Category: Jonathan Franzen

My review of Jonathan Franzen‘s new novel, Freedom, is in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. It’s standard operating procedure to clip the beginning of the review, but I want to point to a few sentences a little lower in the piece, in order to get at one of the reasons why I think the novel doesn’t quite come off:

Throughout the novel are glimpses of people who are more coddled by art than inspired by it. A rock club is full of fans of a “gentler and more respectful way of being . . . more in harmony with consuming.” When Richard gives an interview saying rock “never had any subversive edge,” the provocation is subsumed into blogosphere noise. But writing can hurt, Franzen insists, and art can reshape us.

“Richard” is Richard Katz, a musician friend of the couple at the center of the novel, and something of a mouthpiece for the frustration/contempt/weltschmerz Franzen feels toward the way culture is made and consumed in America. There’s no question that Franzen is a firm believer in the power of storytelling—the whole novel is a study in how the stories we tell one another or ourselves can have a huge impact, sometimes literally wound us. Yet in nearly every scene in which Richard arrives, Franzen appears to be wringing his hands over the usefulness of pursuing art in a society that’s dead to it. It’s a valuable question, but Franzen pursues it awkwardly, and doesn’t resolve it in a satisfying way.

The problem is that, within the structure of Freedom, Richard can’t win regardless how much or little he succeeds. His first band, the Traumatics, is a poor-selling but critically acclaimed punk band that puts out grim-titled albums like Greetings From the Bottom of the Mine Shaft. He’s a smart guy who’s engaged in a pointless pursuit according to Patty Berglund, who narrates the bulk of the Traumatics’ history: The band is dedicated, she writes, “to releasing further wryly titled records that a certain kind of critic and about five thousand people in the world liked to listen to, and doing small-venue gigs attended by scruffy, well-educated white guys who were no longer as young as they used to be.” Richard sings angry all-caps lyrics (“A wall of Regis Philbins! I tell you I’m starting to feel/INSANELY HAPPY! INSANELY HAPPY!”) but not many are listening—though Walter, Patty’s husband and Richard’s friend, is among that enthusiastic 5,000.

When people are listening, the deadness of art-making is even worse. Richard later starts a new band that releases an album of polite folk-rock, and it becomes a hit, “the perfect little Christmas gift to leave beneath tastefully trimmed trees in several hundred thousand NPR-listening households.” That mild sneering about popular art expands a few times in the course of the novel. First in an interview where Richard rails about the relationship between art and mass-consumption and iPods:

We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, we’re not about accurate or objectively verifiable information, we’re not about meaningful labor, we’re not about a coherent set of national ideals, we’re not about wisdom. We’re about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else. We’re about ridiculing people who have the bad manners not to want to be cool like us. We’re about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minutes.

The feeling of contempt only deepens when Richard heads to Washington, DC, and attends a show by indie-rock cause celebre Conor Oberst at the 9:30 Club. Richard takes in the crowd:

…left to themselves to ritually repudiate, for an hour or two on a Saturday night, the cynicism and anger of their elders. They seemed…to bear malice toward nobody. Katz could see it in their clothing, which bespoke none of the rage and disaffection of the crowds he’d been a part of as a youngster. They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming. And so said to him: die.

So how to justify the effort of producing a brick of literature—art!—in 2010 when you’ve expended a lot of effort in its pages dismissing the utility of art, popular or not? A little strangely and unsatisfyingly, it turns out. Franzen has Patty, a woman not especially inclined to reading in his characterization, consume War and Peace, finding parallels in its pages with her own life. (In turn she’ll write her own set of pages that’ll have an impact on her family, pages written in an expert style that recalls a certain American novelist named Jonathan Franzen. Later, people will comment on how well-written those pages are.) And without giving too much of the plot away, it becomes clear that Walter internalized the Traumatics catalog deeply enough to go on an all-caps rant of his own, in a hokey, forced set piece. Awkwardly enough, Franzen is on better footing dismissing the value of art than he is asserting it. And if that’s the case, why bother?

It’s not as if Franzen hasn’t spent serious time trying to answer that question. In his excellent 1996 essay, “Perchance to Dream,” (subscription req’d), he argued that as a novelist he was obligated to look at the big picture, to defend the social novel, even as he was despairing over living in a time when there was no real audience for it. (The essay is a kind of defense of the novel that a certain kind of critic and about five thousand people in the world like.) So Franzen knew, going in, that writing a novel like Freedom would put him in a bind. He writes in the Harpers essay:

The American writer today faces a totalitarianism analogous to the one with which two generations of Eastern Bloc writers had to contend. To ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it, however, is to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine…

Freedom is no nostalgia piece, and there’s much to admire in it—it reads beautifully, has an admirable scope, and the extended parts about bird population and coal mining are less draggy than they have any right to be, even with one long scene literally taking place in a conference room. But it’s a novel with that persistent, irritating drumbeat in the background—technological consumerism is an infernal machine…—and while Franzen obviously threw his best effort into stifling that noise, to cover it up in singing prose and intimate characterizations, the platitude just keeps welling up.

Scott Esposito was for Jonathan Franzen‘s The Corrections before he was against it:

You know, right when I read The Corrections, I really, really liked it too. (And then I read Strong Motion and had a similarly positive reaction.) Both books gave me one of those visceral reactions that I suppose you could compare to falling in love, or perhaps being powerfully smitten after a night of intense conversation.

And then what happened? I got a little perspective. Franzen started looking less and less impressive to me. Other books and authors more so. In other words, I began to embrace that more active part of discernment and taste…

Esposito’s comments follow some earlier comments by Andrew Seal about the Millions’ list of the best fiction of the new millennium. (I haven’t followed the discussion closely, but I gather Seal believes the list is constricted by design—a product of a poll of people with too-alike sensibilities.) The line of thought here is initially a little off-putting, mainly because it reminds me of the kind of arguments you hear poseurs make when they talk about about music. (“You like them? Hey, 2006 called—they want their taste back.”) Nick Hornby explicitly riffed on this notion in his novel High Fidelity. “Anna’s a Simple Minds fan,” one of the record-store nerds laments as he introduces his new girlfriend to his buddies. “But I think she’s beginning to understand why she shouldn’t be.”

Esposito isn’t that shallow. But his argument seems to dismiss as fraudulent the pleasure one gets as a reader—as if falling in love with a book makes you a sucker, and you need to fight against that feeling. Critics can interrogate books they like just as easily as ones they don’t. There’s no reason why you can’t study the feelings you get while reading a book, figure out whether that pleasure is a result of some explicit manipulation by the author or something deeper in the text. Indeed, that’s the most basic of divisions between the endless parade of Amazon reviewers (“I loved this book so mcuh!”) and a critic who wants to explain not just what a novel makes him or her feel but how the novel generated that feeling.

Intentionally or not, Esposito argues that pleasure resists discernment, that it can’t be a product of discernment—he once loved The Corrections, he writes, but after his first read he acquired the “more active part of discernment and taste.” Taste evolves, and nobody’s under any obligation to keep on loving the books they loved years back—if I went back to the books I loved 10 years ago, including The Corrections, I’m sure I’ll find reasons to scratch my head over my initial responses and convictions about the book. But our reasons for loving a book can be articulated, even during that first read—we don’t have to be struck dumb by that love.

Last night I attended Mike Daisey‘s performance of his monologue How Theater Failed America at the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in D.C. It’s a very smart and funny show, well worth seeing if you’re in town this week—a subtle plea to encourage younger performers and audience members (Daisey notes that the baseline age for “youth discount tickets” keeps ticking up, from 25 to 30 to 35), and a not-so-subtle attack on how machinelike the world of theater has become. Between corporate sponsorships and the largely interchangeable pool of actors and directors, Daisey argues, the idea of theater as community spaces has all but disappeared, with successful companies now relegated to doing all they can to preserve the audience it does have, and failing to engage those outside of it.

I know very little about the internal mechanisms of American theater management, so I can’t speak to how much of Daisey’s monologue is truth-telling and how much is rant. (There was certainly a strange moment of disconnect after the show, when Daisey encouraged the crowd to consider attending the rest of Woolly Mammoth’s season, while in the show proper he skewered the season-subscription model.) But if the theater world is anything like the world of arts journalism, or of publishing, or of filmmaking, or of music, Daisey’s nailed it; now that these disciplines find it increasingly difficult to pay for themselves, they risk falling into survival mode, appealing perhaps to a core community but increasingly incapable of expanding it.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to Jonathan Franzen‘s recent statements to 5th Estate about the state of social novel (via the Millions and OUPblog). Franzen takes a few whacks at his youthful naivete in thinking that his writing would somehow generate social change, then explains how he’s now narrowed his ambitions:

I recognize that there’s a small but non-zero segment of the population that feels and thinks in all of those literary ways, and that my task is to reach them and to participate in the life of that segment of the population. This is what I’m writing for, for the people who want a literary experience. I’m no longer worried that nobody besides me can have that kind of experience, but I’m also not imagining that, in any conceivable twist of history, everybody will want that kind of experience. So it’s a weird and possibly selfish-seeming form of communitarianism: I’ve ceased to care much, as a writer, about people who don’t care about books.

As a long-term strategy for Jonathan Franzen, this is wise thinking—he has his fan base, and presumably it’s sizable enough for him to create a decent living for himself. As a long-term strategy for American literature, though, it’s slitting one’s own throat. What is it about this country’s literary culture that creates the feeling that it can only serve itself? The terrible pay that novelists and short-story writers can look forward to? MFA programs? The way that literature is taught in public schools? Is this a global or an American phenomenon? If people creating culture are only reaching the class of people most attuned to agree with it, why are they bothering?

Little Blogger Me doesn’t have an answer to any of those questions. But I suspect everybody in the culture business will be asking those questions a lot more often in 2009, as many of the perceived support beams of that business begin to splinter, if not collapse outright.