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Crossroads

Crossroads
Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021

Reviewed by Bob Wake

At nearly 600 pages, Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads reads like a binge-worthy premium cable series, complete with melodramatic cliffhangers between episodes. Chapters are composed in third-person intimate narration with POV alternating between members of the Hildebrandt family, parents Russ and Marion, and their four children, ranging in ages from nine to twenty. Russ is an associate minister at a church with a thriving youth group culture. It’s 1971 in the Chicago suburbs. The commingling of religion and politics is as vigorous on the antiwar left (liberation theology) as it is on the right. Crossroads is most assuredly a secular novel about religious faith and guilt, no less so than Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (a novel winkingly alluded to in Crossroads, which isn’t without Franzen’s occasional metafictional side glances, up to and including Reverend Hildebrandt driving a Plymouth Fury wagon).

The teenagers are well-drawn, if reminiscent, perhaps unavoidably, of influential television series like Freaks and Geeks and My So-Called Life. The failed HBO project that Franzen and filmmaker Noah Baumbach undertook ten years ago in trying to adapt Franzen’s more challenging novel, The Corrections, may have pushed the author in the direction of ruthless narrative momentum at the expense of literary experimentation. Crossroads is Jonathan Franzen’s most conventional novel to date, but his psychological realism remains as always acute. This is engaging storytelling that bodes well for further installments of what promises to be a trilogy of novels following one American family through the years. (Nine-year-old Judson’s “unhealthy absorption” with an eight-millimeter movie camera, for example, suggests there might be a grown filmmaker inhabiting a future volume.)

The Recognitions

Published March 8, 2021 Novel Leave a Comment
Tags: Gravity's Rainbow, Jonathan Franzen, Mr. Difficult, Steven Moore, T. S. Eliot, The Corrections, The Recognitions, The Waste Land, Thomas Pynchon, Tyrone Slothrop, William Gaddis, Wyatt Gwyon

The Recognitions
William Gaddis
NYRB Classics 2020

Reviewed by Bob Wake

I’m not ashamed to say I leaned heavily on Steven Moore’s indispensable online reader’s guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. I consulted it often for navigational assistance and, frankly, comprehension. This will never not be a difficult novel. A daunting 956 pages, it was initially published to bafflement and poor sales in 1955, when Gaddis was thirty years old. The book is experimental in structure, scale, and execution. Its themes of greed, fraud, and spiritual exhaustion are set amidst a rapacious postwar consumer culture. The narrative encompasses madness, drug addiction, and sexual violence, as well as recurring parodies of cheerful radio commercials pushing pharmaceutical uppers (“Zap”), downers (“Necrostyle”), and contraception (“Cuff”). Gaddis briefly hung with the Beats in Greenwich Village. While The Recognitions isn’t a Beat novel, it shares the nascent counterculture’s mockery of authority and institutions. It’s also exhaustively allusive, like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, piled high with references to classical art and literature, arcane myths, and religious rituals. There’s layer upon layer of erudition.

There’s slapstick. A buffoonish grifter disguising himself beneath an uncooperative toupee is pure Three Stooges. Or pure Thomas Pynchon, whom Gaddis would influence. The antihero of The Recognitions, a hapless art forger named Wyatt Gwyon, vanishes periodically from the kaleidoscopic narrative like Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, subsumed by historical forces greater than himself. (“A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme,” is a playfully metafictional remark from another character in The Recognitions.) Jonathan Franzen famously dubbed Gaddis “Mr. Difficult” in a 2002 New Yorker essay. Franzen courageously tackled The Recognitions on his own. (“The most difficult book I ever voluntarily read in its entirety.”) And while he ended up loving Gaddis’s novel—and even echoing it in The Corrections—he clearly struggled with it. “I read The Recognitions as a kind of penance, back in the early nineties,” he confesses. Given that Steven Moore’s Reader’s Guide first appeared in a print edition in 1982, it’s surprising that Franzen wasn’t familiar with it, or chose not to seek it out. Moore’s scholarly annotations are a masterful achievement in their own right.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

Published February 10, 2021 essays , Literature , Short Story , Writing Leave a Comment
Tags: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Anton Chekhov, George Saunders, Ivan Turgenev, Jonathan Franzen, Karl Kraus, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Russian literature, The Kraus Project

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
George Saunders
Random House 2021

Reviewed by Bob Wake

An unexpected delight. Sure to become a classic on the craft of short story writing. George Saunders’s discussions of the mechanics of seven Russian short stories (three by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy, and one each by Gogol and Turgenev, all included in the book) are so clear-eyed and openhearted as to be breathtaking. Additionally filled with revealing insights into his own idiosyncratic stories and his development as a writer. Jonathan Franzen attempted something similar in 2013 with The Kraus Project, his heavily annotated collection of essays by the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. While Franzen’s autobiographical asides were disarming, the Kraus texts themselves were nearly impenetrable to modern readers. Not so with the Russian short stories collected here, which remain touchstones of high literary art, Shakespearean in their universality and timelessness.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

Published September 3, 2012 Literature , Novel , Short Story , Writing 2 Comments
Tags: Alcoholics Anonymous, Bret Easton Ellis, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, D.T. Max, David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, Infinite Jest, Jay McInerney, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Pietsch, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Tama Janowitz, The Broom of the System

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
D.T. Max
Viking 2012

Reviewed by Bob Wake

D.T. Max’s solid biography of American writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, portrays with emotional force Wallace’s successful struggle to stay sober for the better part of his adult life. From roughly 1989 up until his 2008 suicide (resulting from a recurrence of severe depression that plagued him on and off since his Midwestern adolescence), we learn that he worked a rigorous recovery program, attending regular support group meetings (even when on the road in unfamiliar cities), and befriending and helping fellow recovering addicts. The importance of sobriety to his life and work cannot be overstated. His career-making 1996 maximalist novel, Infinite Jest, can legitimately be considered The Great American AA Novel.

Wallace honored recovery group tenets by not divulging his personal involvement in one organization over another (and the biography never directly links him with any specific twelve-step program by name). Max quotes from a Newsweek interview in which Wallace was asked about Infinite Jest’s verisimilitude and insight regarding Alcoholics Anonymous and halfway-house living conditions. The author replied at the time:

I went with friends to an open AA meeting, and got addicted to them. It was completely riveting. I was never a member—I was a voyeur. When I ended up really liking it was when I let people there know this and they didn’t care.

Michael Pietsch, his editor at Little, Brown, recognized early on that the recovery material was the heart of Infinite Jest, what Pietsch called a “huge roiling story about addiction and recovery, their culture and language and characters, the hidden world that’s revealed when people come in and tell their stories.”

Less impressive to the editor was the novel’s “ornately bizarre-to-goofy superstructure” of dystopian Canadian terrorist cells and the hunt for a lethal video cartridge that induced addictive stupor and even death in those who watched it. The manuscript was cut and reshaped, a process during which Wallace devised his soon-to-be-iconic solution of off-loading some of the novel’s pile-up of political and cinematic arcana and narrative tangents into 100 pages of small-print endnotes, 388 in total.

Max situates the development of Wallace’s nascent writing style (a mixture of Thomas Pynchon’s digressive erudition with the experimental playfulness of Donald Barthelme) within the polarized scene of mid-1980s American literary fiction. When he enrolled in the University of Arizona MFA writing program in 1985, the “dirty realism” of minimalists like Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips and Richard Ford was in vogue. So was the bestselling “brat pack” fiction (defined by Max as “minimalism with attitude”) of Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis. Wallace found himself butting heads with writing professors who championed above all else “the well-made realist short story.” The dynamic with his teachers shifted, however, with the 1987 publication of his antic 500-page first novel, The Broom of the System. The book had been written as his undergraduate thesis at Amherst College before enrolling at Arizona. (Remarkably, he wrote two Amherst theses for a dual-degree. The second was in philosophy, published posthumously in 2010 as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will.)

Wallace would later disavow much of what he considered the metafictional games of his pre-Infinite Jest fiction. Some critics, like A.O. Scott in a perceptive 2000 NYRB piece titled “The Panic of Influence,” believed the writer was kidding himself. As Max summarizes it, Scott “emphasized Wallace’s anxious relationship with postmodernism and also his expectation he could have things both ways, pursuing the questionable tactic of writing cleverly to assert the superiority of sincerity in a world wedded to cleverness.”

The growing ranks of Infinite Jest fans felt otherwise, of course. More than a few flocked to sign up for classes taught by Wallace in the English department at Illinois State University, where he was employed when the 1,079-page novel was published to near-instantaneous notoriety:

Students had begun applying to the graduate program specifically to study with him. He was becoming a beacon for a kind of writing, not the postmodernism of the rest of the department and not the realism of Iowa and everywhere else, but a third approach, uncomfortable but sincere realism for a world that was no longer real. Making the head throb heartlike had the potential to become a literary movement. Different names were bruited for it, from the New Sincerity to Post-postmodernism. Occasionally one heard Grunge Fiction.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story steers clear of hagiography by maintaining a thoroughly researched journalistic tone. The substance abuse, repeated suicide attempts and institutionalizations filling the first half of the biography make for harrowing reading, especially given that the scope and magnitude of some of this information is new.

Certainly the heretofore unreported womanizing documented in the book, with Wallace cavalierly sleeping with female students in the manner of Philip Roth’s Professor Kepesh in The Dying Animal, is far from flattering. His borderline stalking of married poet and future influential memoirist Mary Karr (The Liars’ Club), whom he met during the early stages of his halfway-house recovery in the Boston area, is disturbing and dark. If nothing else, we perhaps now have a little more context for judging novelist and friend Jonathan Franzen’s cryptic allusion (in a 2011 New Yorker essay) to Wallace’s brutish 1999 short story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:

I will pass over the question of diagnosis (it’s possible he was not simply depressive) and the question of how such a beautiful human being had come by such vividly intimate knowledge of the thoughts of hideous men.

The biography grew out of a well-received profile that Max wrote for The New Yorker in 2009. Wallace, it seems, was a compulsive letter writer, most notably to Franzen and the novelist Don DeLillo (a formative literary influence and someone from whom Wallace appears to have sought a good deal of working-writer advice, sometimes in dire desperation). Never a fan of the Internet—“He was wise enough,” writes Max, “to see a snare in it for an addict like himself”—he only began using email after 2000. Generous quotations from his correspondence with Franzen and DeLillo, his life-long agent Bonnie Nadell, and Little, Brown editor Michael Pietsch (whose posthumous assemblage of the author’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, was widely admired) add immeasurably to the portrait of Wallace and his writing process.

Freedom

Published September 11, 2010 Literature Leave a Comment
Tags: Alan Cheuse, Charles Baxter, Freedom, Jonathan Franzen, Patty Berglund, Richard Katz, The Corrections, Walter Berglund

Freedom
Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010

Reviewed by Bob Wake

Jonathan Franzen’s zeitgeist-straddling Freedom has arrived with such outsized fanfare—most notably the Time magazine “Great American Novelist” cover—that backlash was inevitable. The binge and purge cycle of praise and resentment went several rounds before Freedom was even available in bookstores. NPR’s Alan Cheuse declared that the novel was “quite unappealing.” The New York Times trumpeted it as “a masterpiece.” I think I’ll go with compulsively readable, deeply felt, and often very, very funny. Like The Corrections before it, Freedom mines the psychology and behavior of an American family with the kind of acute detailing that elicits continual shocks of recognition. The characters are so intricately three-dimensional that they have the fullness and richness of close-up film acting, as if we’re witnessing dazzling Oscar-worthy performances.

Franzen is fifty-one years old, roughly the respective ages of his psychically bruised married couple, Walter and Patty Berglund, at novel’s end. By which point—page 562 (a mere six pages shorter than The Corrections)—we feel deliriously and somewhat exhaustively connected not only to them but to their lovers, siblings, children, parents, neighbors and co-workers. The Berglunds meet while students at the University of Minnesota, Patty privileged from New York on a basketball scholarship, Walter of in-state modest background with political and policy wonk aspirations. Their college years are beautifully evoked, as is the secondary verging on primary character of Richard Katz, Walter’s roommate in school, and a charismatic rock musician whose life will stay entwined with Walter and Patty’s for decades to come.

Freedom is stylistically elevated with a brilliant strategy that turns one of Franzen’s “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction” advice on its head. That is, rule number four: “Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself.” Nearly 200 pages of Freedom purport to be a manuscript written by Patty Berglund—at the behest of her therapist, whom we never meet—about herself … in the third person. A first-person voice, in other words, masquerading as a third-person voice: “It’s not so fun to be on a road trip with a driver who considers you, and perhaps all women, a pain in the ass, but Patty didn’t know this until she’d tried it. The trouble started with the departure date, which had to be moved up for her.”

On the one hand, we come to recognize this as a dissociative mechanism on Patty’s part, the result of a high school sexual assault. But it’s also a means for Patty to step outside of her character and try to recast her experiences and relationships as pure narrative. Storytelling to pinpoint and separate objective causality from subjective dysfunction. Which, after all, is Franzen’s job here as well. It’s a fairly high-stakes literary gambit, a spritz of postmodern intertextuality. It also brings Patty Berglund spectacularly alive on the page. (At least one reviewer, Charles Baxter in The New York Review of Books, doesn’t buy it, claiming that Patty “hardly seems capable of writing the Franzenian sentences with which her autobiography is speckled…”)

Franzen had to perform a lot of twisty pretzel logic to make the metaphoric locutions on the theme of “corrections” work throughout the earlier novel. Lots of authorial heavy lifting for little payoff, since it was hard to take much from the metaphor other than something ultimately really reductive, i.e., that death is the final “correction” to life. The theme of freedom, however, is infinitely malleable and wondrously adaptive to situations both personal and political, the borders of which are porous. As individuals, we, like Richard Katz, may invariably meet a moment of despondency when we contemplate suicide, a freedom allotted us as sentient beings. (“He was pretty sure that nobody would miss him much when he was dead. He could free Patty and Walter of the bother of him, free himself of the bother of being a bother.”) But just as Katz rejects the notion of suicide in favor of life in all its messiness and conflict, we feel that Franzen’s literary heart is moving in a similar direction, away from the chic dead-end despair of The Corrections, toward something enduring and good in the human spirit.