Franzen: s/d

jars of pee iirc

freedom is what happens when a meanspirited and successful novelist who lives in brooklyn decides that he can write authoritatively about all sorts of things and people that have very little to do with the daily lives of meanspirited, successful novelists who live in brooklyn.

like his disdain and his lack of curiosity make it impossible for him to accurately or convincingly portray how someone like joey would see or feel about the world so he ends up being this ridiculous, hateful figure. & w/ the exception of the bird stuff most of the 'detail' in the novel came across like half-remembered takes on old new yorker and atlantic articles with a bit of the sunday style section thrown in.

difficult listening hour helpfully provided several examples of sparkling prose from the Crusoe article:

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.

It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool.

the stuff about dfw was so weirdly full of unexamined or apparently unconscious rage.

i get where he's coming from (as a close colleague of dfw's reading the avalanche of posthumous press), but the part where he's imagining/projecting dfw's thoughts about how famous and loved he'll be after killing himself is so jaw-droppingly self-centered.

anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool.

this guy is an asshole. NOBODY thinks this way except maybe Ethan Hawke's character in Reality Bites.

Don't read the book.

No worries. I put it down at pg. 12, which I haven't done with a book in years. It didn't even deserve throwing it across the room.

i feel weird criticizing someone's reminiscence of their dead friend but the part in that article where he says something about how DFW's problem was that he couldn't appreciate the wonders of things like BIRD-WATCHING was maybe the most cringe-inducing franzen moment ever.

you know, one thing i will give freedom, is that all this time after reading it, i still get irked when i think of it. which is not something i can say for many contemporary novels ive read and disliked (even intensely at the time) over the last few years.

i know some people on ilb had problems with it (i couldnt bear to read the thread through when i saw p.f. doing his "robot trying to understand the humans" thing), but goon squad taking the pulitzer over this gave me the same schafenfreude-y high that bigelow spanking cameron on oscar night a few years ago did.

ooooh i hate this guy.

can't stand him either. thought my dislike when I read is essay on Gaddis in the NYer. . . nope, he tops it years later with that weird/gross DFW island essay

thought my dislike had reached it's peak that is

i knd of admire his complete shamelessness about intellectually showing his ass in public. (see: the gaddis essay.) admire in a very abstract way, mind you.

the dfw/island essay is something i hope he'll feel a certain shame for later in his life. given who we're talking about, i wouldnt put money on it, though.

(my secret shame is my gross addiction to the naturalist middle-class family/social novel. it's like the lit equivalent of really digging that bon iver album or something. so in a weird way i *want* to like franzen, or wanted *to* like him. but it's like he's hellbent on doing everything, as a writer and a person, to make me loathe him. and i figure if i'm gonna waste time on this sort of b.s. there are stil a raft of philip roth novels i've yet to read.)

i avoided it for a long time, until after i read the pale king--not because the essay and the book had much to do with one another, but because i knew the essay would be tough to read. (either cringeworthy or well-put together and sad). i thought maybe it would be touching, but instead i just felt embarrassed for the guy. i kind of want to read it again, someday, if that makes sense, because it creeped me out so much.

i don't think it should be shameful to read middle-class family/social novels, at all. i want to like the guy too. i'm still on his team. but i haven't read freedom and i doubt i will. the corrections was enough. you know who i really hate along with franzen is rick moody. that guy is terrible. hadn't thought about that guy in ages, but i was at a bankrupt borders sale today and there were tons of moody's last book (ha, along with lots of pale kings and freedoms.)

heh rick moody makes me equally angry for both similar and completely different reasons as j-franz.

i think there's a lot about both of them that they think is subtly self-deprecating but actually comes off as a blanket contempt for anyone of a similar class/education/social background as them who just doesn't happen to *be* them.

(not that this is exclusive to them as feted white upper-middle-class chroniclers of the angst of their millieu, of course.)

no you're right they just have this chip on their shoulders (especially franzy pants). i have a soft spot for moody because he's a musician. i haven't heard any of the music, but i dunno, it brings the guy down to earth somehow and makes me forget about his horrible prose. franzy just seems like an A+ prick, totally contemptuous of all human life, etc

ill kinda rep for franzen's essay collection 'how to be alone', at the very least over his fiction. i think part of it is that in my worst moments i can empathize with franzen's pungent disgust for almost all aspects of contemporary life but i also felt like the essays were less terrible in their certainty, like franzen could at some points gain access to what the world outside his head looked like and realized that a lot of the time the problem is him. like he could see his 'legitimate' rage at the world's base selfishness and unkindness curdle into this self-regarding myopia? idk i thought it was interesting but maybe it was just too 'there but for the grace of god go i' for me to hate outright...

good post -- makes me feel more inclined to check out his essays at some point. the last franzen i read was the corrections, back in 2006. i want to read his essay on dfw but it's behind the nyer paywall and i don't have a sub at the moment so that'll have to wait

I felt so dirty reading Freedom -- as if someone had poured ooze over me -- that I stopped reading it after seventy pages, which I NEVER do.

I fucking hate the kind of all-pervasive jocular flippancy in Franzen's tone, you see it in so many modern American writers now, post-Corrections. It's okay when he's doing obvious comedy, less so when he's talking about one of his key characters being raped as a schoolgirl.

gonna try real hard to remember all the things i thought about freedom, & that ny-er article (most recent dfw one), & mount a defence at some point - i think i more think that he's sometimes good, usually not terrible & just generally a lot better than one might assume from this thread, but i realise i am gonna have to have the stats to back this.

i think he's VERY good as a stylist, fiction-wise. on freedom he seemed to finally achieve the more-or-less transparent, slick-as-grease, lyrical-but-not-really thing he was going for on the corrections. it's just that, as mentioned above, i couldn't get with the content or the tone.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/assets_c/2011/10/AuthorJon_Neils_127752799_600-thumb-465x310-109844.jpeg

this picture is kind of unnerving

i liked Freedom quite a bit (and still LOVE, even on a second reading, The Corrections) but Freedom does have problems. I couldn't reconcile the four or five different Pattys into one Patty at four different stages of her life, she wasn't a believable whole even although for the most part i liked, or could sympathise with her, at those different points. Joey's character arc wasn't convincing because the main thrust of his business dealings in south america/iraq was totally, ridiculously, unbelievable and garbled and rushed. In spite of this i was still entertained and ultimately moved by the book. Plus I think I just like Franzen a whole lot in spite of his persona. i met him at a reading and talked to him for a bit and found him very attractive.

^kinda agree w/ this except for liking franzen as a person. idk, maybe i do a little. at least think hes interesting. i couldnt even read that nonfic 'how to be alone' thing tho. i think the Patty character arc was probably the best of any of them, though to some degree i found all the characters compelling. updike is an ok comparison, though franzens sentences are not nearly as evocative & are too clunkily infused w/ pop/political culture here

Just reread patches of The Corrections and it is still fabulous. Comic dialogue is one of its greatest strengths.

We mentioned Franzen's New Yorker article on Edith Wharton. A response in The Daily Beast.

every once in a while i pick up the corrections and every time i look at the first paragraph it stops me dead in my tracks. and stops me from ever reading the book.

"The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat."

this paragraph drives me a little crazy and the whole northern religion of things comes to an end. firstly, i REALLY want to know how apples ripening in a bag add to the "madness" and "disorder" of an autumn prairie cold front. secondly, i ALWAYS imagine that the storm windows are actually IN the bedrooms. Like, they are all on the bed shuddering. Though, that at least does imply some sort of madness. Thirdly, is the "gust after gust of disorder"...wind? Do empty rooms and yards free of children somehow add to the "madness" of a cold front? if there are leaves and acorns and ripening apples it can't be THAT cold yet. Are leaf blowers and clothes dryers ominous symbols of mother nature's fury? And are the trees smoking a lot of cigarettes and pacing a lot? What exactly makes them "restless"?

so many questions...

and even when i browse at random i find things like:

"It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games."

It's like one of those wise and pithy Tolstoy quotes...except....really? IS that the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements? Maybe I hang out in the wrong prairie towns.

is he talking abt man hunting man??

i have no idea.

local apples

the whole northern spie religion of things coming to an end.

wait, northern spy/spie wouldn't be local to a prairie. nevermind.

i read that paragraph and it makes me think the person who wrote it has only read about going outside. or only seen pictures of outside.

I don't know, I feel the problem may be obscurely connected with wanting to do this:

The madness of the trees ripening in the mortgage of a minor light. You could feel it: gust after gust of disorder. The cold front restless in the sky: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low on the autumn prairie, termperatures falling, storm windows shuddering in empty bedrooms. No red oaks in the yard here. The children rained acorns on houses with no gasoline. The nasal contention of a clothes dryer, the drone of a leaf blower, paper apples in a local bag, the autumn prairie coming to an end. A cold front lengthened on yellowing zoysia. The smell of the whole northern religion of things with which Alfred Lambert had made morning love to the wicker seat after a paintbrush. HIccuping.

dude, that is friggin' brilliant. would read your book any day.

Maybe I shd go get myself a copy of the corrections. I cd do something like Averroes' The Incoherence of The Incoherence. The Corrections of The Corrections

do it!

"Body warmth was hanging in the air, faint smells of Enid's White Shoulders perfume, and something bathroomy, something old-persony."

That is a much, much better paragraph, Fizzles.

would read a 500-page Cheever-inspired novel about a man in suburbia who has a torrid threesome with a chaise and a paint brush.

I also would read.

Thank you, Scott. I'm totally with you on this. The farthest I've gotten is about ten pages in, and that was a painful ten pages. All those images that have some kind of profound meaning that can be sensed but never truly KNOWN.

Perry was the most fun character, and his punishment was excessive in a "this is your brain on drugs" way that felt moralistic, Franzen did him dirty from what I remember.

ok, well, just about done with Freedom which I mostly loved but it was depressing as fuck so I need to read something affirming now.

ok now I'm finished with it and was actually taken by surprise at the denouement.