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December 30, 2010

Just To The Left Of Admiration

Augustine found me sitting in a chair in Barnes & Nobile yesterday, and asked what I was reading; I held up the latest issue of the Paris Review, and the Jonathan Franzen article contained therein (from which the image above was culled). She laughed and told me I was obsessed. "I'm not obsessed," I countered. "I'm just really, really interested."

I bought Franzen's Freedom shortly after it was released this past fall, but held off on reading it for a while, alternately blaming the cover art, that cover of Time and the other books I'd picked up at the same time for the delay. Then I did read it, quite quickly, and immediately thereafter devoured How To Be Alone, his book of essays, his girlfriend Kathryn Chetkovich's essay Envy, and just about every interview I could get my hands on, all with one question in mind: who does this guy think he is?

And I ask that quite sincerely, without a sense of the pejorative. The version of Franzen that emerges through his writing is intensely curious to me; the slightly more immediate persona he projects in interviews even more so. Curious, and oddly abrasive; I noticed it in The Corrections nine years ago, some ulterior aspiration that infringed on the literary quality of the novel. I noticed it too in Freedom, but let me say first that whatever misgivings I had going into that book where quelled by the litany of quotidian queries (e.g. "Where to recycle batteries?") that take up most of the second page and resound with an escalating, intoxicating crystallization of subject matter and style. It's brilliant writing. Franzen is a master of finding the right sentence, and Freedom is a landslide of proverbial bon mots that hit with uncanny precision. They're casually strewn here and there amidst seemingly incidental paragraphs; he doesn't build up to them, or take time to savor them before hitting us with the next syntactical dart. I had two or three instances of this in mind that I thought I might quote here, sentences I should have written down; I couldn't remember their wording, but I recalled the scenes they occurred in, and even their physical orientation on the page. When I opened the book to find them, however, those sentences seemed to have vanished. The little traps of language Franzen sets for us are apparently only tripped by cumulative reading; what one finds in piecemeal is extremely skillful, almost ebullient social storytelling. I went looking for a single line and wound up reading ten pages and reflecting on the mores of our time.

And yet I take it all with a tincture of umbrage. It's a better book than The Corrections, free of the cartoonish set-pieces that story leaned on, but it shares with it, along with several of Franzen's essays, a rather knowing sensibility. They know exactly how good they are. They were written to be that good, as opposed to their goodness being an inherent byproduct of having been written. Their egalitarianism is of a higher order; they were intended to be great. Since when is aspiring to greatness a bad thing? It's not, but when one notices such aspirations, certain red flags go up. Especially when one admits to oneself that one aspires for exactly the same thing.

This is, I think, why I'm simultaneously intrigued by and distrustful of Franzen: his open ivory-tower perspective brings into sharper realization various highfalutin sensibilities of my own. I'm annoyed with the way he qualifies the novels he admires with the prefix 'literary,' but I make the same distinction, silently, when selecting the literature I read. I roll my eyes at his adherence to antiquated technology, his deep distrust of television, and yet I've written in these same pages about how I don't own a TV and often imagine myself in my minds' eye in a burnished room piled high with books. I outright love books, novels in particular. In short, I share share his preferences, and I also share in is idealism. I think there's room for the 'literary' novel in American culture (just as I think there's room for the literary film), and within this context I've yet to exchange the word think for hope. And yet in introducing these propensities within myself, I use a word like 'highfalutin' to let readers know that I'm in on my own joke. I'm afraid of being accused of elitism, even as I constantly seek its shelter. I'm a straddler. Franzen, meanwhile, has long ago admitted that what he likes, what he wants and what he seeks to do is outright better.

Indeed, any problems I have with Freedom are not necessarily the book's fault, but because it comes packaged with its author and his ensuing baggage. In reverse chronological order, we have that Time cover; his reconciliation with Oprah; his book of essays, including the revised version of 'the Harpers' Essay' which, regardless of whether he chose its or not (he didn't), still bears the stigma of its awful original title, Perchance To Dream; the original Oprah debacle (covered beautifully in one of the best essays in How To Be Alone); The Corrections, which itself comes compounded by its novelistic flaws and, conversely, its beloved status; and the 5000-word-longer version of the Harpers' essay, which, pruned though it later was, planted seeds that have flourished into opinions which have proven hard to shake.

Jumping back to the present, I greatly enjoyed reading Chuck Klosterman's recent interview with Franzen in GQ, which adroitly engages this sense of contention and reveals that a.) it's widespread and b.) that Franzen is completely aware of it. He himself succinctly sums up his modus operandi in two quotes:

"I do lead a privileged life. I do believe some books are better than others. I do think that mere popularity does not indicate greatness. In those respects, I suppose I'm an elitist. But I think what was meant by the term elitist at the time was the antithesis of what I've tried to do as a writer, which is to reach the largest possible audience. I've worked so long—and in such a conscious way—to not exclude people."

And, prior to that:

"I think there is a space in our culture—in the living memory of people over 40, and probably in the collective memory of people under 40—for the American novelist ... I had an interest in being that kind of novelist, and I worked at it for thirty years."

There, again, that ambition, about which he is both crystal clear and perfectly modest; it's his having it at all that seems immodest. His intention is to matter, to the most people possible, via the form he considers intrinsic to our culture, at the level he feels is appropriate. Not just appropriate, but necessary. He writes responsibly. He does not look backwards or reach downward with his prose; his standards are set, his door is open. He doesn't have to call himself a Great American Novelist because he's done such a perfect job of openly becoming one. If all we had of him were his books, we'd think them fine books indeed, and perhaps eventually both they and he would be called great. But because they come with him now, accompanied by his goals, his worries, his aspirations, his fears, his beliefs, his standards and his love of the novel and dedication to its value, we've watched him become Great contemporaneously. This immediacy is unsettling; it forces us to make decisions now, without the safety net of time. It's an affront to our own standards, because it forces us to consider them. And maybe it's an awkward cross to bear for Franzen, who I assume would prefer us to engage with his literature, rather than with him. Except that, for better or for worse, he himself has become representative of American literature at this moment, so if we engage with him, we're doing our part to save the novel - the literary novel - from obsolescence. Mission accomplished. Perhaps it's a backwards and messy way of going about it, but let's not argue with results.

Here's a result: when I turned out the lights last night, Augustine was reading Freedom in bed beside me. When I woke up at 6 in the morning, she was still at it. I, meanwhile, after all this vigorous fretting and reflection, have picked up another book (Marilyn Robinson's Home, the followup to Gilead, which is my pick for best novel of the last decade) and am letting it sooth the creases from my brow. Out of the frying pan, into the fire (a closing statement which would have made more sense had I not deleted my original reference to the figuratively conflagrative qualities the best of books offer).

Posted by David Lowery at December 30, 2010 12:07 AM