World famous "Great" (per Time magazine) American novelist Jonathan Franzen puzzles over sudden news of a "Baby Bust" (per Daily Beast, previously Newsweek).
"How will that affect my sales?" Franzen wonders while searching, in three-piece suit, for birds in dilapidated sections of New York.
The entire premise of Jonathan Franzen's recent best-selling best-hyped book Freedom is that America is in fact dangerously overpopulated, which might drastically affect the nation's bird population. (Estimated conservatively at over five billion.)
"Manhattan, anyway, seems to me to still be kind of overpopulated," Jonathan Franzen affirms to himself intelligently. "At least with human beings. Not really maybe so much with birds, I don't think. At least, there doesn't seem to be quite as many here as in Missouri."
Jonathan Franzen's editors, meanwhile, argue among themselves over whether Franzen's novel Freedom could be suddenly rewritten, for, um, accuracy. After all, it's supposed to be a great novel.
"How could we have known?" they say defensively. "If we tweak a few chapters, could we completely change the theme? That America's becoming UNDERpopulated?"
"Would anyone notice?" they ask one another. "No, I don't think anyone will notice."
At the same time, under the framed Time magazine cover of Jonathan Franzen gloriously placed on the wall in his publisher's office, the words "Great American Novelist" beneath the frame have been crossed out and replaced with two others: "Bird Brain."
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