A few months back I read a humor hit-piece on the Williamsburg scene, which dissed, among other hip-spots, a trendoid bookstore where you could pick up all three Jonathan authors … Franzen, Lethem, and Safran Foer, I presume. My first thought was, been there! But upon further reflection, the bookstore I had in mind was Three Lives & Co. in the Village. It was my second Jonathan Franzen, the memoir with the map-brain, used paperback, and the bird parts were boring in that one, too. But what was intriguing, in a creepy cautionary tale sort of way, was how he and his wife had gone years without a social life on the outside.
I of course read The Corrections when it came out...I could swear it was the '90s, and I bought it at The Booksmith on Haight Street, but that's impossible...according to Wikipedia, I was living in the mountains, hmmm...that's weird. Anyway, the consensus was we all really liked it. It seemed like we weren't yet weary of Dysfunctional Families, that communal processing topic, more restrained than the current brand of ramped-up marketable insanity which might involve kitchen knives or pooping under the piano.
I mostly remember thinking it was smart. Kind of how I thought of Obama as smart, one of us, although he hasn't really changed the world much. Funny how now that I'm thinking about it I can't really remember any details from The Corrections. Like, nobody's name. Was there some old father or a bottle of pills or a worn sofa?
After the map-head one, I picked up How to be Alone at Powell's on Hawthorne St. in Portland, not as crazy about essays. I was attracted to the cover, but L. thought it was posed; the woman with the glasses was too cute to be alone; she was definitely being cruised in the bookstore (which looks a lot like Dog Eared on Valencia St.) It's true, her lipstick is freshly applied, and her eyebrows are too perfectly plucked for someone who would so recklessly bend back the book pages. But I guess a photo of an unkempt guy in the basement wouldn't sell.
I wouldn't have noticed Freedom but for my friend, the writer Laura Joakimson, who was, I was surprised to find, a hater. There it was stacked on a table at the Bookshelf at Hooligan Rocks in Truckee, looking like the next thick Harry Potter book. More of a Tweezer than a Twitteratus, I had been blind to the blog-gossip about Franzen. As Matt Dean assured me, "Didn't you know? Franzen-hating is the new black." Feeling disloyal, I made the illicit purchase, even though I had bragged to Laura that I would order it at the Berkeley Public Library--THAT would show Franzen (whom I still secretly liked).
Egad. I was tagged here so many months ago, and my ears never even burned.
ReplyDeleteIf my own pronouncement is correct, and Franzen-hating is the new black, I'm a total beatnik. I'm swathed in Schadenfranzen, awash in Franzenangst.
(The Germans have words for everything, god love 'em.)
ooh dear. Now when people google search my name, Franzen hater will appear.
ReplyDeleteI think when we read things that don't appeal to us there are reasons. I grew up not in Franzen's middle class, but in a lower social strata.
It bothers me that Franzen has so much praise, and the ideas in his novels are basically the same ideas you hear on NPR or read in the New York Times. He writes stories that are boring to me because they're just echoes of everything others have said before him, and more interestingly.
A great writer or thinker to me is someone who can send a shiver of recognition down my spine....Also I guess it's important to me that writers help me to feel something--connection or compassion for others or for the world around me. Franzen's a disconnectionist. He comes across as arrogant every time I hear him speak. And actually loving Franzen is the new black in New York publishing circles. I just don't understand why. Except, ironically, for that television woman who Franzen thinks of as his intellectual inferior, Lady Oprah, who twice blessed him.
So, indeed, it is Dame Oprah who I squarely blame.