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I don't particularly like Jonathan Franzen, as a writer and as a public persona, that is. Freedom was hyped over the top and yes, maybe it is the best social realist novel since The Corrections (which I have yet to read) and by any living American writer in a long time but I really couldn't care much about any of those characters. They were, by and large, pretty boring. And if you ever saw or read an interview with Franzen you might come to the conclusion that the only interesting thing about him was his close friendship to DFW. And this is the only reason why I'm reading his collection of essays and arguments "How To Be Alone" and some random interviews (his Paris Review 'The Art of Fiction' interview from the Winter 2010 issue is now fully available online) and articles like the New Yorker piece about him scattering some of DFWs ashes on an isolate island, Robinson Crusoe and a rare bird (pdf here). A wildly incoherent article, by the way.

But nevertheless, Franzen does have and is able to create a very nice and soothing narratorial voice, making Freedom mostly, despite the characters, a pretty pleasurable read. And also "My Father's Brain", the opening essay from "How To Be Alone" is a very immersive and nicely plotted piece of autobiographical writing that makes want for more. And so, a few essays into the book, I came upon "Lost in the Mail". And this one is also nicely plotted and told, about a 1994 breakdown of the U.S. Postal Service in Chicago where citizens didn't receive mail for weeks and postal workers either hid thousands of letters in their apartments or burnt them - over the course of several years - to obscure the fact that they didn't finish their routes. Some of them drank on duty and stopped in bars to watch sports tv for hours on end to collect overtime payment afterward, etc., etc. One citizen even reports "Mailman harasses us at night, asks for money." As Franzen tells it, this is USPS apocalypse, which makes for a good story (this seems to be his first ever piece for the New Yorker).

But then, at the very end of this essay, when Franzen sums up his nostalgic feelings and thoughts for the US Postal Service in general and the 1994 outrage in particular, he presents the reader with a sudden erratic, out-of-line and out-of-context statement:

"The burning of mail in a viaduct deals the same blow to our innocence as the pederasty of priests."

WTF?! Really? Yes. I checked it several times. There's no mention of priests or pederasty or the confluence of both anywhere before in the text. And to compare the burning of mail to priest's pederasty is the one really big twist in his going-postal narrative. What was he thinking (and re-thinking while proof-reading) or the editors at The New Yorker? Has this been commented on? I mean this essay is 17 years old and the very first thing that google returns when I type in "franzen priest pederasty" is a facebook group that is called "Father Franzen was the best priest ever. end of story." What's going on?

Two essays further into the book, "Sifting the Ashes": Franzen tells a neat story about the rise of the tobacco industry in the U.S. and about coming to terms with his own habit of smoking. Let's see if he deals another blow to our innocence as with the mail-burning child-fucking thing:

"My mother still speaks of cigarettes with loathing. I secretly started smoking them myself in college, perhaps in part because she hated them, and as the years went by I developed a fear of exposure very similar, I'm convinced, to a gay man's fear of coming out to his parents."

Little Jon, who will tell everybody (those who ask about it + those who don't) about his happy and unspoiled High-School time, becomes a little rebellious and smokes a cigarette or two and believes, honestly, he feels the same (well, very similar) dread of exposure of a gay man of coming out to his parents. This is from 1996. Jon Franzen, who grew up in Webster Groves, a St. Louis suburb of 23,000 people. So much about where his sense for social realism comes from. Considering how he built up smoking as a very bad thing indeed before, he seems to say that homosexuality is a) a bad habit, b) something addictive, c) something that makes you sick d) and over the long haul kills you, e) in its function similar to the ending of the world, a personal apocalypse.

I'm really looking forward to read the other pieces in this book.

emotion and irony in contemporary fiction

"What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be 34 in this country."

This is from a DFW interview from Spring 1997 that can be found here and it pretty much sums up what is going on and what has to be done in serious contemporary fiction, i.e. the turning-away from postmodern irony and the turning toward emotional truth. You can see it in DFWs work, most recently in The unfinished Pale King, you can see it in Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, it is what Bret Easton Ellis did in Lunar Park, what Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was all about, as well as Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and also recent TV-shows as Bored to Death - although sometimes they hide it very well -, it is what Terrence Malick does and what Jonathan Franzen's Freedom tries to do. Also Running With Scissors comes to mind, and quite strongly though, i.e. the movie version, I haven't read the memoir. And this is what an LA Times critic had to say about it :

"Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it."

The critic herself doesn't seem to lack the ironic distance that she is actually begging for, though. I don't know where to find it right now, but Jonathan Franzen said it in one of the myriad of interviews he gave in the wake of Freedom. He said that in The Corrections he used irony also and especially to distance himself from certain ideas and emotions presented in the novel. You can basically say anything you want with irony and then easily back out of it if people disagree with you, thus you don't have to stand your ground on very intimate issues, issues that are and feel way too personal to let anyone attack or make fun of them. He said that he wrote a wholeheartedly unironic novel with Freedom, that he eschewed former techniques of irony to get closer to the emotional core of what he wanted to say. And that he is quite aware that exactly that makes him so much more vulnerable if people dislike his work because now the work is much closer to what being Jonathan Franzen really is like. Closer to the emotional truth that is Jonathan Franzen. But people might misread that for sentimentality and naiveté.

Here is something I found in an IRC chat transcript with DFW* shortly after the release of Infinite Jest (and if you are too young to actually have been in one yourself or are now like, my age, and want to get a nice pretty nostalgic trip into the early times of the internet and 90's chat-rooms, you have to read the whole thing (if it doesn't redirect you, click on the Impatient? link). This is pre-facebook stuff. There were actually online chat-rooms BEFORE the internet. Grab yourself a cup of coffee or your beverage-of-cozy-choice and travel into 1996's cyberspace):

"The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion" and

"I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental."

Irony can be a lot of fun, no doubt. And as Dave puts it, we can't escape it because we breathe the stuff everyday. And that makes it actually hard to snap out of it sometimes. (Is the transition to this paragraph too rough? I had a hard time coming up with a coherent one after the quotes.) And I think that is exactly what happened to the LA Times critic a couple lines above. She sees the lack of ironic distance and wants her ironical borders restored immediately to not have to look too closely at something that intends to produce exactly this: a close emotional relationship with its audience. It is precisely not about irony, not about safe distance, not about making fun of everything. It is about emotion. And in the case of this critic, and a lot of others, I fear, about the misreading as being naive and sentimental.

*almost all DFW-related sources are found and taken from The Howling Fantods.