In Praise of Big Books - Parts 2 and 3 (Final)

All those literary cliches I mentioned in the last podcast are a way of saying that I just read Purity by Jonathan Franzen, and I had a great time. I'd been avoiding Franzen novels for years, he was just too much of the zeitgeist in the 2000's, too trendy, too cool, too liked by people and critics whose opinions I didn't care for. And now that I'm reading Freedom, his big book from 2010, I'm beginning to see that my doubts about him at the time were not misplaced. I doubt I knew what the term 'lit-bro' meant before the latest David Foster Wallace volleys, but there was something about all the writers of that most recent generation that rubbed me the wrong way: Wallace, Franzen, Eggers, Michael Chabon, even Zadie Smith, .... The whole spirit of their writing seemed earnest to me where they should be ironic and ironic where they should be earnest. They all struck me as too cool, too self-conscious, for any depth to be anything but a pose. Maybe it's my own shallowness for judging them by their looks, but none of them look like they've thought deeply a day in their lives, even David Foster Wallace looked as though he never suffered. They're all from Hollywood central casting of what a novelist should look like. And then I read an interview with Franzen who said that he never really knew anything about literature until he was twenty-one, and it was all I could do not to scream 'fuuuuuuck you!'

James Wood, probably the pre-eminent literary critic of the early 21st century English speaking world, and to my still slightly limited knowledge, the best, had his own description of it that was, to use our own era's critique of the previous era, strangely gendered in the other direction, a trend in novel writing which he called 'hysterical realism, in which he terms the novelists of Generation-X more a kind of 'Frankfurt School entertainer', more concerned with showing how the world works with digressions on arcane topics than in the more traditional novelistic pursuits of elucidating subtleties of character, being, and situation. This strikes me as both true and a misnomer. Like any art form, there are endless permutations in which an art form can evolve, and it's absolutely true that some of these novels I've read read like 'novels-by-google' who are more interested in information than in making the audience feel anything at all.

But there is also a pendulum that grounds all forms of study in the models and patterns of the past, and this new novel, arriving in America at the turn of the 21st century and in Europe and Latin America in the mid-20th, is much much closer to the novel of the 17th and 18th centuries - those picaresque, digressionary, simultaneously humorous and pedantic, novels like Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, Jacques the Fatalist,  and Moll Flanders, all of which reach still farther back into the novel's very origins with works like Simplicius Simplicissimus, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and even Don Quixote and the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. This is a very different, older idea of what a novel is, whose animating purpose is to tell a rollicking story of adventure. And to tell the adventure, you have to do a lot of leg work to set the scene. You have to convey all the information that gives the reader context for the situations in which the characters find themselves - this is not easy to do, and it has to be done at length and the situations have to be entertaining enough to be enjoyable reading, and the easiest way to make them entertaining is to make them weird and absurd, so if these situations seem weird enough, they probably obscure the characters within the situation.

This is a very different kind of novel than the more traditional, 19th century type, and to this day, the 19th century novel of character and inner thought was so universally beloved because it is embedded in the universal human experience of consciousness. Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, these novels were and remain so beloved because the way the characters think mirrors the way we think, even if the situations are not ones we generally find ourselves in. Aristotle would call that process 'mimetic', it's as though we experience what they experience and we think to ourselves that this might be the way we'd react in the same situation.

On the other hand, that sort of sympathetic empathy for people different than us is not much in vogue today, and there's nothing today more beloved of more readers than sci-fi and fantasy. It's difficult to imagine two genres more grounded in the external setting of the world it builds rather than the mind that perceives. So even if the audience for David Foster Wallace and Dom DeLillo is a very specific demographic, the audiences for Isaac Asimov and J.R.R. Tolkein seem near-universal, and who knows? I may have my doubts that the genre fiction of living memory will be of any more interest to later readers than Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle are to today's, but among today's readers, there's no question that all kinds genre fiction is more beloved and culturally relevant than anything by Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen.

But Franzen was always a little apart from the rest of them. He was more interested in taking this sort of 'explaining how the world is' approach to writing and regrounding it in the substance of character and feeling, and that sounds at least a little more interesting than cold bites of information that cause a novel to be written nearly as much by google as by the writer. There's always been a place in the most traditional novels to find all those social movements of the world represented by character, and that place is allegory. I'm not going to list all the great novelistic allegories, it's practically an honor roll. The brief list I'll make is to show how many different concepts a novel can represent.

I suppose it begins with Balzac (and I'll try to say that name this time without giggling), who made 'The Human Comedy', I can't say that I've ever found any one book of his truly scintillating, but the point of his 'Comedie Humaine' is to portray as many different types of people as possible in the extremely dynamic and diverse society that was early 19th century Paris. Later, the novelistic allegorist for all time, Thomas Mann, created Buddenbrooks, a 19th century novel published in 1901, through which, by portraying a 19th century German family, he took the reader through all the different traits of character said to belong to each generation of 19th century German life, and prophetically showed the dissolution of that way of life, which perhaps could only lead to the nihilistic fanaticism of the next two generations. In the 1920s, Mann wrote the other book I'm now reading, The Magic Mountain, which is the ultimate novel of ideas, in which every character in asylum high up in the mountains seems to represent a completely different philosophy of life in that very intellectually fecund era that makes each character neurotic in a completely different way. And before Mann there was Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov, and every brother represented a different trait of human instinct. The father, Fyodor Karamazov, seemed to be an untrained animal who gave into all kinds of instincts in the most pathetic ways, and was eventually murdered and clearly murdered by one of his sons. The oldest, Dmitri, clearly represents the heart, with all its overwhelming passions, its desire to do good, and the division between the two creates overwhelming suffering for him, and he is blamed for his father's murder. The middle child, Ivan, clearly represents the head, with all of its cold calculations for abstract thought and its innate predisposition to nihilism, whereas Dmitri is predisposed to suffering, Ivan is predisposed to outright insanity, and eventually goes crazy and confesses to his father's murder, though he clearly didn't do it, we'll get to what happened in a moment. And then there's Alyosha, the youngest, beloved by all, who clearly represents the soul, and has a calling into the priesthood and a monastery. But Father Zossima, the elder of his monastery, sees how screwed up his family is, and tells Alyosha that he must spend his life tending to his family and to communities at large, and through the good faith of Alyosha in his fellow man and his holy mother Church, many characters find that they can start the hard work of redemption. And then there is the illegitimate son, Smerdyakov, who is the negative human experience, the part of humans which they never want to acknowledge, the base low cunning, the easy gullibility, the pleasure in others' suffering, the base animal instinct and passion for low pursuits, and the desire to revisit suffering inflicted upon oneself onto others. I suppose it goes without saying that he's the brother whom we're meant to be at least 99% sure killed his father. He claimed he did it because of Ivan's dictum that in a world without God, everything is permitted. When Ivan hears this, he becomes so guilt stricken that he goes crazy and believes himself to be the murderer.

The point of all this is a novel of character can also be a novel of ideas if the characters mean more than just themselves, and this is where Purity excelled. We'll get to that in the next podcast. See you then!

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 We're all older now, and there's a whole new generation of literary fiction writers to be annoyed by.  The very fact that Franzen is so out of step now from a literary country he previously did so much to define makes me feel like taking what he has to say a little more seriously. Love turns so easily into hate, and to be honest, the hate engendered by both Franzen and David Foster Wallace makes me think twice about them. It certainly doesn't make me more interested in reading David Foster Wallace when one finds out his long history of wretched behavior to the women closest to him, but it's slightly amusing that thousands of readers, not just the quote-unquote mansplainers who were always recommending him to women, who used to eat up his every word and were devastated by his suicide; seem as though they're vowing en masse to never re-read his work. At very least, when readers have that complicated a relationship with a author, that means that his works are probably interesting. Even so, Infinite Jest is not my idea of a great way to spend a month... On the other hand, Wallace's journalism is far more interesting, and interesting in a way that a lot of later journalism is not because it challenges the preconceived notions of its audience. In one piece asks audience members to put aside their loathing of right-wing radio to consider the spectacular level of talent involved in making it. In another he asks them to empathize with run-of-the-mill Middle Americans at an Illinois State Fair, all of whom would probably vote Trump a quarter century later. There was his piece on John McCain, which examined the phenomenon of how McCain got many 2000 liberals excited about highly conservative notions like national greatness and honor and sacrifice. And then of course, there's the lobster.... (pause) I've tried Infinite Jest at least twice, not very hard, one day I'll make a more serious effort, but it never called to me. Perhaps Wallace's natural home, like the natural home of many novelists in this extremely un-novelistic age, is journalism. Wallace's long-form feature writing is magnificent - conversational, urgent, with incisive points that always compel the attention span.

But except perhaps for Consider the Lobster, which I won't even describe, just read it, all of these pieces are so antithetical to the spirit of 2020 that it should come as no surprise that the very same audiences who thrilled to Wallace at twenty now turn against him at forty. Perhaps in some way, Wallace knew what was coming for him, and having devoted so much time to resisting his inner voice telling him what a monster he was, he could not abide hearing that voice in externalized form, telling him what he thought he knew about himself all along. Though that's probably reading far too much into a suicide that will never truly be understood except to say that Wallace battled severe depression for decades. But depression does lift eventually, and whether in a year or fifty, the pendulum eventually swings back. Whether or not that includes me, Wallace will find new and appreciative audiences, he already has, and his most appreciative appraisers in the late 2010s seems to be a number of Christian publications.

But with Franzen, there's none of the high drama of Wallace's biography, indeed, perhaps partially out of personal experience of watching Wallace's demons, Franzen seems to do what he can to avoid exactly that kind of drama. When Oprah gave Franzen her endorsement, effectively making his career forever, Franzen did everything he could to turn it down. People thought he was monstrously ungrateful and scornful of an appreciative public, but think of all those American celebrity novelists - the stress of being a celebrity to more than twenty-thousand core readers can kill creativity - think of Salinger, Ellison, Fitzgerald, Margaret Mitchell, Capote and Harper Lee, David Foster Wallace... you go to public readings where you're treated as a rock star by literally thousands and then you have to go home and spend years at a time by yourself, trying to recapture the flame you'd been able to conjure in colossally different life-circumstances. The pressure of writing big books may have killed Wallace, or maybe it was knowledge of the media firestorm which would eventually burn much of his colossal esteem, but in the face of whatever similar pressure, Franzen churned out three meganovels in fifteen years and seems to have a fourth on the way - which will apparently be his final novel. I doubt a big novel is ever without its troubles, but compared to his famous friend to whose name Franzen is always connected, it seems almost as though big novels with big questions are as easy for him to expectorate as a loogie.

Freedom, on the other hand, does not seem nearly as great a book to me. At that time Freedom was released, only nine years ago, everyone spoke about how Franzen reground American novels in old notions of character and plot, but what strikes me in 2019 is how much information overload there is. There is a never-ending series of plot points whose complexity is serpentine, and whose point very well may be to elucidate the mind-numbing complexity behind which many businessmen hide their malfeasance, but as I found out when writing my own novel, portrayals of those complexities do not  make for great storytelling unless you can find a way to evoke their opacity without succumbing to the same. This is the oft-stated complaint about the novels of that generation: Wallace, Franzen, Zadie Smith, and going further back to Thomas Pynchon and Dom DeLillo.

About five years ago, Franzen drew all kinds of fire for saying that twitter is the ultimate irresponsible medium that reduces everyone's capacity for thought to the size of a soundbite - let's leave aside that of course America's pre-eminent writer of long novels in our generation was going to believe that, but four years later, a demagogic would-be dictator won a Presidential election with vast aid from a twitter feed, three years after that, there's little sign that this twittering era will end well for anyone but a handful of billionaires, each of whom might have rebellious daughters who disown them anyway.

And then, of course, there's the issue of misogyny in Franzen's writing. In some ways, Franzen was in a tough bind. He was called out for having privileges which women writers lack, and he immediately acknowledged its truth. What else could one do with a notion that's so obviously true. When Freedom came out, it was practically a month-long release party in the New York Times. But Franzen then noted that the accusations were coming from romance novelist, Jennifer Weiner, and Jodi Piccoult, both of whom can complain about their lack of critical approbation to their tens of millions of dollars in sales. To me, the problem is sort of framed by everyone backwardly. Why the pretense to the belief that writers relegated to genre ghettos don't suffer in the quality of their output and their freedom to go in any creative direction they like? Jodi Picoult is a relatively serious middlebrow writer, but Jennifer Weiner a romance writer - there's a pretty obvious beginning, middle, and end to that kind of book, and only so many variations. And meanwhile, very good genre fiction writers like JK Rowling and Barbara Taylor Bradford already make exponents more money than Franzen ever will, so in that sense, this liberal male who at least means well finds it a little difficult to feel too much sympathy. On the other hand, the problem is clearly that a woman who wants to write serious fiction will necessarily find her opportunities systemically limited, and therefore will often be relegated to making a much more probable success for herself within a genre ghetto. And this is a problem. If women or minorities were writing the same quantity of great literary fiction as white men, there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem, because that means that they are getting the same amount of opportunities and the system is ultimately not weighted against them. But the system is weighted against them. And because of the frustrations inherent in systemic bias, many of the most talented women and writers of color simply give up their literary dreams, or are still forced more often to dilute their work for commercial considerations, or, if they even get to the pages of a book review, get  more critical pans that make them have to compromise on their vision for later work. I realize that there is a minefield of controversy one has to wade through with these points, but the point is to create a diverse world where the opportunities of the present and future are properly weighted to equal distribution resources for talent in all directions.

So is Franzen a misogynist? Well, I'll try to tread carefully here. There doesn't seem to be Wallace's long history of outright hostility, but there's definitely something both in Franzen's media pronouncements and in his fiction that makes him sound marginally less interested in women. In Purity there's no mistaking bristling contempt for the most radical feminism represented by the character Annabel Laird. Perhaps his weakness is my weakness too, and the character of Annabel's idealism is clearly born not of any lived experience, but of a toxic combination of mental instability and too much privilege that feeds on one another. She is clearly meant in many ways to be an allegorical representation of American radicalism born more of privilege than necessity, and I mostly had to nod in agreement with it, such belligerents do exist rather plentifully in some circles, among men as well as women. But there were a number of other women in the book who were portrayed much more sympathetically, the character of Laila is presented as a much more liberal feminist who lives in equal cooperative partnership with her partner who is also her coworker and is in many ways the star of their relationship to whom he cedes the limelight. One might fault Franzen as a male novelist telling women the proper way to be feminist, and yet, is a writer really supposed to silence themself? Fiction is only worthwhile if it has the sting of truth, just as non-fiction is only worthwhile if it has the vividness of fiction. Stories are a way of rendering the world in a multi-dimensional, more parablistic, deeper truth than mere facts. Every character has his or her or their own perspective,  and his or her or their own point of view, and through the writer's perspective, if he or she or they write work of quality, the composite of perspectives, the multi-dimensionality of reading characters live truth through lived experience, will provide a kind of new truth about life with which the reader can come away.

And yet at the same time, there is something about the rendering of Annabel Laird that doesn't sit right, and seems genuinely cruel, both to the delusions of the mentally ill, and also to the fact that a few of Annabel's points about the condition of women are not entirely wrong in ways that I'm not entirely sure her creator understands.

All writers, all people, have terrible weaknesses, but with enough insight, insight sometimes born of struggle, perhaps weaknesses can be re-contextualized into strengths. All sorts of great narrative artists from Philip Roth to Martin Scorsese to Strindberg to Dostoevsky have made their fear, confusion, and anger toward women into subjects that make abundantly explicit that the fault lies with the male protagonist and his creator, not the female characters or women more generally. Such limitations do mean there's some essentially lacking mix of compassion and imagination in the nature of creators like them, and it comes through in their work. The very best of the best are creatively androgynous, but you don't need to be able to imagine all the way into every kind of person to be a great artist, you just need to freight your imaginings, however misunderstanding or cruel, with meaning. Within the cruelty there must be compassion, just as within the compassion exhibited by the  very best of the best: a Shakespeare, or a Mozart, or a Rembrandt, or a Tolstoy, there is cruelty.

And this ambiguity between cruelty and compassion is where Purity excels. Like Dostoevsky, Franzen's ability to render the dysfunctional messiness of human motivations would seem unearthly, except that conflicts of human motivation are the very essence of the human story. For the characters in this book, love means hate and hate means love, the purer their motivations, the darker the reality they will into being. The more they long for simplicity, the more tangled grow their complications. The more will to power they exhibit to enact their better world visions, the more the world resists their ministering. It is a masterful rendering of human complication. It serves as an allegory for the very complicated mess that is the contemporary American-led world, and also serves as a kind of middlebrow tale in itself, existing somewhere between a pot boiler and soap opera. The best of the best is not just highbrow, it's every-brow and all at once. No, this isn't Tolstoy or Chekhov, it's not even Twain or Roth, and the attempts at humor in Purity are not great, but even with those quid-pro-quos, it's damn close to canonical fiction. It is very difficult to imagine an intersecting web of people and stories that better mirror the very particular conflicts of our time.

And Franzen is yet again embroiled in controversy for an article in the New Yorker about climate change, and how it may be counterproductive to give false hope for a future in which climate change doesn't subsume the planet if we act quickly enough. Obviously it's a little hypocritical for this doom and gloom podcaster who seemingly so delights in stripping what he believes to be illusions away to criticize someone else for taking away hopes, but Franzen did seem like a counterproductive catastrophizer. My first thought when I saw the article was 'shut up Jonathan,' and it's hardly the first time I've seen Franzen's name in the headlines and thought that. The same scientific experts who prognosticate about climate change's likelihood are the ones telling Franzen that he's grossly exaggerated the likelihood. But then again, scientists are notorious for their positivism, their belief that the world operates according to logical principles and that all logical things of this world can be scientifically verified. Nobody is better at understanding the unreason of people than a novelist, and perhaps it takes a novelist to make the imaginative leap that shows that even the most urgent human problems will fall prey to human irrationalities long after the chance for sparing every human life has ceased.

Like most of you dear listeners, Franzen hails from a very light society, but I think he's clearly a novelist of darkness from a generation who has begun to see the American light darken, in the tradition of Dostoevsky, Melville, Conrad, Mann, Faulkner, McCarthy, a novelist of excess who sees the potential in humans to destroy themselves. Perhaps it's not just more comforting to prefer the other line of writers, the light-bringers who see human's constructive potential, perhaps it's also more necessary if we're going to make better worlds. But there must be an enormous place of honor for this dark vision, the cautionary purge through fiction that shows the worlds we do not want to come to pass.