The Banality of Freedom: Jonathan Franzen

Franzen, Time, inverted.

Calling a writer experimental is now the equivalent of saying his work does not matter, is not readable, and is aggressively masturbatory. But why is it an experiment to attempt something artistic? A painter striving for originality is not called experimental. . . Without risk, you have paintings hanging in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. 

      -Ben Marcus in Harper's Magazine, October 2005

If you're the kind of person who suffers from cultural bucket-list anxiety, you've been introduced to a new little gremlin of a meme over the past several months. Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, Freedom, has manifested itself in the manner of a solar eclipse: its viewers have gathered in worship from coast to coast, but none have looked directly at it. None, would seem, except the Atlantic's B.R. Myers, in his cutting review "Smaller than Life."

Freedom's title says everything you need to know about Jonathan Franzen: it's ostentatiously lazy, presumptuously avuncular, headline-grubbing, Europe-snubbing, all-encompassing without bothering to encompass. Yet it's been greeted as a liberator, drooled over; palm fronds have been strewn promiscuously in its path. The cues are from the horse's mouth, of course. Not only has it been compared with War and Peace; it actually compares itself with War and Peace. (One of the protagonists is reading Tolstoy; the pertinence to her own life of Natasha Rostov's confusion about whom to love is, quote, "psychedelic.")

I haven't read Freedom. I spent this past summer reading War and Peace instead. (Yes, it's worth it, if you have a hundred days to kill.) But I did read Franzen's 2001 novel The Corrections. No, I couldn't put it down while I was reading it. It brimmed over  with nefarious Lithuanians, extramarital shenanigans, hip urban gardens, pharmaceutical chicanery, voyeuristic accounts of lesbian sex. Cheap pop hooks by the score; paint-by-numbers pop-culture references? Galore.

I haven't thought about The Corrections, though, since I finished it. Not once. It's breeding dust on the shelf with the other crap I'll never touch again. I would contrast this with Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book I found vastly frustrating and pointless while I was reading it. But when I closed its pages, I became obsessed; transformed; a different person. (And Ulysses? It's a tough book to read all the way through. But for me, it's changed the fabric of reality.)

In 2005, Harper's Magazine published an essay by Ben Marcus with the (ironic) title of "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: A Correction."  (Only the first page is available free online, although even that much is worth reading. The rest is behind a paywall.) At the time, I had just given up six years of my young life to the writing of an "experimental" novel, and I was twisting in the wind; Marcus's essay brought me back to myself. He excoriates and ridicules the "realist" establishment in modern literature, deriding as a "desperate argument. . . the notion that reality can be represented only through a certain kind of narrative attention." Two persons are identified, here, as the main current ambassadors of the narrative realism perfected long ago by John Updike and others: Jonathan Franzen, and "dour" Atlantic Monthly critic B.R. Myers.

Which is why I was fascinated that the latter was the only major critic to not only pan Franzen's "masterpiece," but to drag it out into the sun and leave it to rot dry.

Myers appears most often in the pages of the Atlantic dissecting the underpinnings of North Korean fascism; although originally from New Jersey (as am I), he has lived in West Germany and apartheid South Africa, and holds both an M.A. in Soviet Studies and a Ph. D. in North Korean literature. So he knows something about "freedom," maybe even more than Jonathan Franzen. (He is also a supporter of the Green Party of the United States (as am I).)

By the end of his first paragraph, Myers has summed up Franzen's novel as a "576-page monument to insignificance." Quoting heavily from the original, he blasts Franzen's insipid prose as "insecure":

We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang.

And Franzen, I'd argue, is the worst kind of elitist: the kind that won't admit it. The kind that panders. (The Corrections has a major character named "Chip," for God's sake!) An unrepentant liberal, he nonetheless has this common with right wing demagogues like Bill O'Reilly of Fox News.
I admit, there's a little pinge in me for coming down so hard on Franzen; I know that he was a close personal friend of David Foster Wallace. I got my start in publishing by writing Wallace's obituary for the Tucson Weekly, a circle-of-life moment if ever there was one, and I'm still struggling with his suicide. It seems to me that Franzen, sadly, lacks Wallace's genius: the ability to lay one's intellect out on the page without coming off like a snob. And so he went off in the opposite direction.

The NY Times called Freedom "a masterpiece of fiction;" Maureen Corrigan, NPR's in-house reviewer, called it "revelatory and ambitious." So I'll read it, eventually, maybe the next time I come down with bronchitis.