I’ve often thought about the rabbit hole of books I tumbled down some years ago. How one led to another, how a recommendation led to a bore-in-the-head read or how a lazy stroll through a store led to eye contact with a spine and a promise. I’ve thought about those books that well-intentioned friends recommended but were left unfinished at a nice round page number like 40 or those that forced free time when there wasn’t any.
Fiction was not a massive part of my life growing up. Through school I was briefly enthralled by Macbeth, learned the pre-determined lines of Heaney for the exam and burrowed through Pride and Prejudice out of necessity. When my English teacher implored me to stop wasting my time with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I gave his advice the disdain it initially invited but part of me wondered what gave him the wide-eyed gaze he had when he delved into whatever he was devouring during the anointed reading hour.
Looking back now it’s with irony I recall how The Corrections entered my life. It was a perfect example of the gushing, relentless media machine that middle-aged, very white and writer of impolitely good novels Jonathan Franzen is the beneficiary of. It is also one of the chief sticks to beat him over the head with. Franzen was just on the cusp of entering the literary stratosphere with the publication of Freedom. His contented face, full of all that respect and admiration, was about to adorn Time magazine’s cover with the title Great American Novelist. This would presumably have the silver-clouded lining of making for a fine if rudimentary dartboard for his gathering hecklers.
Freedom was hailed as a cultural event and somehow pinged across my radar and, since nobody on Twitter told me otherwise, I decided I was going to try fiction, this type of fiction. Google sweetened the deal by telling me that Franzen had some sort of beef with Oprah and that his previous novel was quite something too.
What followed was a spark and something of an awakening. A salmon squelched down Chip Lambert’s pants, a camera followed Gary in the kitchen and Enid Lambert was going to change her life at 75. The great many hordes who subscribe to the Franzen snark machine online might suggest that had any decent work of fiction been thrust upon me at that hour that I might have felt something similar and while that might have been true, new readers of serious fiction often have to be coaxed, they need a piece of work to creep just over the parapet, to nod in their direction and beckon them into a world that was waiting all along for them. In the entertainment maelstrom that attacks our eyes daily, surely the novel should welcome these crumbs that are swept its way.
Franzen’s place as modern literature’s gate keeper is secure but there is an increasing majority who have a serious problem with that. The type that are equating virtual thumbs up and retweets as opinion, the type that use a medium that is built for self-verification as an opinion poll. Find those that agree with you, follow them and suddenly the world agrees with you. Even now, as that sentence ends, some delicious smack down, more than likely with the word Luddite in it, is being constructed in riposte. It’s become a race to see just how much one can define their hatred of this man, this man who hates the internet, hates women, drones on about birds and generally is just out there in the world, being himself.
Franzen’s latest work, Purity, arrived with that relentless media machine behind it but ever since the mere title of the book dropped, and the explanation that it was about a 24-year old women looking for her father and struggling with college payments, opinions were formed and hardened. Purity was a gross title. How dare he write about a woman. The fawning reviews that will inevitably follow are proof of the white male hegemony for which Franzen is a beacon. It was the hell Barrett Brown described in his rambling, kind-of review of Franzen in The Intercept, a hell: “where the columns are composed by Thomas Friedman, the novels are written by Jonathan Franzen, the debate is framed by CNN, and the fact-checking is done by no one”.
Brown’s work was scooped up with vigour online. We were urged to merely read this review, not to bother reading the book. In classic internet parlance Brown “eviscerated” Franzen, he “destroyed” him. Never mind the fact that he at once: reviews a review of Purity; tells us off the bat he has no time for modern literature; has an issue with a fictional character’s opinion of Wikileaks; and towards the end expresses his disdain for the subject matter of the book.
Purity is far from flawless and, out of Franzen’s last three works, it sits third, but it is a strikingly good novel all the same, one that manages to combine farce with feeling and tries to wrap its head around big ideas. Ultimately, yet again, despite the ode to Dickens and nod to the 19th century, Franzen has tried to construct a novel of the times. He hit this pitch perfectly with Freedom and The Corrections and perhaps it’s in the polarising opinions that Purity invites that he has inadvertently hit the pitch this time.
A couple of months back, I sat two rows back as he with the contented face and easy gait of success read to a near sold-out crowd in Dublin. Franzen is mischievous and sincere in person. He seems to take genuine interest in meeting readers and conversing with them, yet it’s his grumpy persona online that he must continually contend with. His interviewer in this instance asked him about the internet, the fact he was a man – “a chromosome problem, I’ve had it for a while” – and mostly about all those peripheral takes on Franzen the man, the caricature of the Luddite novelist. Franzen answered these questions politely and with good humour but the assorted groans around me spoke of a passionate section of the audience that was interested in merely hearing about his process, not the mass of noise that surrounds him.
Therein lies the eternal problem with Franzen. There were those clutching their tattered copies of The Corrections and those who were curious about the man who hates the internet. There were those who preferred his non-fiction and those who wanted to know just what his problem with Jennifer Weiner was.
In answering a question about the sizeable percentage of female writers that seem to have a serious problem with him, Franzen brought up Elena Ferrante as an example of a female writer who has written novels about the family that are rightly considered literature and not mere “chick-lit”. The vast opposite ends of the spectrum that Ferrante and Franzen occupy in today’s world are striking. One eschews all public speaking, all interviews and all promotional work; one partakes in the traditional method of public speaking and is happy to do the traditional book tour and the mass of interviews that follow from it.
With Ferrante, we are forced to merely judge the work and nothing else and her type of stunning, hyper, near-autobiographical fiction has struck a chord in a world that continually asks you to define yourself. Franzen’s work by contrast will now always be seen through the prism of Franzen the man, he of the wispy hair and black glasses and defender of bird rights against outdoor cats.
After Franzen had dutifully answered the audience’s questions, he made his way to the back of the room where a table and green pen were waiting. More and more were drawn to the stack of books for sale at a table near by and a wireless credit card machine scanned with gusto as hardbacks invaded the space of handbags, knapsacks and trusty shopping carrier bags.
For what it was worth, I thanked Franzen for The Corrections and explained that it had sparked something in me. He briefly stopped writing his careful signature and shook my hand, saying that was great to hear. The encounter could have been counted in seconds and mirrored thousands more that have happened this year, but this was the pre-eminent novelist of his age meeting and greeting readers. There was no snark. Even those who perhaps went to grumble about him didn’t raise a word. Franzen won’t participate online and he is castigated for it. Perhaps we should be content that this supposed dinosaur just sticks to face-to-face meetings with readers.
The work must always stand alone but perhaps, in a time when the novel is a distant flicker on the cultural radar, we should be a little grateful for the oxygen Franzen offers. For if we were deprived of that oxygen, if even the forces that gather to denounce were spared him, if we couldn’t pick holes in his characters and debate the place of females in his world, I and, I hasten to wager, many others may not have tumbled down that rabbit hole.
Perhaps the middle ground is the man shines a light on the novel and the writer has at times achieved greatness. Distilling a middle message in today’s world is an intimidating challenge, so we should be thankful for what an embittered novelist in Purity describes as “the plague of literary Jonathans” for offering himself up to the extremity of opinions.
Ultimately, we should meet in the middle and discuss the books.
