An Inner Life Outgrown

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The New York Sun

The best of Jonathan Franzen can be had in “The Corrections.” The round up of magazine pieces collected, and billed as a personal history, in “The Discomfort Zone” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 195 pages, $22), will do little for readers who want more of the carbonated literary excellence found in his novel. But readers who are curious about Franzen himself will find much to interest them here. Not because “The Discomfort Zone” is especially revealing or even evocative — though it does have its moments — but because Mr. Franzen’s interest in himself is just what galls and interests his most engaged critics.

“The Corrections” would have been famous in its own right, but Mr. Franzen surrounded it with controversy. Mostly, these controversies were constructive. Firstly, in an essay published in Harper’s years before, he bemoaned the irrelevance of contemporary novels, calling for a new engagement with mainstream culture, which he then attempted in “The Corrections.” He was providing the critical apparatus for his own future book.

Then, immediately after its publication, Mr. Franzen was gratified with the mainstream engagement he had craved: “The Corrections” was an Oprah Book Club selection. But Mr. Franzen found that he couldn’t go through the motions; as a film crew followed him around his childhood neighborhood, waiting for him to look contemplative, Mr. Franzen only grew impatient and embarrassed. Oprah withdrew her offer and Mr. Franzen was left with a perfect kind of accidental celebrity.

Finally, in 2002, Mr. Franzen, now a literary superstar and the recipient of a national book award, published an essay in the New Yorker that made him many enemies in the literary world.The essay, called “Mr. Difficult,” asked an Emperor’s New Clothes question: Why does highbrow literature have to be difficult? In its frank description of the laboriousness of reading a book like William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions,” the essay was refreshing, but it often smacked of self-help license. Mr. Franzen told the reader to think of a novel as a “lover”; he advised the reader to let himself be gratified.

The argument has been made that Mr. Franzen always does what makes sense for his career: He misses mainstream recognition when he doesn’t have it, spurns it when he gets too much, and disowns inconvenient idols once he’s become one himself. But it could also be argued that Mr. Franzen has been sincere from the beginning. As a relatively marginal writer in the mid-1990s, he wanted to make himself more relevant. He thought about how to keep his honor while also becoming a more popular writer.

What fascinates Franzen-watchers is that we know so much about him, that a man who titled his essay collection “How To Be Alone” lives so much in the open. He reads his own ambitions as a map of the literary world.

In “The Discomfort Zone” we see this conflation of self and society in action, usually to good effect. Mr. Franzen’s fundamental subject is the loss of middle-class certainties, which he sees as happening during his lifetime. In “The Corrections,” the generations are divided and haunted by an epochal gap that no one is brave enough to truly comprehend.

Now, in a piece titled, “House For Sale,” a 39-year-old Franzen compares his childhood home — now on the market after his mother’s death — to an outdated novel. Mr. Franzen chooses a fetching but unreliable realtor, but what really makes him feel guilty is his detachment. “What lived on — in me — was the discomfort of how completely I’d outgrown the novel I’d once been so happy to live in, and how little I even cared about the final sale price.”

The turning points in his life always resemble the turning points in American society. That is his gift in his novel, where everything can be designed for perfect resonance; but it burdens his memoir.For example, in “My Bird Problem,” Mr. Franzen points out that his marriage fell apart in the 1990s, which also was a time of careless ecological spoliation. Unsure whether to divorce his wife, he turns his guilt-ridden ambivalence over to society at large: “So more study was needed. The fossil record was ambiguous. The liberal scientific consensus was self-serving.”

In “The Foreign Language,” he relates his dawning understanding of Kafka, in stages, and thus covers a great deal of his personal growth in college. He characteristically talks about two things at once — the original and now perhaps forgotten subversiveness of Peanuts helps explain the surprisingly complex mores of his upscale St. Louis neighborhood. Mr. Franzen goes beyond the simple use of metaphor; he glues his characters to history. Hence the successful alchemy of sociology and novel-writing in “The Corrections.” More power to him. But readers who care more about Kafka’s fiction than Mr. Franzen’s life may prefer to stick to Mr. Franzen’s fiction.

blytal@nysun.com


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