows the folksy advice of her grandmother. We consider the matter of Sister Bear’s “maladaptive compulsions,” as you put it, to be a non-starter.
Speaking of grandparents, The Berenstain Bears has always promoted honoring one’s elders. However, we do not see the necessity of the 63-page section toward the end of the novel in which Papa Bear’s lineage is traced back four generations to a 19th-century bear from “The Old Ursine Country” whose intensive work ethic compels him to work his way up from a unionized beekeeper to a “corrupt and proto-Nixonian honey magnate whose sclerotic view of the world must necessarily culminate in the sort of casual indifference to his fellow bears that could only emerge from a psyche poisoned by the hardships of his ancestors.”
We must admit that your characterization of Papa Bear himself as a domestic abuser, through your astute callback to The Berenstain Bears Forget Their Manners, is quite compelling.
Originality and More on Inappropriateness
Speaking of Papa, his diatribe at the Bear Country town meeting, in which he declares that bears are “a cancer on the planet” is essentially just a more outlandish version of events that already occurred in The Berenstain Bears Go Green. The periodic appearance of Papa Bear’s old college roommate who resents his own professional successes was also inappropriate for our readers. I’m not even going to get into what happens between him and Mama Bear beginning on pg.385. Frankly, some of your adverb choices in this section were just plain offensive.
Consistency of Characterization
Concerning the incident with Brother Bear during the Bear Scout camping trip: Honestly, the less said, the better, but we feel confident that it is not consistent with his established characterization for him to repeat nationalistic alt-right talking points while telling Cousin Freddy that he has a plan to travel to Hungary with a friend he met online where they will become rich by “doing some computer work with associates of Viktor Orbán.”
We found it unsettling that Brother Bear “winked conspiratorially, his last vestiges of morality slipping irrevocably into the ether” after this line of dialogue, and also noted that you didn’t even try to make the Hungarian Prime Minister’s name into some sort of bear-related pun, which shows a worrisome lack of familiarity with our brand.
Extraneous Details
Finally, while we have always made a point of alluding to the non-bear creatures that live in Bear Country, we were perplexed by your decision to devote several dozen pages to the taxonomic rank of hundreds of bird species. Where did that even come from?
Yours,
Michael Bruin
Estate of Stan & Jan Berenstain
Berenstain Bears, Inc.
