The Mysterious Case of Jonathan Franzen

I try to keep a light touch on the publishing world, and I like to follow success stories about authors, even if I don't read their stuff. As a frequenter of bookstores (my closest is a Barnes and Noble, which hurts my help-independent-booksellers inclination, but spares my bank account, as I can get a teacher discount at B&N, plus not have to commute for an hour to get there), I see a lot of names on the shelves. My diet is dichotomously spread between classics and science fiction/fantasy, with some dabbling in the historical section, too. The large, mainstream fiction is relatively unexplored by me, though I occasionally venture outwards. And, since I always perk up when I hear about authors--and few current authors court as much controversy as Jonathan Franzen--I finally decided to buy a copy of Freedom. (In the interest of full disclosure, I bought it used for a dollar, plus tax, at a now-out-of-business used bookstore.)

It's still sitting on my shelf. But an audiobook became available through my library, so I finally "cracked the cover", as it were, and began listening to it on my daily bike ride (hooray for summer). I'm not going to review the book, because, frankly, I'm not enjoying it too much and I don't know if I'm going to finish it. Indeed, I'm just over an hour into the thing (a few pages, perhaps, into the first chapter after a lengthy prologue that doesn't call itself a prologue), and I don't know how to feel about it. In fact, that's why I'm writing this essay: I don't know what to do about how I feel about Jonathan Franzen.

Unpacking My Feelings

I want to be a published, full-time author. I look at the writer life the way my kids look at iPads--with longing, addiction, and eternal pining. I'm well aware it isn't a dreamscape of effortless work coupled by endless success and piles of money. Nothing is easy in this life, and I'm learning that on a near-daily basis. But if I could choose, I would want to struggle through life by earning a living with my art.

So when there's someone who is successfully writing--getting the visibility that Oprah provides, for example--I tend to log the author in my head. I do this for as many authors as my distracted globe can fit, and I often find myself cheering on, if only internally and not financially, underdog authors who look like they deserve success. 

But I have this weird habit of also suspecting successful writers. Like, they're not real writers because of their instant success. Christopher Paolini, Stephanie Myers, and E.L. James all come to mind, in part because there's no trail of hard work to explain their fame. I even felt this way for a long time about J.K. Rowling, though I've definitely changed my tune about what the Harry Potter series is, does, and will continue to be. 

When it comes to Franzen, then, I didn't follow his sundry controversies or pay a lot of attention to his body of work. To me, he was a nobody whom a lot of people liked and had gotten into a kerfuffle with Oprah (a fact I didn't learn about until much later). And in terms of being a writer, he likely worked really hard as one, because, by all critical views, he's a really talented writer. That, for the Paolini-Myers-James cocktail I mentioned above, at least differentiated him from the pack of talentless hacks (I assumed, based upon others' opinions; I haven't read Myers nor James, but I was beyond bored with Paolini and couldn't fathom his popularity) that seemed to be able to hoover up all the money.

Curmudgeonly Writer

Sadly, I can't remember where or how I got a strong anti-Franzen bug inserted into my worldview, but it's a real thing. I get a strange, snobbish vibe about Franzen as a person, which I'm having a hard time divorcing myself from as I attempt to read (or, more accurately, listen) to his novel. The disdain I sense comes from things like this (his rules are down over half way), I guess, and a general angst in certain online circles. I hadn't realized that I'd internalized so much of that feeling, so it's been difficult to push past it and try to enjoy his writing.

I mean, Franzen strikes me as a "writer's writer", someone who knows how to tell a story and is interested in demonstrating that quite openly. Indeed, the beginning of the book is replete with "tell, instead of show" concepts, but they're written in a way that makes them somewhat more engaging. Sadly, most of the people are pretty rotten depictions of humans. There's a lot of psychological trauma (and, still in the first chapter, sexual trauma, too) that they have to work through, and that makes sense to me. But it's bleak. It's cold. It feels...mean. But maybe I'm reading too much into it. Maybe it's that anti-Franzen default that I've found myself in. Perhaps I'm simply looking for reasons to dismiss his work, to try to tease out justifications for having bought his book as a bargain-bin impulse buy.

Some of this unease certainly comes from the wry, quasi-condescending delivery of many of the details. It could be because I'm listening to it, but almost every description, every chosen detail--which are engaging and make me wonder--seems to be selected to be the least flattering nuance of the characters. Here's a section from page 5, describing Patty Berglund (and there's a lot of description in this; it takes a long time for the book to have a cohesive scene. Franzen seems interested in allowing the story to begin vaguely before sharpening details, which I'm undecided on as a reader and not too much a fan of as a writer). 

But most people found her humility sincere or at least amusing, and it was in any case hard to resist a woman whom your own children liked so much and who remembered not only their birthdays, but yours, too, and came to your back door with a plate of cookies or a card or some lilies of the valley in a little thrift-store vase that she told you not to bother returning.

Those are useful details and help establish Patty's character and...I can't help but sense a bit of disdain in the voice of the narrator for this type of person. Having moved recently (I'm hitting the one year mark of this house in a little less than a month) and still struggling to find how I fit into what I aim will be the last place I will call home, I feel a little cold at the condescension I read (into it?) at the idea that her neighborliness is "at least amusing" to her community. Remembering birthdays and caring about others makes for a pretty amazing person, in my book (no pun intended), and yet she has enemies and petty people who are pretty happy to see her life's struggles enhance before the not-really-a-prologue-because-it-wasn't-called-a-prologue ends.

So maybe that's it. The pessimism for how communities behave, the calculation of adults when a teenaged character is raped (again, chapter one, so that isn't even a spoiler), and the blatant mistakes parents make while raising their children seems to be the sauce of the entire book's stew.

But, again, I'm not saying this as a reviewer of the book. I'm trying to figure out if this book really is as problematic as it feels to me now, or if I'm simply projecting my own dissatisfaction with this genre (not a fan of mainstream fiction normally, remember) and the author.

It's really a bit of a mystery.