SOS

You'll be happy to know that the reviewer of Elle magazine, Kate Christensen, finds, in her very short review of Freedom, a number of things we were talking about last week in villagecharm's review of the shocking Tanenhaus review in the NYT. She thinks the desperate housewife Patty is Franzen, whereas the Brit reviewer in the Guardian thinks the rockstar character is Franzen, neither of whose problems are as mimetic, interesting, emblematic, or attractive as Franzen seems to think they are.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/19/freedom-jonathan-franzen-review

Partly (I'm judging from the reviews) the book seems to be about Sex-and-the-City do-me feminists, aka whores, and stay-at-home feminist moms, aka madonnas, and the ways and means by which they come on to big swinging dick writers rockstars. Plus a real Freudian hatred of one's own parents, for whom, evidently, one should repudiate gratitude as one simultaneously dines out, for a generation, in print, on their mistakes. I think this Freudian shit -- decades of psychoanalysis as the upper West Side bar mitzvah -- is the secret Woody Allen attraction of Tanenhaus and the City chattering classes to Franzen. And it is so completely over; the talking cure is the essence, I think as danschank put it, of old white boy gasbag literature. (Pomo, I think we agreed, whatever it may be, is explicitly about reclaiming narrative from OWBGBs.)

I was interested in both reviewers' struggle to like the characters, and their indictment of the nastiness of spirit toward women.

I can't find a link to the Elle review (not that I'm touting it as the canonical take on it; it is the Z generation take on it, which is interesting to me), but here's the nut:

Reading Freedom, Franzen's colossally ambitious, intermittently entertaining, but ultimately unsuccessful new novel, I felt I was huddling with him while he vented his loathing of our species, colluding in mocking everyone in the book -- and that he was mocking me, too, for turning the pages, because doing so implied that I care about these repellent people.

The Brit reviewer, as they often salubriously do, disengages himself civilly from the grotesque Yankee brouhaha around the publication of the book (they do the same with American academic knickertwists, having moved on from "theory", which they invented, in about 1980) and finds much to like in it. Still, I think he comes down pretty decisively on the theory that it is a book about celebrity, Franzen's, and grossly unattractive groupies, Franzen's.

Which is kind of like being invited to play with day-of-the-locusts shit on a silver platter. Also featured in the book. Yum yum. (I want to add here I think the setting of Freedom in St. Paul (and, subsequently D.C. and NYC) is a mark of Franzen's disingenuousness, clumsiness, and frivolity: engagement with the city in which he actually lives and machines his celebrity is the mark of a true observer of the Zeitgeist. This is New York. We'll find a place to dance is the novel everyone should be writing).

Since Dickens keeps entering the colloquy, I'd like to point out that he was probably the first literary celebrity -- cum national hero. One observer blundered into a circle of about 20 people in a cobbler's shop, all of whom had chipped in for a subscription to the magazine which was serializing Pickwick Papers, listening to the cobbler, who was the only literate among them, read the whole immense tale aloud. Mainly because Sam Weller was the first working class protagonist. This is how revolutionary an artist Dickens was.

As far as I know, he never abandoned actuality to write about celebrity, and maintained his fly-on-the-wall invisibility in real society. Even though he was the 19th century equivalent of Elvis, Nabokov and Che Guevara, he begins his last book, Our Mutual Friend, with one of the most haunting and enduring images of the city and its vanities that I have encountered: a description of a body-bounty-hunter on the Thames towing a corpse downstream in a boat rowed by a devoted daughter. There's a trophy for you, of all the world's goods that had been laid at Dickens' feet.



( FYI, here is the NYRB review, even-handed, and coming to the crux of the matter, which is that Franzen is a materialist struggling and failing to address what he thinks, but is not, a larger, more popular, of consuming-interest-to-the-chattering-classes theme: the Bush years )

Hitchens

I am thinking about Hitchens and his courageous atheism.

One problem. He is not an atheist, he has a higher power to which he has devoted his life and which is probably the cause of his esophageal cancer. If he were less a daily practitioner of belief, in other words, if he were not, like many libertarians, basically arguing for permission to act out in a way harmful to himself and others, I would admire his non-atheism more.

Now Virginia Woolf was an atheist, for sure, and probably one of the most courageous that there have been. Still, she has a kind of Hegelian or Bergsonian belief in the eternal moment which is, as everyone can understand, a mystic's sense of God.

You don't have to call it God, I do it to annoy my atheist friend J, who insisted on being an atheist long after he gave up drinking the good part of a gallon of vodka a day and writing poetry at the Admiral Benbow, a Connecticut Avenue hippie dive (last seen in its incarnation as a yuppie bagelry) to become a salesman for something obnoxious, the doting husband of a pillhead, the father of two really hideous children, and a devotee of the belief that cashmere protects you from death.

The thing, as one of his comrades once pointed out to me, about atheists is not that they believe in nothing, but that they believe anything.

I'm kind of with I.B. Singer, aka Gimpel the Fool. He said, Whatever happens to me after I am dead, I can be sure of one thing. I will have nothing to do with it.