Glenna's Blog

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is enjoyable while you’re reading it but leaves you nothing to think about when you’re through. Compared to other great narratives of the past decade, especially Franzen’s own, it’s a cupcake.

Freedom is “sweeping,” meaning it explains characters’ personalities by sketching the biographies of their great grandparents. Generally the book is big on cause and effect (it is medium on silly foreign intrigue). Every action is foreshadowed, explained by reference to the character’s ancestors, explained by reference to the character’s adolescence, analogized to the actions of an unrelated character, echoed by the character’s offspring, punished, and forgiven. Walter’s “primary interest […] was to safeguard pockets of nature from loutish country people like his brother.” Walter’s daughter “sounded like Patty and was outraged like Walter, and yet she was entirely herself.” All is connected, nothing is random. You are never dizzy, you never have to squint.

Needless to say, the main characters in this neat story are fundamentally decent. Franzen’s last chapter invites us to believe that none of them will ever sin again. Harshness only comes in at the level of politics. People shouldn’t have more than two kids. Cats shouldn’t be allowed outside. Neo-cons say things like, “we have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts.”

To imagine a less cheesy “sweeping” novel, look at Jennifer Egan’s Visit from the Goon Squad, which came out earlier this year. There are a few too many satisfying connections made, but there are also totally repugnant yet relatable central characters, like a PR exec who freelances for a dictator and a record executive who pressures teenagers to blow him at concerts (Freedom has a rock star who bangs teenagers, but he is not repugnant; the sex is played for laughs). There are two experimental chapters: a celebrity profile and a long powerpoint presentation set in the future. In fact the whole book has an experimental structure. There are jumbo themes and foreign intrigue (the dictator) but there are no lectures about Iraq. It’s a riskier book than Freedom, and way more fun because of it.

Franzen’s previous book, The Corrections, is also messy and dark and fun. Without warning or explanation, segments are told from the point of view of an Alzheimer’s patient. The lifelong good girl seduces a married couple one spouse at a time and discovers in the process that she is both a lesbian and a sexual sadist. At the end of the book, the most capable offspring of the Alzheimer’s guy is showing the first symptom of Alzheimer’s.

The Corrections left me unnerved and a little thrilled. Freedom just pissed me off. My mistakes aren’t my grandmother’s fault, my career isn’t caused by one annoying episode when I was 17, my ex’s new girlfriend will not be killed next month in a way which has already been foreshadowed, and I am not guaranteed a happy ending, Franzen, so screw you.

A while ago I slammed an excerpt from Jonathan Franzen’s book Freedom because it was so slanted in favor of the rape victim character. Now I’m reading the book and it turns out I was wrong to judge. Although the segment is in the third person, it’s supposed to have been written by the rape victim herself. That makes it understated and wry.

“In her blue dress, with her cheeks lightly flushed, her blue, blue eyes, and her gold curls pinned up as though for the first time—pinned up to be out of the way for her flight—Mrs. Raddick’s daughter might have just dropped from this radiant heaven. Mrs. Raddick’s timid, faintly astonished, but deeply admiring glance looked as if she believed it, too; but the daughter didn’t appear any too pleased—why should she?—to have alighted on the steps of the Casino. Indeed, she was bored—bored as though Heaven had been full of casinos with snuffy old saints for croupiers and crowns to play with.”

Katherine Mansfield, “The Young Girl.”

It’s all about the word Casino. Each of the words preceding Casino is awful (they’re exactly the types of words you’d expect to find nearby a pretty girl), Casino is excellent (it represents exploitation; it ends in an “o”), and then you get three more excellent words immediately: “bored,” “snuffy,” and “croupiers.” It’s like an avalanche. “Saints” is also good because it forces you to think about heaven, which earlier in the paragraph you ignored for seeming like a cliche.

“I got my first job, and now if someone said, Hey, look at Benji’s right arm, it’s bigger than his left because he jerks off so much, I could say, No, that’s from scooping ice cream.”

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs.”

E. M. Forster, Maurice.

Or maybe this is great writing, “mingling” is the perfect word to describe what most humans want to do with each other, and I am heartless?

Each chapter of Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a story about someone who showed up on the sidelines of an earlier chapter. Some of the stories take place in the 1970s and some in the 2020s, they’re out of order, and the characters’ motivations change. But at the end I felt as satisfied as the first time I watched Wizard of Oz.

The patterns are more important than the points in Goon Squad, and the relationships are more important than the characters. Over and over Egan shows what happens between old men and young women, cool sisters and uncool brothers, ambivalent spouses, and jealous friends.

Goon Squad is the most enjoyable experimental novel I’ve read in a while, maybe ever. It reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room except that I liked it. Not only are the chapters arranged nonlinearly, but one of them is a poetic powerpoint presentation set in a world without grass that analyzes family dynamics and the use of pauses in rock songs. When I picked up Goon Squad I felt angsty about the limits of literature, but now I don’t.

On the downside, the book is fundamentally maudlin. It’s basically about how children are going to die. But Egan mostly redeems herself on this point with satire of African dictators and anthropology grad students.

I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.

[That sentence is about looking at the aleph, which contains the universe. First thing of the semester my Introduction to Poetry Writing professor made us write our own semicolonic sentences about looking at Chapel Hill, which contained our universe. Seven years later I still think about the Aleph assignment, but I never redo it, because writing about the unimaginable universe makes me feel like a tool.]

Jeffrey Eugenides in the New Yorker:

“There was something creepy about one guy’s face––it was like a baby’s face that had hideously aged”

A guy is an aged baby, so this sentence is just a lengthy version of “one guy had a hideous face.”

Some write to make money; some write to communicate; some write because they enjoy it; Jonathan Franzen writes to prove to other writers that he is capable of writing from the perspective of a rape victim.

“When she started fighting, she fought hard, if not well, and only for so long, because she was drunk for one of the first times ever. […] Altogether, there was much to blame herself for.”

It’s too bad that this story reads like a final project for 10th grade health class, because I really admired Franzen’s portrait of a lesbian in The Corrections. Now I’m looking back thinking, wtf Franzen, literature shouldn’t make the reader feel “admiration.” Write something that disturbs me instead.

“Friendship’s not a ridiculous thing,” Harrison said, solemn as an owl and full of emotion.

“bisexual leanings”

The New Republic talking about Katherine Mansfield. That magazine literally can’t string two words together.

Philip Roth symbolizes a black man’s penis with a crow “whose lustrous blackness beneath her hand was warm and sleek like nothing she had ever fondled.”

“misleading chin”

Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow