Manageable Discontents
By PHILLIP LOPATE
FARTHER AWAY
By Jonathan Franzen
321 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
As we should all know by now, Jonathan
Franzen is a serious writer who plays for the highest literary stakes, who is
uncomfortable with American TV consumerism, and whose last two novels, “The
Corrections” and “Freedom,” have legitimately catapulted him to the front ranks
of American fiction. Less known is that he has also published three nonfiction
books, “How to Be Alone” (essays), “The Discomfort Zone” (a short memoir) and,
now, a second essay collection, “Farther Away.”
The nonfiction of pre-eminent novelists is
bound to fascinate, shedding light on their mentality and fictional practice,
even if such authors seem to be giving less than full energy to this
second-choice genre. Saul Bellow, for instance, wrote magnificently essayistic
fiction, but his actual essays pale by comparison; similarly, John Updike was
an ever-graceful critic, but few of his nonfiction pieces stir the blood the
way his short stories or novels can. There have been exceptions, of course,
including Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence or, in our own day, J. M. Coetzee
and Cynthia Ozick. Most dyed-in-the-wool novelists, however, do not excel at
the essay, for good reason: they are wired otherwise. And so we come to
Franzen’s latest collection, which, while not nearly as strong as his novels,
still has its attractions, as might be expected from so insightful and
resourceful a writer.
The book begins with a commencement
address, “Pain Won’t Kill You,” which may be summarized as: Get past your
adolescent brooding; turn off your narcissism-promoting social media; drag
yourself out of your room; engage with the natural world (he chose birds) and
your fellow human beings; try to love, and embrace the hurt and messiness that
love entails. This message, delivered in a casual colloquial style to the
graduating class and in a more urgent manner elsewhere, runs through the essay
collection. The author is not shy about preaching simple morality; he can be
both hedgehog and fox, and here he is often the hedgehog, with convictions born
out of a personal crisis and the lessons learned. That crisis, which he
discusses freely in these pages, stemmed from the failure of his youthful
marriage and his attendant depression, guilt and shame. His overcoming the
anguish successfully is reproduced here in what we might call a Healing
Narrative.
It is no accident that the graduation
speech was presented at Kenyon College, the very same venue where David Foster
Wallace had given his famous commencement address several years previously.
These pages are haunted by Wallace, whose suicide hit the author, his good
friend, hard. In the title essay, Franzen goes off to an island in the South
Pacific Ocean to bird-watch, to recoup his sense of identity after a grueling,
boring book tour — and to allow himself to feel, by imposed isolation, the
fullness of grief that he had been keeping at bay. Wallace’s widow, Karen, has
given the author some of her husband’s ashes to distribute on that beautiful
island. Though Franzen mocks himself for playing at Robinson Crusoe, this is
essentially a solemn, somber essay, and a flawed one — too attenuated for the
redemption it mechanically delivers (mission accomplished: he cries and
sprinkles the ashes), too truncated to process all the murky emotions that lie
beneath the surface.
“Once, when we were driving near Stinson
Beach, in California, I’d stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed
curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory.
He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent
boredom. ‘Yeah,’ he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, ‘it’s
pretty.’ In the summer before he died, sitting with him on his patio while he
smoked cigarettes, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his
house and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily
medicated afternoon naps I was learning the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming
trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my
manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and
he could not.”
One can read this passage as both
compassionate and gloating. Franzen manfully admits to competing with Wallace,
but cannot refrain from similar comparisons in his favor, like: “It was time to
accept finitude and incompleteness and leave certain birds forever unseen, that
the ability to accept this was the gift I’d been given and my beloved dead
friend had not.” There is also the occasional clunky, ex-graduate student
diction: “If boredom is the soil in which the seeds of addiction sprout, and if
the phenomenology and the teleology of suicidality are the same as those of
addiction, it seems fair to say that David died of boredom.”
Here are some reasons, I think, that
Franzen’s essays do not match his fiction. While his prose is always cogent, he
is not that consistently stylish a sentence writer. Essays put a different kind
of pressure on the sentence, calling for more aphoristic compression and wit.
His novels work best through patient accumulation of social detail and
character development. By contrast, the I-character in his essays is not as
strongly developed, nor as vivid. He is better able to convey moral irony by
dramatizing a fictional conflict than by baldly stating his views. Finally,
since, as he puts it, “fiction is my religion,” he may simply be a literary
monotheist who has never fully grasped the imaginative and expressive
possibilities of nonfiction; he’s not trying to catch that fire. When he speaks
of the authors who influenced him, they are all fiction writers.
The collection features a lovely personal
essay, “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” which begins as an amusingly grumpy
rant against cellphone users, who intrude their private “I love you”s onto his
public space, and transforms into a touching portrait of his parents. We have
met these two people before, more or less, as Alfred and Enid, the parents in
“The Corrections,” and the author again writes wonderfully about his stoical
father and overdemonstrative mother. There are also several deft journalistic
pieces of eco-travel reportage, one involving the killing of birds in the
Mediterranean, another, the efforts of Chinese bird-watchers in a country
facing radical habitat loss. Franzen pays tribute, in a series of graceful
appreciations, to some quirky and unjustly neglected writers: James Purdy,
Donald Antrim, Paula Fox, Frank Wedekind (if only he didn’t try to sell
Wedekind to us as a proto-rocker!). He also argues that the great short story
writer Alice Munro has not gotten her due. These valentines demonstrate his
generosity, humanity and love of fiction, as well as his own preference for the
morally complex over the sentimental. The struggle to be a good human being,
against the pulls of solipsism and narcissism, can be glimpsed in every page of
these essays, which if nothing else offer a telling battle report from within
the consciousness of one of our major novelists.
Phillip Lopate directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia
University. His collections include “Bachelorhood” and “Against Joie de Vivre.”
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