i'm a very very complex person

I. Older reading

I finally finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It's difficult to know what to say about the book, how to approach the task of reviewing it. It's difficult in part because the book is huge, sprawling, complicated, and messy. And because so much as been said (and said so passionately) about the book already--Franzen is apparently either a self-important asshole or the second coming, and every writer and critic in America seems to have very strong opinions about which one he is. And then there are all of those comparisons to The Corrections that are just crying out to be made...

So let's get the comparisons to The Corrections out of the way first. The similarities are obvious: both novels are big and ambitious, stuffed with large casts of characters and up-to-the-minute cultural references; both concern troubled midwestern families, exposing the full range of their dysfunction in squirm-inducing detail; both take generational conflict as one their major themes. And let's get this out of the way too: The Corrections is better. Maybe even a lot better. It's funnier and looser, Franzen manages his large cast better, and the whole just seems to mean more in the end. But Freedom, even if it never took flight for me in the same way that The Corrections did, is still a good book.

I think the key to the strength of Freedom lies in its primary difference from The Corrections. Despite the large cast, despite all the blurbs that describe it as a novel about a family, it is essentially a two-character book. Freedom is the story of Walter and Patty Berglund, of their marriage, of their love for each other, of the ways that they cause each other pain every single day. Walter and Patty are great characters--they're complicated, they're flawed in really significant ways, they do good things, they do awful things, and even if the reader doesn't particularly like them, it would be hard to deny their essential humanity. Franzen also does a great job of giving us a very long view of the relationship between Walter and Patty, the way it evolves and is changed by the force of time.

The trouble with this is that it makes the book feel uneven. None of the other characters come to life the way Walter and Patty do. The only one who comes close is their long-time friend Richard Katz. The others mainly feel like automatons who have been programmed to play a particular role and then plugged into the story. The plot seems to lose focus whenever it wanders too far from Walter and Patty. There were long chapters devoted to the trials and tribulations of their son Joey, but in the end those chapters seemed not to add up to much. The book could have been two hundred pages shorter (and possibly better) without of Joey's convoluted plot lines.

So it's a flawed book, but it's also a highly engaging and readable book.

II. Newer reading

Wanting something quite different from Freedom, I went to my to-read shelf and took down Liza Dalby's memoir East Wind Melts the Ice. I've only read a little bit of it so far, but Dalby's conception of the book is fascinating. In studying the history of Japanese and Chinese calendrical systems, Dalby learned about an ancient Chinese calendar that divides the year into 72 segments of five days each. Each segment is a tiny little season, and has a name reflecting what happens in the natural world during that small span: "Fish swim upstream, breaking the ice," or "Bitter herb grows tall," or "White dew descends." Dalby's book is a year-long journal written in concordance with these calendar segments--each miniature season has a miniature essay, an easy, flowing reflection on whatever Dalby notices or thinks about during that phase of the year.

I thought at first that reading the book straight through might be the wrong approach--that I should, instead, spread it out over the course of a whole year, reading each little section during the appropriate five-day period. And perhaps that would be a good way to read it, but right now I am going to read it straight through. I read the introduction and the first few sections last night, and the whole thing spoke so clearly to the frame of mind that I'm in right now. The idea of noting seasonal change in such an infinitesimal way seems just right to me in this moment when I'm watching the progression of plants blooming across my garden. First the camellia, then the azalea, soon the lilac. Last week I took a picture of new buds on my neighbors' tree; today I am looking out the window at a tree in full leaf. So I'll stay with that feeling and read the book right now. And maybe, if it bears rereading, someday I'll try it the other way too.

Why do I feel like my life has been consumed lately? Where does all my time go? Why do feel like I have so much going on? I've been trying to get this post up for days now, but I haven't even had the chance to sit down and write a simple review. What's the deal? Fortunately it appears that my Thrusday night student is standing me up (Surprise, surprise! He does this all the time.) so I'll put the time to good use and finally write this review. Without further ado:

Strong Motion, Jonathan Franzen’s second novel, is a big, elaborate book that's packed with…well, with all sorts of things: earthquakes in greater Boston, familial dysfunction in the extreme, the antics of a clinic-picketing minister of an anti-abortion church, grouchy observations about American culture at the end of the ‘80s, the misdeeds of an environmentally irresponsible chemical company, an attempted murder, vast sums of money being thrown about, and the Red Sox losing the playoffs. The book follows Louis Holland and Renee Seitchek as they fall in love with each other and attempt to find their way through all the chaos of the narrative.

It’s exciting to watch a writer try to pull off a book as ambitious as this one, but I always get so disappointed if they don’t succeed. Franzen gets close to realizing his ambitions with Strong Motion, but the book never really gels. I think this may be partly due to the sheer volume of what the book contains—there’s just too much stuff competing for the reader’s attention, and the split focus on reproductive rights and environmentalism means that neither issue gets explored in a satisfying way. The real problem, though, is the characters. They just don’t make sense. I wanted to like Renee and there were times when I found myself identifying with her quite strongly, but there were also many moments when she would do or say something that would leave me shocked that Franzen believed that a 30-year-old woman would think/feel/act like that. And it wasn’t just the 30-year-old woman, either. All of the characters had these slips, where suddenly their motivations stopped making sense, or their reactions suddenly seemed out of proportion to the situation, or the decisions they made felt like choices that no human on the face of the earth would ever pick.

I was troubled by odd bits of disconnection in the plot, as well. Why, for instance, when Louis is initially presented to us as a typical nerdy loner—a pale, lumpen guy who’s losing his hair at 23, who wears aviator glasses, who spends his spare time fiddling with transistor radios in his bedroom, who is still much more boy than man—does he end up being fought over by two different women? I have nothing against nerdy guys, but Franzen set Louis up as such a loser that I found it very hard to believe that both women (and especially the beautiful and superficial Lauren) would be interested in him. It’s very hard for a book to recover once it’s gone too far over the plausibility line, and Strong Motion did that more than once.

Despite its flaws, Strong Motion is a decent book. It’s entertaining, there’s enough intrigue in the plot to keep things moving at a pretty good clip, and Franzen’s prose is sharp. It's also very evident that a lot of research went into producing it. The book feels almost like a practice exercise for The Corrections—similar themes handled with less assurance—and although it’s not nearly as good, fans of The Corrections may be interested in reading this book to trace the origins of the better novel.

I'm now reading Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, and enjoying it quite a bit. It's no Cloud Atlas, but it is a fun read.

I loved The Corrections. I loved the way I had moments of empathy with even the least sympathetic characters. I loved the fact that large sections of it were set in Philadelphia and I loved the accuracy of Franzen's description of the city. I loved the tiny little connections between the different sections of the book, things you really needed to be paying attention to notice: the name of the mutual fund started by Chip's girlfriend's family turned up in Gary's section, Gary and his wife woke up to a radio report about Khellye Withers, who turns up later on in Enid's conversation with her new friend on the cruise ship. I loved the fact that it contained the best take on the old food-sex metaphor that I've read in quite a while. I loved the way Franzen was able to convey the existential crises lurking in such mundane activities as grilling dinner and untangling Christmas lights. I loved the way the present and the past interacted in the book, the way the story of each character's life in the present would suddenly jerk backward for pages at a time yet still feel completely seamless. I loved the fact that the Lamberts came from a town named for the patron saint of desperate causes (although I would have loved it more if Franzen hadn't felt the need to explain it to us). I loved the little moments of foreshadowing (or backshadowing, perhaps), the bits of the past that intruded on the present before they had been explained, and I loved the feeling when it finally made sense--as when Alfred thinks briefly of the blue-cheeked man from Signals who had betrayed him, and then, as soon as Don Armour appears, we know who he is and what he does. The only thing I'm not sure I loved was the ending. At the moment when I finished it, I felt strongly that the short final chapter, almost like an epilogue in function, should not have been added. Now, however, I am not as sure as I was. The impact of the book would perhaps have been stronger without that final chapter, but it would also have been much bleaker.

And now I am reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which has drawn me in more completely in the first few pages than any Rushdie book I've read since Midnight's Children. That's an excellent sign, and I'm very much looking forward to the rest of it.

I finished How to Be Alone. Interestingly, I suddenly got much more involved in it after my last post. Somehow the cumulative effect of all the essays gave me a very intimate sense of Franzen's personality, and as I neared the end of the book I began to feel closer and closer to him. And I decided that I really like him. I like his thoughtfulness and earnestness and scrupulous honesty, and the way he's willing to expose himself in his writing. For some reason, by the end of the book I was really wishing I could meet him in person. A strange reaction to a book of essays, but there it is.

Also, I managed to take the time to sit down and really think and write seriously about one of the essays, the way I'd been wanting to. The result is rather long, but I would love to discuss these issues, so I will post it here.

( very long )

I'm at work, so I don't have a whole lot of time, but I wanted to briefly make note of two very interesting articles that I read recently. Both were from the New Yorker, and both were from the same issue, although I unfortunately do not remember which issue it was. The first one that I read was a long piece by Jonathan Franzen dealing with difficulty in literature, and the second was an in-depth profile of Harold Bloom, controversial literary critic/scholar extraordinaire. Taken together, the two articles represent a rather forceful repudiation of many of the basic tenets of postmodernism. Very interesting. I took a class on postmodern literature when I was in England, and I loved the class, the professor, the reading list... All in all, it was one of the best academic experiences of my life. That class sparked an interest in postmodernism for me, as well as introducing me to several authors whom I pursued on my own. So I have some experience with postmodern literature, and I enjoyed most of what I read. However, I have to confess that I enjoyed it for distinctly non-postmodern reasons! There were characters that appealed to me, and lovely writing that I enjoyed, and tangled webs of plot that were fun to sort out... All the things that true postmodern people were supposed to disdain and view as simply so much artifice. Nonetheless, I also enjoyed the more orthodox postmodern stuff: the way the authors introduced uncertainty into their texts, the questions that they raised, they way they seemed to be willing to have fun at the expense of their own books even as they were writing them. So I clearly have an interesting relationship to postmodern literature and to the whole notion of exactly what postmodernism is. I haven't yet sorted it out completely, but those two articles were certainly interesting for me.

In other news, I am about halfway through -The Vision of Emma Blau-. I am enjoying it, but it's definitely a slow book rather than a page turner. That doesn't mean it's not enjoyable, it's just a different kind of enjoyment.