In This
Galaxy, One Star Shines Brightest
By Liesl Schillinger
ON Tuesday, a balmy night at the end of a golden late-summer day,
Manhattan’s literary Elysium — novelists, editors, writers, publishers and
agents — proceeded up a marble staircase to the glass-windowed salons and brick
terrace of the Bowery Hotel. They’d come to witness the apotheosis of Jonathan
Franzen, author of “Freedom” (his fourth book), the most feted novel of the
season.
Minutes after the party’s outset, guests already had gathered around the
bar at the landing, including Mr. Franzen himself, calm and genial in a dark
gray suit and pale blue shirt, equably chatting with his girlfriend, Kathryn
Chetkovich; and Mark Costello, the novelist husband of the editor in chief of
Scribner, Nan Graham. Ms. Graham, in a chic cloud-blue dress, stood at the bar,
talking with Deborah Treisman, the New Yorker’s elegant fiction editor, who
helped secure Mr. Franzen’s inclusion in the New Yorker’s showcase of emerging
novelists in 1999, in an issue called “The Future of American Fiction.”
“We did get glammed up,” Ms. Graham observed.
As daylight filtered into the high-ceilinged rooms — awash in the
romantic luster of the Colonial era — scores of literati surged from the
staircase, hailing each other, picking up drinks, standing arm in arm, or
spilling into cushioned wicker love seats on the terrace. These were the current
standard-bearers of the literary world, and Mr. Franzen’s exuberant acclaim had
revived their hopes in the future of the novel. The guests had not only come to
celebrate; they’d come to defend the author from detractors who’ve groused at
his good fortune, nicknaming it “Franzenfreude.”
After Time magazine put Mr. Franzen on its Aug. 23 cover, with the tagline “Great
American Novelist,” the author Jennifer Weiner created theTwitter hashtag @Franzenfreude, defining the word as “taking pain in the
multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.”
Emerging from a conversation with Lorin Stein, the new editor of The
Paris Review, Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar Straus Giroux,
publisher of “Freedom,” rejected Ms. Weiner’s word, as defined. In German, he
pointed out, “freude” means “joy.” “This,” he said extending his arm to
indicate the revelers —“is Franzenfreude” — Joy in Franzen. When he first read
the manuscript, Mr. Galassi recalled: “I wrote him and said, it’s clear you’re
the great novelist of our generation. That’s what’s happening here.” Another
guest, the book critic Laura Miller, who is moderating a reading club for
“Freedom” on Salon.com, agreed. “To say the book is hyped is just ridiculous.
He’s not Lady Gaga. We picked a
book we knew a lot of people would be wanting to read.”
“Freedom” follows the lives of Walter and Patty Berglund, a couple who
meet in college in Minnesota on the brink of the ’80s. Walter is a stoical
idealist; Patty is a diffident basketball jock with a crush on Walter’s
roommate, a caddish musician. For 20 years, they raise their children in St.
Paul (a malleable daughter, Jessica; and a steel-willed son, Joey); but after
9/11, they move to Washington, D.C., where Walter works to protect an
endangered bird called the Cerulean Warbler. The family unravels against the
backdrop of love affairs, iPods, an imperiled natural environment and two
foreign wars.
Guest after guest traded stories of how they’d devoured the book; of how
their galleys had been “filched” by covetous colleagues; and of how guilty they
felt if they hadn’t read it. “I’ve bought it,” the novelist Josh Ferris (“Then
We Came to the End”) made excuse. Mark Greif, a founding editor of the literary
journal n+1, said with amazement that “everyone I talk to has actually read it”
— noting that the book has been out for only a week. Standing nearby, the New
Yorker editorial director, Henry Finder, called the book “masterly.” The New
Yorker has published
nonfiction pieces by Mr. Franzen, he noted — on ecological devastation in
China, and on the slaughter of songbirds in the Mediterranean. Praising the
author’s elaboration of social and environmental themes, he said, “We don’t
often see that in American fiction.”
While great European literary authors show a sense of moral engagement,
he said, “even in brilliant American novels, they’re only engaged in the
micro-dynamic of American life.” Mr. Franzen, he said, “doesn’t just do that.
It’s the moral intelligence that distinguishes his mature work.”
As night fell and the day’s heat melted away, conversations on the
terrace grew louder. Sitting at a low table, surrounded by Zadie Smith, Mark Ronson and Patrick McGrath, the
novelist Nathan Englander said: “I’m so happy for him. I know how hard the guy
works. That’s a basic thing for me. Commitment to craft. You really can’t
control reaction, you can’t control sales. There is only the work.” He added:
“The guy put his head down for 10 years, for the better part of a decade, and
worked.”
A little after 9, as the Great American Novelist departed, the guests
reluctantly followed, talking and clutching glasses, walking uncertainly down
the marble steps to the pavement outside, where hopeful stragglers met them and
learned they’d arrived too late.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction:
November 18, 2010
A picture caption on Sept. 9 with The
Scene column, about the author Jonathan Franzen, misidentified the author Zadie
Smith shown with two other people at a party for Mr. Franzen. She was seated at
the right, not in the middle. (The other two people were not identified.) The
error was pointed out in an e-mail on Sept. 9. This correction was delayed
because The Times failed to follow through on the complaint.
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