Farther Away: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen

  JF: This is, wow, this is really—

  THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN: Why, in New York, naturally. In centrally located New York. Our first battle of interest: Harlem Heights. Situation dire. Washington and his shaky amateur army perilously bottled up in Manhattan. General William Howe newly arrived in New York Harbor with a veritable armada—upwards of thirty thousand fresh, well-trained troops, including the storied Hessians. Our Continental Army demoralized by heavy losses and available for easy crushing. Critical engagement: Harlem Heights, near present-day Columbia University. Washington’s troops fight the British to a draw, allowing the general to escape to New Jersey with his army more or less intact. Terrible lost opportunity for the British, tremendous morale-boosting break for Washington, who lives to fight—or avoid fighting!—another day.

  JF: Excuse me—

  THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN: Second battle: Bemis Heights, Saratoga. The year: 1777. The British plan for winning the war: simple. Unite Howe’s overwhelming southern expeditionary force with eight thousand British troops from Canada, under the leadership of General John Burgoyne—the so-called “Gentleman Johnny.” Establish supply lines, control the Hudson and Lake Champlain, sever New England from the southern colonies. Divide and conquer. But it’s the boggy northland, the buggy morass. American troops, many of them part-time, dig into Bemis Heights at Saratoga, where, inspired by the heroics of Benedict Arnold, they launch a series of crippling assaults on Gentleman Johnny, who within a week surrenders his entire army. A stirring victory with enormous strategic implications! News of it encourages France to side decisively with the Americans and declare war on England, and through the next six years of war the finest army on the planet proves ever more tentative and ineffectual against the Americans.

  JF: Um?

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Jeremy?

  THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN: The lesson? Control New York, control the country. New York is the linchpin. The red-hot center. The crux, if you will.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Jeremy, excuse me, I’m just going to take our guest down the hall here for a minute. He’s looking a little shell-shocked.

  THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN: First capital of the newly formed United States of America, as stipulated by its splendid new Constitution? Site of George Washington’s inauguration as our republic’s first president? Did someone say . . . New York City? And though our infant state may not have hosted the capital for long, she certainly did have another trick or two up her sleeve! Hemming the young republic in against the Atlantic seaboard: a formidable chain of mountains stretching all the way from Georgia up to Maine. Only three viable ways to get past them and tap the vast economic potential of the mid-continent: far south around Florida through the Gulf of Mexico; far north around Nova Scotia through the inhospitably Canadian waters of the St. Lawrence; or, centrally, centrally, through a gap in the mountains cut by the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. All that was needed was to dig a canal through some swampy lowlands, and an inexhaustible flood of timber, iron, grain, and meat would funnel down through New York City while a counterflood of manufactured goods went back upriver, enriching its citizens in perpetuity. And lo! Lo!

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Come on—this way.

  THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN: Lo! It came to pass!

  JF: Hey, thank you!

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Who the heck sent you in to Jeremy?

  JF: It was Mr. Van Gander.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Quite the practical joker, Rick Van Gander. I’m Hal, by the way, I’m the geologist. We can breathe a little better out here. You want a doughnut?

  JF: Thanks, I’m fine. I just want to do my interview. At least, I thought that’s what I wanted.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Sure thing. (Dialing) Janelle? The writer? He’s asking about his interview? . . . Okay, will do. (Hanging up) She’s going to come and get you. If she can remember where my office is. Is there something I can help you with in the meantime?

  JF: Thanks. I’m feeling somewhat bludgeoned. I had this idea that I could just sit down with New York in a café and tell her how much I’ve always loved her. Just casually, the two of us. And then I would describe her beauty.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Ha, that’s not the way it works anymore.

  JF: The first time I saw her, I was blown away by how green and lush everything was. The Taconic Parkway, the Palisades Parkway, the Hutchinson River Parkway. It was like a fairy tale, with these beautiful old bridges and mile after mile of forest and parkland on either side. It was so utterly different from the flat asphalt and cornfields out where I came from. The scale of it, the age of it.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Sure.

  JF: My mom’s little sister lived for a long time in Schenectady with my two girl cousins and her husband, who worked for GE. When I was in high school, they moved him away from manufacturing in Schenectady to their corporate headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. He spent the last years of his career leading the team that designed the new corporate logo. Which turned out to look almost exactly like the old corporate logo.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Schenectady ain’t doing so well anymore. None of those old manufacturing towns are.

  JF: My aunt and uncle escaped to arty Westport. The summer I turned seventeen, my parents and I drove out to see them there. The first thing that happened was I conceived a huge crush on my cousin Martha. She was eighteen and tall and funny and vivacious and had poor eyesight, and I could actually talk to her halfway comfortably, because we were cousins. And somehow it got arranged—somehow my parents signed off on it—that Martha and I would drive into Manhattan and spend a day there by ourselves. It was August 1976. Hot, smelly, polleny, thundery, weedy. Martha was working as the babysitter and driver for three Westport girls whose father had gone to South America for two months with his wife and his mistress. The girls were sixteen, fourteen, and eleven, all of them incredibly tiny and obsessed with body weight. The middle one played the flute and was precocious and constantly bugging Martha to take her to high school parties where she could meet some older boys. The vehicle Martha chauffeured them in was an enormous black Town Car. By August, she’d already smashed one Town Car and had had to call her employer’s office to arrange for another. We sailed down the Merritt Parkway in the left lane at high speed, with all the windows open and furnace-hot air blowing through and the three princesses splayed out across the backseat—the older two of them cute enough and close enough to me in age that I could barely say a word to them. Not that they showed the slightest interest in me anyway. We landed on the Upper East Side, by the art museum, where the girls’ grandmother had an apartment. The most impressive thing to me was that the middle girl had come to the city for the day without any shoes. I remember her walking up the hot Fifth Avenue sidewalk barefoot, in her sleeveless top and tiny shorts and carrying her flute. I’d never seen entitlement like this, never even imagined it. It was simultaneously beyond my ken and totally intoxicating. My parents were ur-Midwestern and went through life apologizing and feeling the opposite of entitled. You know, and the hazy blue-gray sky with big white clouds drifting over Central Park. And the buildings of stone and the doormen, and Fifth Avenue like a solid column of yellow cabs receding uptown into this bromine-brown pall of smog. The vast urbanity of it all. And to be there with Martha, my exciting New York cousin, and to spend an afternoon wandering the streets with her, and then have dinner like two adults, and go to a free concert in the park: the self I felt myself to be that day was a self I recognized only because I’d longed for it for so long. I met, in myself, on my first day in New York City, the person I wanted to become. We picked up the girls from their grandmother’s around eleven and went to get the Town Car out of the art museum garage, and that was when we discovered that the right-rear tire was flat. A puddle of black rubber. So Martha and I worked shoulder to shoulder, sweating, like a couple, and got the car jacked up and the tire changed while the middle girl sat
cross-legged on the trunk of somebody else’s car, the soles of her feet all black with the city, and played the flute. And then, after midnight, we drove out of there. The girls asleep in back, like they were the kids I’d had with Martha, and the windows down and the air still sultry but cooler now and smelling of the Sound, and the roads potholed and empty, and the streetlights a mysterious sodium orange, unlike the bluish mercury-vapor lights that were still the standard in St. Louis. And over the Whitestone Bridge we went. And that’s when I had the clinching vision. That’s when I fell irretrievably for New York: when I saw Co-Op City late at night.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Get outta here.

  JF: Seriously. I’d already spent the day in Manhattan. I’d already seen the biggest and most city-like city in the world. And now we’d been driving away from it for fifteen or twenty minutes, which in St. Louis would have been enough to get you out into pitch-dark river-bottom cornfields, and suddenly, as far as I could see, there were these huge towers of habitation, and every single one of them was as tall as the tallest building in St. Louis, and there were more of them than I could count. The most distant ones were over by the water and otherworldly in the haze. Tens of thousands of city lives all stacked and packed against each other. The sheer number of apartments that you could see out here in the southeast Bronx: it all seemed unknowably and excitingly vast, the way my own future seemed to me at that moment, with Martha sitting next to me doing seventy.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: And did anything ever come of that? You and her?

  JF: I crashed for a night on her sofa four years later. Again the Upper East Side. In some anonymous Co-Op City–like tower. Martha had just finished college at Cornell. She was sharing a two-bedroom with two other girls. I was in the city with my brother Tom. We’d had dinner down in Chinatown with the in-laws of my other brother, who’d married his own Manhattan girl a couple of years earlier. Tom went to stay with one of his art-school girlfriends and I went uptown to Martha’s. I remember in the morning, the first thing she did was put Robert Palmer’s “Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley” on the living room stereo and crank up the volume. We took an unbelievably crowded 6 train down to SoHo, where she had a job selling ad space for the SoHo News. And I thought: Boy, this is the life!

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Again without irony, presumably.

  JF: Totally without irony.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: “New York is where I’d rather stay! / I get allergic smelling hay!”

  JF: What can I tell you? There’s a particular connection between the Midwest and New York. Not just that New York created the market for the goods that made the Midwest what it is. And not just that the Midwest, in supplying those goods, made New York what it is. New York’s like the beady eye of yang at the center of the Midwest’s unentitled, self-effacing plains of yin. And the Midwest is like the dewy, romantic, hopeful eye of yin at the center of New York’s brutal, grasping yang. A certain kind of Midwesterner comes east to be completed. Just as a certain kind of New York native goes to the Midwest to be renewed.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Huh. Pretty deep stuff there. And, you know, what’s genuinely interesting, though, is that there’s a connection at the level of geology as well. I mean, think about it: New York is the only state on the East Coast that is also a Great Lakes state. You think it’s any accident that the Erie Canal got dug where it did? You ever driven the Thruway west along the Mohawk? Way, way off in the distance on the southern side, miles and miles away, you can see these enormous, sharp river bluffs. Well, you know what? Those bluffs used to be the edge of the river. Back when it was a miles-wide cataclysmic flood of glacial meltwater bursting out of mid-continent and draining down toward the ocean. That’s what created your easy route to the Midwest: the last Ice Age.

  JF: Which I understand was pretty recent, geologically speaking.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Yesterday afternoon, geologically speaking. It’s only ten thousand years since you had mastodons and woolly mammoths wandering around Bear Mountain and West Point. All sorts of crazy shit—California condors out Syracuse way, walruses and beluga whales up near the Canadian border. And all recently. Yesterday afternoon, more or less. Twenty thousand years ago, the entire state was under a sheet of ice. As the ice began to recede, all across North America, you got these huge lakes of meltwater with nowhere to go. And it would build up and build up until it found a catastrophic way out. Sometimes it flowed out on the western side, down the Mississippi, but sometimes there were monumental ice dams over there and the water had to find a way out to the east. And when a dam finally broke, it really broke. It was bigger than biblical. It was awe-inspiring. And that’s what happened in central New York. There came a time when the way out for all that water was right past present-day Schenectady. It carved the bluffs to the south of the Mohawk, it carved the Hudson Valley, it even carved a canyon in the continental shelf that goes two hundred miles out to sea. Then the ice pulled back farther and farther north until another new exit opened up: over the top of the Adirondacks and around the east side of them and down through what eventually became Lake George and Lake Champlain to the Hudson. So what you see in the Hudson today is in fact a close cousin of the Mississippi. Those two rivers were the two principal southern drainages for a continent’s worth of melted ice.

  JF: The mind reels.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: New York City’s cosmopolitanism runs pretty deep, too, geologically speaking. We’ve been entertaining foreign visitors for better than half a billion years. Most notably the continent of Africa, which came over about three hundred million years ago, crashed into America, stuck around long enough to build the Alleghenies, and then headed back east. If you look at a geological map of New York, it looks a lot like a state map of ethnicity. The bedrock geology upstate is fairly white-bread uniform—big deposits of limestone from the time when New York was a shallow subtropical sea. But when you get down toward the lower Hudson and the Manhattan spur, the rock becomes incredibly heterogeneous and folded and fragmented. You’ve got remnants of every kind of crap that’s come crashing into the continent tectonically, plus other crap from various magmatic upwellings due to rifting, plus further crap that got pushed down by the glaciers. Downstate looks like a melting pot that needs a good stir. And why? Because New York truly always was very central. It sits at the far southeastern corner of the original North American shield, and at the very top of the Appalachian fold belt, and on the western margin of all the gnarly New England volcanic-island crappy-crap that got appended to the continent, and in a northwest corner of our ever-widening Atlantic Ocean. The fact that it’s a conjunction of all these things helps explain why it ended up as the most open and inviting state in the whole seaboard, with its easy routes up to Canada and over to the Midwest. Because, literally, for hundreds of millions of years, New York is where the action’s been.

  JF: What’s funny, listening to you, is how much less ancient this all seems than my own early twenties. Three hundred million years is nothing compared to how long it’s been since I was a senior in college. And even college seems relatively recent compared to the years right after. The years when I was married. If you want to talk about a tortured, deep geology.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: I don’t suppose you married your vivacious cousin?

  JF: No, no, no. But definitely a New York girl. Just like I’d always dreamed of. Her people on her dad’s side had been living in Orange County since the 1600s. And her mom’s name was Harriet. And she had two very petite younger sisters who were a lot like the girls in the backseat of Martha’s Town Car. And she was deliciously unhappy.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Unhappy was never my idea of delicious.

  JF: Well, for some reason, it was mine. Three hundred million years ago. The first thing we did when we got out of school was sublet an apartment on West 110th Street. By the end of that summer, I was so in love with the city, it was almost an afterthought to propose that
she and I get married. Which we did, a year later, on a hillside up in Orange County, near the terminus of the Palisades Parkway. Late in the day, we drove off in our Chevy Nova and crossed the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge, heading back toward Boston. I told the toll-taker that we’d just got married, and he waved us on through. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that we were happy then and happy for the next five years, happy being in Boston, happy visiting New York, happy longing for it from a distance. It was only when we decided to actually live here that our troubles started.

  NEW YORK STATE’S PUBLICIST: (Distantly) Hal? Hello? Hal?

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: Oops—excuse me. Janelle! Wrong way! Over here! Janelle! She can never find me . . . Janelle!

  NEW YORK STATE’S PUBLICIST: Oh, this is terrible, terrible! Jon, she’s been ready for you for five minutes already, and here I’m wandering around and around and around in this warren. I know I promised you a half hour, but I’m afraid you may have to content yourself with fifteen minutes. And, I’m sorry, but, hiding back here with Hal, you do bear a certain amount of responsibility yourself. Honestly, Hal, you need to install escape-path lighting or something.

  THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST: I feel lucky to be funded at all.

  JF: It’s been nice talking to you.

  NEW YORK STATE’S PUBLICIST: Let’s go, let’s go. Run with me! I should have sprinkled some bread crumbs behind me . . . A person could lie down and die here, and the world might never know it . . . She hates to be kept waiting even five seconds! And you know who she’ll blame, don’t you?

  JF: Me?

  NEW YORK STATE’S PUBLICIST: No! Me! Me! Oh, here we are, here we are, we’re coming coming coming coming, here, just go on in, she’s waiting for you—go on—and don’t forget to ask about the pictures—

  JF: Hello!

  NEW YORK STATE: Hello. Come in.