There's a reason that all sorts of major athletic competitions are over in a minute or two. If most olympic athletes had to operate at peak performance past two minutes, they would fail at best to perform at their optimum, injure themselves permanently at worst. In the same way, there is no way to expect any kind of aesthetic perfection from long-form narrative. The best short stories are perfect, they are self-contained worlds which create multitudes of meaning that never stop yielding possibilities no matter how often you ponder them. Over the last ten years I've thought of so many different possibilities for what the end of Chekhov's The Black Monk might mean that it would be an entire podcast to list them all. Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants is little but a conversation that can mean an exponential multiplicity of different situations. The chill of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown can make you speculate your whole life long about America's origins, and wonder how many puritans, how many Christians through the millennia, went through the motions of faith while truly believing in nothing, or even only the Devil, and how that lack of faith may have corrupted the Christian faith itself. And it would be pointless to get started on all the potential meanings in Kafka's Before the Law or Borges's The Other, because both are not even a single page long, would take you literally three minutes to read, and have enough potential meanings to ponder for a lifetime and never get past their first door. But meaning does not necessarily connote intellectual meaning, it can also connote emotional meaning. My personal favorite writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, is suddenly an almost forgotten master of the short story, and his short stories do not have the subtleties of Borges or Kafka. They are virtually folk tales, like Hans Christian Anderson or Edgar Allen Poe in their different ways, or Giovanni Verga and Flannery O'Connor, and they evoke not speculation but sense-impression, so grounded are they all in various pre-literate oral traditions that they evoke the entire worldview of a place and time, not only the superstitions and fears of distant people, but their hopes and values, and to me, that's almost more worthwhile than the more intellectual type, save Chekhov, who empathized with other humans as though they lived inside his own skin.
On the other hand, even the best big books have to make aesthetic contortions of logic and structure and observation, with a hundred pages at a time of boredom to be endured until the narrative picks up again. Dostoevsky called Tolstoy's 864 page Anna Karenina a flawless work of art, and it's definitely more flawless than Dostoevsky's four final loose baggy monsters, but Book III of Anna Karenina, with all its prattling on about Levin's land dealings, would strain even the most business-savvy farmer. In terms of perfect novels, One might say The Great Gatsby is perfect, or Pride and Prejudice, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Dostoevsky's earlier and very lean Notes from the Underground, or Stefan Zweig's Chess Story, or Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, the latter three are short enough that they might fall into the novella category rather than novel, and personally, I think the novella is a particularly great because it can feature a straight-forward narrative without creating its aesthetic splendors by elision as the short stories have to almost inevitably - the unsaid being as important as the said, nor does it allow its author a yield to temptation of taking us through every narrative permutation of which they can think, no matter how dubious the connection to the rest of the book.
And then of course, there's Shakespeare, writer of writers, who takes us through so many permutations and contortions of logic and structure and character paradox that it's almost impossible to say that Shakespeare has any form at all. Perhaps he was writing the equivalent of the loose baggy monster in an era when few writers knew how to construct a story that was more than a hundred pages long - even Don Quixote is more a collection of short stories than a connected narrative, but because they're so short in comparison to later greats like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, they scorch on both the stage and the page. The plays absorb us in as other writer can, and spit us out a different person.
And then, even over Shakespeare, there's the 'BIGGEST' book of them all, the Holy Bible, a work probably collated, redacted, edited, and marinated over a period of 2000 years. A lot of people in our think the Bible is just regressive mesmerism for groupthink, I think it's still the greatest book ever written, containing everything from the largest cosmic questions to the smallest domestic squabbles, the best intentions to the most appallingly violent ones, the highest poetry to the lowest comedy, - and yes, there is comedy in the Bible all over the place. The Bible is an anthology that has themes for every situation, and as the universal relatability of its themes pops up again and again in relation to the problems of every generation, one can only conclude that even if the Bible gets all kinds of specifics wrong, it is an eternal book. And because its themes and characters are so universally relatable to everyday life, encounters with the Bible completely change our thinking about life. For good or ill, there has never been a more powerful work of literature.
And why might that be? I would imagine that the limit for a book to have no excess verbiage is probably around 375 pages, but the big novel, the best of them anyway, is the nearest thing to lived experience that we get without living life. Clive James, as we said a few podcasts ago, defined fiction as 'life without the dull bits', ...well.., in big books the dull bits are definitely there, ditto in the big symphonies and operas, the long-form TV shows and double albums. But here's to them. Part of living life is living through the disappointing passages, which make the exciting parts all the sweeter. Even the best long novels will have 1 dull page for every 9 exciting ones, and you will be grateful for so little dullness than rather so much. And as we take them in, necessarily little by little, our impressions of these works cannot possibly be instant. We don't just watch the story evolve, we evolve alongside the story, often having to leave and return to it in the middle, bringing all sorts of unrelated new experiences to the book, pondering these stories and characters and themes for days.
All these cliches are a way of saying that I just read Purity by Jonathan Franzen, and I had a great time. I'd been avoiding Franzen's 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. 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, Chabon.... 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.
But we're all older now, and there's a whole new generation of 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 women in his life both permanently and peripherally, but it's slightly amusing that thousands of readers, not just the mansplainers who never shut up about the book, who used to eat up his every word and were devastated by his suicide, seem as though they're vowing to never re-read his work. At very least, when readers have that complicated a relationship with a book, that means that the book is probably interesting.
With Franzen, there's none of the high drama of Wallace's biography, indeed Franzen seems to do what he can to avoid 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, 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 his reputation, but in the face of whatever pressure, Franzen churned out three meganovels in fifteen years and seems to have a fourth on the way - though apparently his final one. 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 fart. He 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. Is Franzen a misogynist? Well, we'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. You can pick up a kind of contempt in Purity for certain kinds of women, and all kinds of contempt for the much more radical forms of feminism represented by the character Annabel Laird. Perhaps his weakness is my weakness too, and when 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 in some ways meant to be an allegorical representation for many forms of American radicalism born more of privilege than necessity, and I mostly had to shake my head in agreement with him, and there were a number of other women in the book who were portrayed much more sympathetically. Yet at the same time, there was something about the rendering of the character that didn't sit right, and seemed 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 were not entirely wrong in ways that I'm not entirely sure her creator understands.
We all 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 is that of the protagonist and his creator, not the female characters or women more generally. It does mean that 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 best of the best: a Shakespeare, or a Mozart, or a Rembrandt, or a Tolstoy, there is cruelty.
And meaning is where Purity excels. Like Dostoevsky and Strindberg, 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, the more the world resists. 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. This isn't Chekhov or Tolstoy, 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. 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 with enough time and argument, the world will yield to reason. 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 everyone's life has ceased.
Like most of you dear listeners, Franzen hails from a very light society, but he is clearly a novelist of darkness, 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.
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