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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.

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.