Sunday, September 19, 2010

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Many intelligent, well-meaning people will mistake—have mistakenFreedom for a good novel.

But many (perhaps most) intelligent, well-meaning people are masochists, who mistake pain for love and grief for insight. Children of the Old Testament, they worship a spiteful God, a disgusted God, and their attitude towards themselves and the rest of humanity can be succinctly summarized as: We get what we deserve (as long as what we get is bad).

We shouldn't be surprised, then, that those same people embrace a book whose primary ambition is the systematic annihilation of its characters. That ambition confirms a worldview that they've been trained since infancy to enjoy.

I know that most of the great characters in the history of the novel are annihilated by their authors. The reasons for that are complex and most certainly worth considering. But the novel's primary ambition has never been annihilation. Great novelists are not sadists. Tolstoy takes no pleasure in Anna Karenina's demise.

What, then, is a novel's primary ambition?

To re-concieve God. To displace the Sacred Texts in the moral and intellectual life of its audience.

Any novel attempting something else is not worth reading.

Novels attempt this re-conception very simply: they create a world, and by doing so propose a new idea of the Divine. We—the audience, humanity—experience this divinity (and, by extension, our own humanity) mostly through the novel's characters, feeling life through them, for them. What happens to Emma Bovary, to Raskolnikov, to Anna Karenina, to Herzog in fact only happens to us.

So to judge a book is to judge the theology of its creator, and particularly the creator's idea of humanity.

Which bring us to Freedom.

Like The Corrections, Freedom is the ambitious attempt to contemplate a particular moment in American life. It presents itself as a social novel. It follows the lives of some decent middle-class liberal Americans through the hideous years of the Bush Administration.

That sounds like a worthwhile project. Why, then, do I find the book objectionable?

Four reasons: 1) its sadistic attitude toward its characters (and therefore toward its readers); 2) its incompetent use of free indirect speech; 3) its gaudy symbolism; and 4) its theological conviction that we achieve redemption through suffering.

Let's consider each point individually:

1) Until the end of the book (see 4!), absolutely everything that happens to the book's characters is bad. Dully, sadistically, characteristically, insignificantly bad.

2) Without having the sense to specifically name the problem, B.R. Myers isolates Franzen's incompetent handling of free indirect speech in his scathing review of the book for The Atlantic. I'll merely note that the incoherence of the characters—the chasm between their situation and their language—cannot be excused as postmodern truthiness. (The rape quote that Myers criticizes in his article is characteristic of the entire book.) It's simply not possible that Franzen's characters think as they do when he permits them to narrate the book. And all novels have an obligation to remain possible. To abandon the possible is always artistic failure. 

3) When one of the main characters, who has fled his young bride, recognizes the errors of his ways when he's searching through his own excrement for his wedding ring, I conclude that the author doesn't trust his character's (which means his audience's) intelligence. It's incumbent upon all novelists to leave their sledgehammers at home.

4) The sentimentality of Freedom's final pages, when Franzen finally relents and permits his characters a modicum of happiness, serve to reinforce the tediously bourgeois (or, more specifically, Christian) notion that only by suffering do we find redemption. In this regard the novel is an intellectual disappointment, a return to the dreary safety of received, cliché ideas.

At some point one must take a stand. Freedom is not great literature. It is not even good literature. It is clumsy, misanthropic, bourgeois kitsch.

(My review of The Corrections can be found here.)

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

On Disliking God

The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. —Herman Melville, "Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851"
I'm trying to decide when I began to dislike God.

Perhaps when I was forced to read about Him and wanted to read something else—most likely a Hardy Boys book. That would have been in Chalmers, Indiana, near the time of my baptism, at seven or eight years old.

Or when I was told to pray to Him before lunch in Mrs. Staley's first grade class, standing in line at the classroom door in Knoxville, Tennessee, surrounded by hungry classmates.

Or when I asked Him to stop my parents' fighting—that, too, would have been in Tennessee—and from my knees listened to the world (it's true) continue to crack.

Or much later, when He denied me Darlene Barrett's body (the first of many bodies to choose Him over me, despite my trembling, my gentleness, my self-evident innocence).

Or when I danced manically one afternoon to "Money for Nothing" and my father, speaking with God's voice, told me to get control of myself. And I did, and I never danced like that again.

Or when I saw a girl—why bother with the names, anymore?—climb out of a pool from night-swimming, and sit on its edge in her bra and panties, gleaming in the dim light.

Or, days later, when that same girl betrayed me with my best friend. And I decided that I'd been emasculated by my obedience.

Or when I allowed myself to admit that The Book of Mormon was a terrible bore, and chose instead to read Love in the Time of Cholera. That would have been in General Belgrano, in Argentina, during my Mormon mission. After finishing García Márquez I read A Tale of Two Cities, which my mother had been suggesting I read since my early adolescence, and I wept bitterly at its famous conclusion, undergoing, I think, my own decapitation.

Or when I sat on our family room's red shag carpet in our Austin, Texas, five-years-old, and watched Secretariat destroy Sham at the Belmont Stakes to win the Triple Crown.

Or when I read Othello for the first time.

Or, better yet, when Tom kissed Becky.

Or when I saw my grandmother dead in her coffin.

Or when I saw my mother weeping at the pulpit, trying to speak.

Whenever it was, I hope that I rebelled first against God's seriousness. Older now, it's possible to imagine—but only imagine—that He was laughing all along; that nothing is serious; that the truest religious journey is from seriousness to laughter. But that's a journey almost no one makes. I have made it only in my imagination—and perhaps not even there.

I do wonder, though, if Melville isn't right—if just about everyone dislikes God, especially those who most claim to love Him. Shakespeare, who was Melville's progenitor and can teach us everything, has already warned us about those who insist too much.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Something Worth Fighting For

This is the America I remember: 30 Mosques, 30 Days. A moving, amusing, delightful look into the America—let's call it the real America—our hysterical national media usually ignores.

Having said that: to its credit, I learned of this blog in an article at CNN.com, through my customized iGoogle feed.

I'm so freaking modern.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

How Would Jesus Shave?



By their mustaches ye shall know them.

Lost Call

I've had more than one person tell me that what's missing from these notes is my sense of humor.

This criticism—and they mean it as a criticism—might be the most acute commentary on my writing generally: every story, every email, every birthday card. Visions of Joanna, too, is a grim, sad book. It delights in the nuances of grief, in the easy lyricism of tragedy. Also, my new book: so terribly, poetically sad—

So the question presents itself: Why do I find comic writing so difficult these days? (There was a day when it come easily—when it was all I did.)

Because comedy, laughter, has always been one of the primary pleasures of my (relatively docile) life.

Professionally, for example: I love laughter in the classroom. I am a failure as teacher when we don't laugh.

(Although recently I've noticed that I'm embarrassed about making a class laugh. As if I've realized that at some point I embraced the role of the Dancing Bear, convinced that I'm good at little else, and now regret that embrace, as it seems to lack, like so much else in my life, ambition.)

Even now the note turns serious—

Better that God had said to Isaiah: "Come now, and let us laugh together."

Reason, you see—this I've learned—is lifeless. Very few people care about reason.

Instead of hearing someone say, "You are so reasonable!" I want to hear: "You make me laugh."

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Notes on Virginia Woolf

White ashes on my brown corduroys. The sun strikes my bare chest.

A bee on the white picnic table appears to be dying. Maybe it's drinking the paint. Its abdomen in the sunlight is the color of my Newcastle.

The bee falls, or flies, into the grass.

Behind me, my old neighbors attend to their garden. By way of its bounty they continue to live. Their hope resides in the vegetables' tenacity, in the general relentlessness of life, as certain after its fashion as death.

Tomorrow, I will transform. I will arrive at a new self by attempting a hopeless return to youth.

In the mean-time I release the top button of my corduroys, to give this man's belly some room.

The dog, Maggie, will be dead in a matter of weeks. Her eyes, looking up from her little face, which she rests on her paws, say: "I am dying." This expression I translate as: Help.

I pour her some water and for a while she drinks greedily. In the same action one can see hope and hopelessness.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Redux)

With Tuesday's release of Freedom (to much fanfare), I've decided to re-visit my review of Franzen's prior novel, The Corrections, which can be found here, mildly revised.

I haven't read much of Freedom, but so far it strikes me as a continuation of Franzen's ambition in The Corrections: the novelistic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.