Minding the Gaps: "Farther Away" by Jonathan Franzen

Whenever the works or opinions of Jonathan Franzen come up in my conversations, I have a ready reply that I've shared many, many times: I admire the man's writing and devotion to a sometimes old-fashioned view of literature, but I tend to agree with his critics more often than not (and on a side note, the Twitter parody @EmperorFranzen is consistently hilarious). However, with these admissions in mind, I believe it shows my own evolution as a reader, to be able to balance and assess my own enjoyment of a person's writings and my respect of his critics. It's a far cry from the almost crazed fanaticism of my early and late teens in which I'd latch on to a "favorite" author and be so captivated to not realize his or her shortcomings. When Freedom was published in 2009, my own review (and a couple of follow-up essays) made mention of the critiques, ideas that were not against Franzen directly, but necessary wonders of whether or not the novel would have been as highly acclaimed had it been written by a female or minority author and not someone eight years removed from the massive critical and commercial success of The Corrections. In that time, Franzen has published a handful of essays (included in his newest collection, Farther Away) that at best engage American sensibilities of technology and community, and at worst make him come off as more cantankerous than normal. However, this collection has its share of bright spots, notably his attempts to call more attention to environmental issues.

The opening essay is carefully placed, and upon getting into it, the reader finds the unexpected soul of Franzen's arguments. The essay, a reprint of a 2011 commencement speech, starts off as a rant against technological advances and how dangerously close people come to "loving" their devices and social media outlets. However, the meaning of the speech is important, a plea to engage the world for what it contains, rather than engaging it via filtered "likes," gadgetry, and consumerism.

"Let me suggest, finally, that the world of technoconsumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn (Franzen 6)."

"But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist--a person who can't tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable (Franzen 7)."

These ideas are manifested in a more concrete manner in his widely circulated piece "I Just Called To Say I Love You." In this, he acknowledges his critics (a few self-references to himself as 'Grampaw'), and explores our cell-phone transfixed culture through the constant, powerful phrase "I love you," constantly yelled into phones in public spaces when the three words are meant to be private, sometimes little-used declarations. Again, he starts off with a tone that balances on deplorable pessimism, but then works itself into a touching look at his family connections and our post-9/11 world. To borrow a phrase of his from the 1990s, what looks like hate is actually tough love.

"The cell phone came of age on September 11, 2001. Imprinted that day on our collective consciousness was the image of cell phones as conduits of intimacy for the desperate. In every too-loud I-love-you that I hear nowadays, as in the more general national orgy of connectedness--the imperative for parents and children to connect by phone once or twice or five or ten times daily--it's difficult not to hear an echo of those terrible, entirely appropriate I-love-yous uttered on the four doomed planes and in the two doomed towers. And it's precisely this echo, the fact that it's an echo, the sentimentality of it, that so irritates me (Franzen 150)."

My favorite pieces in Farther Away are the essays documenting Franzen's travels abroad, sometimes for adventure and bird-watching, but more often for journalistic reportage of how the world, through its human oversight and carelessness, is creating dangerous conditions for birds and wildlife. His trip to Cyprus, documented in "The Ugly Mediterranean," is a firsthand look at rebellious conservationists who often find themselves the target of poachers and lax government regulations on bird poaching. But it also turns into a fascinating cultural report, showing how poaching is tied to generations of men in the country who view it as a birthright and a token of masculinity. The writing is carefully precise, and with the exception of the emphasis on birds, Franzen himself tends to disappear, and he becomes an impassioned journalist.

"The Republic of Malta, which consists of several densely populated chunks of limestone with collectively less than twice the area of the District of Columbia, is the most savagely bird-hostile place in Europe. There are twelve thousand registered hunters (about three percent of the country's population), a large number of whom consider it their birthright to shoot any bird unlucky enough to migrate over Malta, regardless of the season or the bird's protection status. The Maltese shoot bee-eaters, hoopoes, golden orioles, shearwaters, storks, and herons. They stand outside the fences of the international airport and shoot swallows for target practice. They shoot from urban rooftops and from the side of busy roads. They stand in closely spaced cliffside bunkers and mow down flocks of migrating hawks. They shoot endangered raptors, such as lesser spotted eagles and pallid harriers, that governments farther north in Europe are spending millions of euros to conserve. Rarities are stuffed and added to trophy collections; nonrarities are left on the ground or buried under rocks, as not to incriminate their shooters (Franzen 86-87)."

Like any work of non-fiction, some of the essays are enjoyable than others, and Franzen does stumble on occasion. "Interview With New York State" presents a rambling history of the state as told through a series of "interviews" with Franzen and the state's PR handlers. The idea is quite funny, but after awhile, it becomes tedious, even though there are the occasional nuggets of historical facts. I find Franzen to be at his most humorous when he deploys the occasional use of folly and hilarity, instead of attempting to sustain it for an entire piece. I enjoyed the book reviews scattered throughout, but I haven't read any of the books he mentions, so I'm withholding creative opinions, but based on his past reviews of works I'm familiar with, his literary criticism is almost always on the mark. At the very least, his references gave me some new titles to add to my list.

There are two pieces about the late David Foster Wallace, and it's impossible to explore them without making mention of some of Franzen's biggest critics. Some people feel he's getting a lot of mileage out of his friendship with Wallace, or that he has claimed Wallace's suicide was done out for legacy's sake. The writings presented here are beautifully touching, and from what I got from them, it's the case of a writer being completely open and honest about a troubled friend, taking every conceivable angle, but never downplaying the depression that led to Wallace's final act. There's love and anger mixed together, the only natural reactions to such a loss. Franzen never sugarcoats his emotions, and to some, that might be viewed as needlessly harsh.

"He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took him away from us and made the person into a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in The Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn't 'belong' to his readers any less than to me (Franzen 38)."

Being such a public literary figure, Franzen will always have his share of detractors, especially when he talks or writes in the opinionated ways we all tend to do. However, none of his own pet peeves originate from spite or general crankiness--he attempts to share his view of the world with highlights of the solutions and reasons for his demeanor. My mention of sometimes agreeing with his critics is in no way an attempt to soften or apologize for my admiration of him, which goes back almost ten years, when I devoured his literary essays in How To Be Alone. Like any artist, he's not perfect, both creatively or personally, but the complexities make him that much more accessible to me. Farther Away is full of thought-provoking material and excellent nonfiction narratives, and he never asks the reader to share his passions or agree with him all the time, but rather to allow him his opinions and then judge for themselves. My own championing of his literary criticism and overall writings likely won't sway anyone who disagrees with him, but I'm hoping to keep this in mind the next time I encounter a writer or artist who rubs me the wrong way, and continue to separate the writings from the public opinions. Love Franzen or hate him, but it's almost impossible to not be at least partially drawn by his subjects and goals.

Work Cited:
Franzen, Jonathan. Farther Away: Essays. Copyright 2012 by Jonathan Franzen.

Data Accessibility: "The Recognitions"

"...The Recognitions was perfect for the task. Reading the whole thing would also confer bragging rights. If somebody asked me if I'd read The Sotweed Factor, I could shoot back: No, but have you read The Recognitions? And blow smoke from the muzzle of my gun (Franzen 247)."




I recently completed a long-term goal of mine, a project that has been on my to-do list since I was twenty. Back in December, I began reading The Recognitions, the 1955 debut novel of author William Gaddis. Several times in the past, I started it, but never managed to make it beyond the first fifty pages or so. After a couple of months of on-again, off-again struggling, I finally finished the book. Even though I opened with it, the above passage from novelist Jonathan Franzen does not represent my beliefs. I didn't read the book for any bragging rights or literary hipster street cred. And even though I finished it, I'll be the first one to openly admit that I was lost at times, and that the book is packed with allusions and references that I undoubtedly missed. I had to turn to online summaries to pick up on some characters who were lost in the shuffle, and I found myself being slightly passive at times, skimming through parts written in Spanish, Latin, and Italian without taking the time to translate them. Even though this is an admission of literary sins, I still feel as if I made an accomplishment. Reading can be a combination of pleasure and work, and reading The Recognitions was a lot like my reading of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace: I knew it would be a challenge, but a good one. The readings were done out of a desire for the literary pleasure, but with full knowledge that I'd have to roll up my sleeves and devote time to vastly long narratives. Admittedly, this was far from easy. Even when the book was first published, a lot of critics and readers found it daunting, as William Gass explains in his relatively famous introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, which works as an example of Gaddis defenders being extremely devoted to the writer's cause, and also offering a glimmer of hope to the first-time reader.

"Its arrival was duly noted in fifty-five papers and periodicals. Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid. But the reviewers' responses to the book confirmed its character and quality, for they not only declared it unreadable and wandering and tiresome and confused, they participated in the very chicaneries the text documented and dramatized. It was too much to expect: that they should read and understand and praise a fiction they were fictions in. You, too, can let your present copy rest unread on some prominent table. A few critics confessed they could not reach the novel's conclusion except by skipping. Well, how many have actually arrived at the last page of Proust or completed Finnegans Wake? What does it mean to finish Moby-Dick, anyway? Do not begin this book with any hope of that. This is a book you are meant to befriend. It will be your lifelong companion. You will end only to begin again (Gass vii)."

My fascination with Gaddis (despite the fact that I've only read three of his books, including the slim essay collection The Rush For Second Place) began at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where I lucked out and studied under Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers, two Gaddis scholars who also edited an invaluable critical collection entitled Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System. It was at that time that I began following Franzen's critical work, and professor Tabbi and I occasionally clashed over the issue of Franzen's assessment of Gaddis, in his essay "Mr. Difficult." At that time, I wasn't anywhere close to being ready to read The Recognitions, even though I gave it some attempts. The enthusiasm that Tabbi and Shavers brought to even the most basic studies of Gaddis rubbed off on me. I still have quite a way to go before I a.) complete the Gaddis bibliography, and b.) can profess to have a more complete knowledge of his style and sources. But even with just one basic reading of The Recognitions, the amount of information and genuinely brilliant passages is exhilarating.

The novel follows several interconnected and dissecting plot lines. A preacher's son named Wyatt Gwyon grows up with intense religious fear, partly due to his Aunt's belief that he should devote himself to God, not the emulation of him (namely, recreating God's creations via art). As an adult, his marriage is strained and possibly sexless, his wife is engaged in multiple affairs, and after bad reviews, he takes an offer to forge the paintings of old masters to be re-sold as originals by a corrupt art dealer named Recktall Brown. Wyatt's path crosses with Otto Pivner, a playwright dogged by hints of plagiarism and pursuing a troubled poet and model named Esme. In the beginning and the middle of the novel, the reader is introduced to a counterfeiter whose son is mixed up with Esme. Showing up at a party and taking the dubious center stage at the novel's end is Stanley, a tortured Catholic composer who lives his life under a continually troubled religious code. Granted, in a twisting novel of 956 pages, this is just a sampling of the complete list of characters. Other ones play small to semi-important parts, others drift in and out, and some make mere cameo appearances. Giving a capsule description of each character would be both helpful and pointless, since, much like the novel's themes, picking and choosing their ultimate destinations is challenging.

The novel's themes and sources are many, and the historical and classical references alone are daunting to keep up with (again, as I mentioned above, I know that I missed most of them; some of the historical allusions are even explained within the novel, but a full understanding of their relation to the story requires nearly infinite background studies and resources). However, the implications and questions pop up at the reader from the beginning, and make for a literal whirlwind of ideas. Religious fanaticism and hypocrisy are bluntly explored. The nature of art, art criticism, and reality are debated. Few, if any, of the character relationships are genuine or truly long-lasting, creating a sense of isolation and despair in the multiple cities and countries in which the stories take place, thereby making The Recognitions a truly underrated example of 1950s unhappiness (Franzen hints that, stripped down, the novel is akin to Catcher In the Rye). What is, on the surface, a continual search for happiness is actually a search for integrity and reality in a false, corrupt world. For such a vast work, it's important to read carefully, since Gaddis had a knack for creating intensely philosophical and sociological details in his fiction. It's really the best of both worlds, with consistent, smaller character examinations mixed in with the novel's more expansive, overall messages. For example, look at the details infused in a brief sketch of the marriage between Wyatt and Esther:

"A year later, they had been married for almost a year; which was unlike Wyatt. He had become increasingly reluctant wherever decisions were concerned; and the more he knew, the less inclined to commit himself. Not that this was an exceptional state: whole systems of philosophy have been erected upon it. On the other hand, the more insistent from those depths, became the necessity to do so: a plight which has formed the cornerstone for whole schools of psychology. So it may be that his decision to marry simply made one decision the less that he must eventually face; or it is equally possible that his decision to marry was indecision crystallized, insofar as he was not deciding against it (Gaddis 79)."

Given that the novel was published in 1955, reading it today still renders it fresh, and shocking in the sense that Gaddis' criticisms were almost literally years ahead of the times, even if this is only evidenced in hindsight. As William Gass hinted, Gaddis seemed to poke fun at his eventual critics, but he also shows a deft hand for critiques of the consumer, political, and overall cultures of the 1950s, especially in the face of art and creativity. Some of these critiques are blunt, but at times, they are sly and carefully worded.

"He listened to the radio during periods of political heat, the speech in which one senator told the truth about another (this was known as a 'smear campaign'); and then the raucous gathering where people were paid in five-dollar bills to shout, clap, parade, and otherwise indicate the totally irrational quality of their enthusiasm for a man they had never met to take office and govern them (Gaddis 290)."

For a novel that packs in a stunning wealth of religious history and study, the subject is another one that doesn't escape Gaddis' wary eye. A few of the characters, most notably Stanley, profess intense religious feelings. Wyatt's father alternates between his life as a preacher, as well as a descent into madness, Mithraism, and pagan worship. However, a prevailing sentiment is the fact that religion is fueled by money and hypocrisy, which isn't so far-fetched today, but one can only imagine how daring this was in 1955. Again, Gaddis combines both explicit critiques with ones that the reader either discovers or stumbles upon.

"There was, in fact, a religious aura about this festival, religious that is in the sense of devotion, adoration, celebration of deity, before religion became confused with systems of ethics and morality, to become a sore affliction upon the very things it had once exalted (Gaddis 311)."




I feel as if I'm picking and choosing various aspects of The Recognitions, but its scope is such that one essay on it cannot hope to reveal every question or theme. However, the prevailing ruminations center on art and creativity, and again, the balance of the real (personal integrity) and the false (corruption, monetary aspirations). Passages and pages of dialogue are devoted to these very notions. Some of the most striking ideas come in conversations between Wyatt and Basil Valentine (an associate of Recktall Brown).

"--You? the, what was it you said, the shambles of your work? What a pitifully selfish career! being lived, as you said? by something that uses you and then sheds you like a husk when its own ends are accomplished?......

--No I, it's just, listen, criticism? It's the most important art now, it's the one we need the most now. Criticism is the art we need most today. But not, don't you see? not the 'if I'd done it myself...'Yes a, a disciplined nostalgia, disciplined recognitions but not, no, listen, what is the favor? Why did you come here (Gaddis 335)?"

A substantial part of the Gaddis "mystique" is his lifelong separation between his work and his personal life. While he wasn't a recluse in the sense of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, writer Cynthia Ozick was famously noted for saying that Gaddis was famous for not being famous enough. His art was meant to stand alone with little to no readerly expectations to wonder or assume how personal or autobiographical his novels were. His most famous interview was conducted in 1986 in The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction No. 101), and his first published statement puts to rest any notions of wanting to be a public figure.

"I suppose because I've got some illusion about finally getting the whole thing out of the way once and for all. In the past I've resisted partly because of the tendency I've observed of putting the man in the place of his work, and that goes back more than thirty years; it comes up in a conversation early in The Recognitions. That, and the conviction that the work has got to stand on its own--when ambiguities appear they are deliberate and I've no intention of running after them with explanations--and finally, of course, the threat of questions from someone unfamiliar with the work itself: Do you work on a fixed schedule every day? On which side of the paper do you write? That sort of talk-show pap, five-minute celebrity, turning the creative artist into a performing one, which doesn't look to be the case here."

Perhaps with this introductory essay, I've committed the same mistakes of the early Gaddis readers. I've sketched some of the themes, I've admitted the work's difficulty, but in reality, I haven't dived into anything truly substantial; in fact, given the impossibility of doing so on a small scale, I've left vast amounts of The Recognitions unmentioned. One of my next blog posts will be a more detailed look at some nuances of the novel, but I felt that a general introduction essay was warranted. The Recognitions has been called an encyclopedic novel, has been noted for its vast amounts of data, almost rendering it as a book of codes to be deciphered. However, while these notions are in part true, for an overall assessment, the novel is accessible for a good majority of readers. Given the passion of Gaddis scholars, and the sheer length of his first two novels (the other being JR), there's a definite sense of intimidation that goes along with any attempts to ease into his bibliography. However, the book is a very real novel, and not an impossible mass that some would make it out to be. William Gass makes the deceptively simple advice seem even grander than it actually is: it just takes time and understanding, but the works of Gaddis are not impossible, but challenging in the best literary sense. Again, this is the first of two essays that I'm planning to write about this book. Perhaps I've introduced the important topics, or perhaps I've glossed over more important themes. I'll be getting into specifics in my next piece, and if anyone reading this is unfamiliar with Gaddis, I'm hoping that this introductory outline helps with perfunctory understanding. I'm also writing this for myself, and hoping that within these notes, I'm working towards a more complete understanding of not only the novel, but of the majority of the Gaddis bibliography.

Works Cited:

Franzen, Jonathan. How To Be Alone.
Copyright 2003 by Jonathan Franzen.

Gaddis, William. The Recognitions. Copyright 1983 by William Gaddis. Introduction copyright 1993 by William H. Gass.

Oprah and Jonathan: Take Two

Just over a week ago, following many speculations and whisperings, Oprah Winfrey selected Jonathan Franzen's Freedom as her latest Book Club pick. This didn't come as as shock to me when it was announced; as a bookseller, I had seen copies of the book affixed with the Oprah sticker (as a side note, it's a relief that the sticker actually matches the color scheme of the novel's cover, so it's not such an aesthetic eyesore). Before the announcement, some anonymous booksellers had leaked photos of Freedom as the Oprah Book Club title, thereby rendering any speculation as fact. The literary world normally doesn't lend itself to gossip, and this is fairly tame.

Whenever Oprah announces a Book Club title, said work becomes an instant best-seller, not that Franzen's latest needed any help. However, the selection would not have been such a major event had it not been for the tension between the two people back in 2001. Franzen's previous novel, The Corrections, had been selected by Oprah, and afterward, Franzen gave an interview to Powells.com, and his comments on Oprah, in addition to being both critical and praising at the same time, were very easy to take out of context. The interview can be read here in its entirety, and this part of the conversation was the center of the ensuing uproar, which led to Winfrey disinviting Franzen from her show, since he was "seemingly uncomfortable" with the invitation.

Dave [Weich]: I had recommended The Corrections to a friend. A few days later, Oprah announced that it would be her new Book Club pick. My friend soon emailed me to ask if I really thought he should read it.

Franzen: Now I've signed a big label deal and I'm playing stadiums, how good can I be?

Dave: Exactly. But this is someone I very much respect, and I don't think his asking that question can be considered at all unusual. I'm sure thousands of people won't read this book for no other reason than the fact that Oprah recommended it. If you're that popular, the thinking goes, if you speak to the masses, you can't possibly be saying anything too intelligent.

Whereas from where I sit the authors that matter are the ones that can say something intelligent and thought provoking that a reasonably smart person can digest and enjoy. If you need a scholarly background to decode it, it might be great art but to what end? You might as well be writing in Latin.

Franzen: That's one of the perverse, not to say fetishistic responses to the obliteratively ubiquitous presence of buying in our lives: to say, "I don't buy the popular stuff, I buy the small label stuff," as if that makes you any less of a consumer. But I'm somewhat guilty of it myself, and it follows a pattern. Certainly in music, suddenly the band you like because it was not produced goes to a major label and becomes heavily produced. It's hard to think of a major label Mekons recording, for example. It's impossible because they would never do it.

But I'm with you, I don't think the same applies to fiction. The problem in this case is some of Oprah's picks. She's picked some good books, but she's picked enough schmaltzy, one dimensional ones that I cringe, myself, even though I think she's really smart and she's really fighting the good fight. And she's an easy target.



There were other quotes that added fuel to this fire, namely Franzen's wondering about his place in "the high-end literary tradition" and his concern about reaching a male audience. Strangely, in all of the discussions over Franzen's comments, nobody made any mention of Weich's words, some of which seem, in context, more scathing than Franzen's comments. This led to a lot of backlash, and despite Franzen's honest apologies, he was derided as (in his words): "a pompous snob, a real asshole." Naturally, nine years was enough time for this to die down, but with Oprah's Book Club focusing on Freedom, the old "feud" has been receiving some perverse nostalgia. When I heard about the selection, my gut instinct was that it was nothing more than a publicity stunt. These initial reactions also gave way to some positives, and the praises and critiques were equally given to both Winfrey and Franzen.

Winfrey (praise): She genuinely loved Freedom, and didn't let an old, unnecessary quibble get in the way of highlighting one of the best books of the year.

Winfrey (critique): It's a publicity stunt. It's the last season her talk show, and what better way to drum up some attention than by inviting an author with whom she's had issues with in the past?

Franzen (praise): He sent Winfrey a galley copy of his novel, along with a note, and was gracious enough to accept her Book Club selection, since genuinely considers himself an artist who wants to reach most people, not a select few.

Franzen (critique): Well, pretty much the same as Oprah's.



So when the Book Club pick was made, I was fully expecting a lot more buzz than has been given this event. Sure, quite a few writers and bloggers have made note of it, just like how I'm doing now. However, it has not been the overblown "stunt" that I thought it was going to be. Freedom is still
on top of the best-seller lists, as it was before Oprah's selection. Perhaps more will be made of this once Franzen appears on her show. However, there's much beauty in the relative silence over the issue: it proves that there is none. One can be a literary artist and mesh well with a mainstream forum. It worked for Toni Morrison, it worked for Cormac McCarthy, and it will undoubtedly work for Franzen.

To close, I'd like to return to an earlier statement regarding Franzen's concern about reaching a male audience. While it definitely appears sexist at first, with a little more understanding, it's not that way at all. My essay on Freedom discussed the very important topic that female writers do not get the attention of their male counterparts. However, on the opposite end, it's very telling that men are generally less inclined to read novels than women. Last week, I had the very good fortune to attend a discussion held in Chicago with writer Gary Shteyngart. During his talk, he made explicit mention of the fact that male readers make up a dwindling percentage of readers in general. Yes, there are the insufferable categories of "chick lit" and "dick lit." But, as literature moves further into the twenty-first century, female writers need more respect, and something needs to be done to avert the trend of non-reading men. A novel like Freedom, at least in my selling of it, has been scooped up by equal numbers of men and women. An intangible subject like literature really shouldn't have to be broken down by gender, but there are still many strides that need to be made. I personally don't have any answers, but the subject is alive and being discussed, and that's a great start, especially in literary websites and blogs. What better way to tackle the problems of reading and writing than reading and write about them?

Jonathan Franzen's (And Our) America

"Freedom is not the kind of Great American Novel that [Jonathan] Franzen's predecessors wrote--not the kind Bellow and Mailer and Updike wrote. The American scene is just too complex--and too aware of its own complexity, for anything to loom that large over it again. But Freedom feels big in a different way, a way that not much other American fiction does right now. It doesn't back down from the complexity."--Lev Grossman, Time Magazine, August 23rd 2010.



I was genuinely hoping to write a review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom without any mention of The Great American Novel. I've mentioned it here before, in varying capacities, but trying to define that term is often done to fill space, has a tendency to be needlessly rhetorical, or causes some needless hand-wringing. Franzen's latest novel has inspired both claims of being a contender for said title, but has also provoked some much needed, thoughtful dialogues on literature and gender studies (more on this later). However, in previous years, Franzen has been a leading defender of both the novel as a social tool, and as well as the novel as a tool in general (Let's get another tiresome question out of the way: Is the novel dead? Short answer: Not at all). In the age of Facebook and Twitter, the idea of sitting down with a big novel may seem strange to some, or, as Franzen has put it in much more eloquent terms, an extravagant luxury. Even in times that are both uncertain and in constant flux all at once, the novel is still a medium that can capture emotions and states and not be outdated within five years. A novel like Freedom can explore sociological norms of an era and mention names and items that may end up being put in the "history" pile, but these outer themes take second billing to the true, timeless issues: those of family, people, emotions, and life in general. These may be very broad categories, but emotions never really change, only in response to their surroundings.

Freedom is a novel in which no fewer than four characters could be classified as the "main character." In 1980s St. Paul, Minnesota, Walter and Patty Berglund, the epitome (and anti-definition) of the liberal family, are the cause of much gossip and worry in their neighborhood. Walter is an upstanding lawyer with 3M and a tireless crusader for natural and sociological projects. Patty is a former NCAA basketball star, now (seemingly) content to be a stay-at-home mother. A good friend of mine who read Freedom at the same time, consistently mentioned that she found a lot of the characters to be caricatures. This is evident from the beginning, but reading the novel as a whole reveals that the initial opinions are more than likely intentional caricatures. Patty's actions as a new transplant to the neighborhood is both intensely earnest and an honest exaggeration of her desire to make good, or to at least appear to be the model of a Good Wife and Good Mother. But, like any real human being, her personality is rife with contradictions, and this also goes for the other characters.

"To Seth Paulsen, who talked about Patty a little too often for his wife's taste, the Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege. One problem with Seth's theory was that the Berglunds weren't all that privileged; their only known asset was their house, which they'd rebuilt with their own hands. Another problem, Merrie Paulsen pointed out, was that Patty was no great progressive and certainly no feminist (staying home with her birthday calendar, baking those goddamned birthday cookies) and seemed altogether allergic to politics. If you mentioned an election or a candidate to her, you could see her struggling and failing to be her usual self--see her becoming agitated and doing too much nodding, too much yeah-yeahing (Franzen 7)."

If anything seems amiss with the Berglunds, that's because everything is amiss. Walter struggles with his son Joey, a rebellious figure who eventually moves in next door with his girlfriend's Republican family; Patty devotes too much attention to Joey and too little attention to her daughter Jessica, an issue that flares up years later; as the novel progresses, it's revealed that Patty is suffering from depression and the hints of alcoholism. Freedom alternates between the past and the present, with large sections formed as Patty's autobiography, a work that's done at the suggestion of her therapist, but takes on greater significance later on. Patty and Walter meet in college, but their relationship takes awhile to develop. Patty is "friends" with an unstable drug addict named Eliza, who introduces her to Richard Katz, an up-and-coming rock musician who happens to be Walter's best friend. Richard is a defiant womanizer, and both his magnetism and repulsiveness make him attractive to both Patty (sexually) and Walter (vicariously). As Patty sinks further into her depression, seemingly inexplicable events occur. The family moves to Washington, D.C., where Walter takes a job with a coal company under the guise of establishing protected breeding habitats for a species of bird called the cerulean warbler, which also sets the stage for unprotected mountaintop coal removal. In addition, he also begins to fall for his younger assistant. Joey's college life leads to a job securing parts for a mysterious corporation selling substandard auto parts to the United States Military, all while his relationship with his girlfriend spins between breaking and becoming seriously unhealthy, not to mention his constant attractions to various other women.

While Patty, Walter, and Richard take equal turns being the focal point of the story, Patty's depression and actions not only make up a lot of the narrative, but has a trickle-down effect on everyone she knows. My aforementioned friend was irritated by how it was possible that Patty could be able to write long, detailed remembrances, along with detailed dialogues written, seemingly, word for word. While I completely understand this criticism, Franzen's writing and knack for dialogue (in Grossman's profile, he mentions how Franzen reads his dialogue aloud while writing, in order to achieve maximum success) more than makes up for this. The majority of the scenes between Patty and Richard are stunningly detailed, capturing nuances, unspoken attractions, and the constant verbal games they play. At one point, they're alone together while Richard, in his part-time job, builds the deck on Patty and Walter's summer home.

"She must have betrayed him in the way she said that, because Richard gave her a little frown. 'You OK?'
'No no no,' she said, 'I love being up here. I love it. This is my favorite place in the world. It doesn't solve anything, if you know what I mean. But I love getting up in the morning. I love smelling the air.'
'I meant are you OK with my being here.'
'Oh, totally. God. Yes. Totally. Yah! I mean, you know how Walter loves you. I feel like we've been friends with you for so long, but I've hardly ever really talked to you. It's a nice opportunity. But you truly shouldn't feel you have to stay, if you want to get back to New York. I'm so used to being alone up here. It's fine.'
This speech seemed to have taken her a very long time to get to the end of. It was followed by a brief silence between them.
'I'm just trying to hear what you're actually saying,' Richard said. 'Whether you actually want me here or not.'
'God,' she said. 'I keep saying it, don't I? Didn't I just say it (Franzen 160-161).'"



It's been quite awhile since my last reading of The Corrections, but I found that Freedom contains wonderful descriptions of the so-called "everyday moments." Given its long, painstaking sketches of city and rural life, political and corporate maneuverings, and the joys and pains of romantic and familial relationships, the smaller details are rendered just as striking, even though they could play into one of the usual criticisms of Franzen, his penchant for overflowing literary descriptions. But several passages made me smile with their reality and detail:

"That evening in Philadelphia, there was a brief dismal episode: she went down to the hotel bar with the intention of picking somebody up. She quickly discovered that the world is divided into people who know how to be comfortable by themselves on a bar chair and people who do not (Franzen 181)."

"Staying in hotels with Lalitha had become perhaps the hardest single part of their working relationship. In Washington, where she lived upstairs from him, she at least was on a different floor, and Patty was around to generally disturb the picture. At the Days Inn in Beckley, they fitted identical keycards into identical doors, fifteen feet from each other, and entered rooms whose identical profound drabness only a torrid illicit affair could have overcome (Franzen 303)."

Earlier, I mentioned that the recent applause over Freedom has been met with some relevant, honest critiques, but not of the work itself or of the author. Poet and literary critic Meghan O'Rourke published a wonderful article in Slate, and the title immediately brings up the concern: "Can a Woman Be a Great American Novelist?" Quite a few strong essays, even ones by Franzen himself, highlight the tendency of "literature" to be the domain of middle-aged white males. Of course, there have been great strides to the variety of literature. O'Rourke mentions Zadie Smith and Toni Morrison, and personally, I've been anxiously awaiting the new novel by Nicole Krauss. Both on this blog and in private conversations, I've been concerned about adding more essays on female writers, and in all of the excitement over Freedom, O'Rourke poses an excellent suggestion.



"A thought exercise, perhaps specious: If this book had been written by a woman (say, Jennifer Franzen), would it have been called 'a masterpiece of American fiction' in the first line of its front-page New York Times review; would its author, perhaps with longer hair and make-up, have been featured in Time as a GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST; would the Guardian have called it the 'Book Of the Century'? Without detracting from Franzen, I think we can say it would not have received this trifecta of plaudits, largely because we don't ascribe literary authority as freely to women as men, and our models of literary greatness remain primarily male (and white)(O'Rourke)."

These are essential thoughts, and the fact that someone took the time to disparagingly edit O'Rourke's Wikipedia page ("Despite her Yale education and privileged life, she believes she is at a great disadvantage as a writer because she is a not a (yawn) white male") proves her point that bias still abounds. However, to put a happier spin on this without taking away from the argument, it's a testament that a major literary novel can have this trickle-down effect, being both a major piece of art in its own right and highlighting the contributions of other writers. This could be another essay in its own right, but despite the respect gained by the likes of Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates, to name a few, it's true that women writers don't always spring to mind immediately (O'Rourke mentions being guilty of this herself). To borrow her phrase, "unconscious bias" is still bias.

This may seem like a sidetrack, but O'Rourke's essay can be an answer (one of many) to the question that has been posed, either explicitly or otherwise, in virtually every review of Freedom that I've read: "What is it about?" Really, take your pick. If you want it to be about urban gentrification, go ahead. If you want it to be about the overlap and problems of both liberal and conservative personal politics, there are plenty of examples. If you want it to be a look at fractured families and regretful yet necessary sexual relationships, there are a lot of pages devoted to those, too. It's too easy to say that Freedom is about our modern times, but the blending of the sociological and the personal makes it both large and small.

Franzen has been called pompous and an elitist, for his literary acumen, his writing style, and his anger at the novel being perceived as a less-than-serious enterprise. However, his latest work speaks for itself, and its near-universal praise shows what a lot of readers have known all along, and is stated perfectly by Grossman: "He's one of contemporary fiction's great populists and a key ally of the beleaguered modern reader."

Works Cited:
Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom. Copyright 2010 by Jonathan Franzen.

O'Rourke, Meghan. "Can a Woman Be a 'Great American Novelist?'" Slate Magazine. September 14, 2010.

A Franzen Break

After my post last weekend, I got a little too sure of myself and set up this mental schedule for the Calvino Project: Finish Invisible Cities by Monday, and have the blog updated by Tuesday night. Naturally, it's taking a lot longer than I anticipated, but not for lack of effort. I've started drafting my essay on Calvino's books (see the previous update for details), and it's going to be longer than I anticipated. However, I'm going to try to get much of it finished tomorrow, and then I can move on to other books, articles, and ideas.

As much as I'm enjoying my personal discovery of the works of Italo Calvino, I had to take a break this evening. So, as I've been known to do at least once a month, I re-read Jonathan Franzen's essay "Mr. Difficult," selected from his wonderful non-fiction collection, How To Be Alone. As hard as this question is to answer on the spot, if someone were to ask me who my favorite author is, I'd have to go with Mr. Franzen.

I was first introduced to the works of Jonathan Franzen during my undergraduate years. "Mr. Difficult" was read in one of my classes during a two or three week study of William Gaddis (a name that will undoubtedly come up quite often in this blog). Franzen's brief biography and insight into Gaddis, along with arguments outlining the battle between Art (capital A) and mass entertainment in fiction, make up the essay. I remember slightly struggling in college with all the information provided in the essay, but once I learned more and devoured two of Franzen's novels (Strong Motion, The Corrections), the piece took on great meaning. I make it a point to re-read it often, whether in full or in small doses. I've read it in full at least fifteen times, and I find it very comforting when faced with either a difficult book or a long stretch of focusing on just one author (in my case, Calvino for the time being). Franzen's love/hate relationship with the works of William Gaddis often provide comfort to me as I try to grapple with other works.

As I read through it tonight, I was struck with how one of my favorite passages in the essay reflects my reading life at the moment.

"I was just happy to have a good, hard book to read, and I was impressed with myself for managing it. Following [the] pilgrimage became my own pilgrimage. The loft, for those ten days, in spite of the gurgling pigeons, was the quietest place I've ever been. It was profoundly, metaphysically quiet...I felt virtuous, as if I'd run three miles, eaten my kale, been to the dentist, filed my tax return, and gone to church (Franzen 244-245)."

Granted, I've read (sometimes unsuccessfully) books that are harder than the ones by Italo Calvino, but I'm happy. In my case, instead of pigeons, I'm reading and studying in a beautifully quiet space, accompanied by the sighs of sleeping dogs and the occasional cat walking across my stomach. Back in college, I used to hate reading in quiet places; coffee shops were always my preferred destination. This hasn't totally changed, but I've learned to appreciate serene isolation, alone with books and ideas.

Work Cited:
Franzen, Jonathan. How To Be Alone. Copyright 2003 by Jonathan Franzen.