And indeed, around his story of the decay of this family’s values—a process symbolized first by the physical and then by the mental collapse of the paterfamilias, Alfred, a bitter, emotionally crabbed engineer who starts out with Parkinson’s disease and ends with Alzheimer’s—the author twined motifs and story lines intended to remind readers that the Lamberts’ problems were mirrored on a much larger cultural scale. Hence, for instance, the various characters’ attempts to “correct” (the word is used repeatedly, and pointedly, throughout the book) their wayward lives was ironically reflected in one ongoing story line about the popularity of a new, mood-altering wonder drug called Correcktall (the most obvious of the book’s “easy fixes”); another leitmotif was a widespread if inchoate anxiety on the part of many characters about an imminent “correction” in the financial markets. It was this entwining, by means of suggestive symbols and artful details, of the broadly social and the narrowly personal themes, the family drama and the drama of national anxiety, that gave The Corrections the largeness that made it seem so worthy to critics. It was a big American novel about big American themes.
The intensity and raw emotionality of Franzen’s account of these hapless people, awkwardly fumbling with their failure to catch up to the larger culture, is clearly what won over readers (male and female)—and was, just as clearly, what elevated it above his previous fictions. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, published in 1988, was a nightmare fantasia on American themes. Its fanciful plot was about—well, a plot: a secret plan by an Indian woman and her henchman to take over the city of St. Louis, where she has, rather bizarrely, managed to get herself appointed chief of police. The conflict between these rather over-the-top aliens—these “others”—and the stolid, solid midwestern businessman who resists the Indians’ seductions, and who eventually thwarts the plot, indicates the presence early on of Franzen’s preoccupation with Americanness under siege, with the uneasy encounter between traditional values and a world that had gone unrecognizably awry. But the overelaborate and (you kept feeling) overly clever donnée kept getting in the way of a profound engagement with his subject. With its intricate plotting (in every sense) and its curdled, paranoid vision of America in crisis at every level, the novel betrayed its author’s debt—one owed by many novelists of his generation—to the work of Don DeLillo, who, as Franzen made clear in an essay he published in Harper’s in 1996, is something of a hero to him.
Even more DeLilloesque was his second novel, Strong Motion, a paranoid fantasy (again) about a young man, awkward, geeky, midwestern, named Louis Holland, who stumbles on, and subsequently attempts to expose, a vast and sinister corporate plot to cover up illegal oil drilling in, of all places, Massachusetts. The drilling has destabilized the area’s tectonic plates, which in turn has led to a number of earthquakes. The latter are what the title, in part, refers to; but there are other “strong motions” that the book wants to treat. The corrosive relationship, for instance, between the young hero and his awful mother (horrible, intrusive, overbearing mothers run through Franzen’s fiction) and his ineffective, post-hippie father; and the budding romance between him and a prickly, sexually avid young female seismologist, whose allure, it must be said, is difficult for the reader to grasp. (Franzen doesn’t seem to like younger women much, either: in both of his first two novels, the younger, sexually active female leads get shot.)
But as you went through Strong Motion, it occurred to you that what really preoccupied this clever author was the clever bits: the factoids about seismology, the stuff you don’t need other human beings to do. The subplots about relationships come off as an afterthought, as if the author realized (or someone—an editor, say—told him) that the novel needed some emotional interest to succeed. Although Strong Motion ends with the awkward Louis—who starts out emotionally frozen, traumatized by his bad parenting—ostensibly understanding what love is all about, you suspect that his creator didn’t really think there was anything terribly wrong with him to begin with.
It’s only if you’ve read the first two novels that you can appreciate how great a leap—in artistry but also in maturity—The Corrections represented. Many readers enjoy cleverness and narrative gamesmanship; a certain and not necessarily hard-won cynicism and sourness, too. This is why the epigones of DeLillo are popular. But far more readers (presumably the half-million people who trust Oprah’s taste enough to go out and buy her selections on faith) want to be entertained by a story about real human beings having real human problems and experiencing real human feelings. The evil cultural aliens and dastardly corporate plots can be amusing, but at the end of the day what many of us want from a large novel are characters more or less recognizably like ourselves: imperfect parents, imperfect children plagued by the kind of awkwardness, self-consciousness, weakness, and failure that you can’t write about well if you’re too invested in showing off your own cleverness and superiority as a creator; the everyday-life stuff, indeed, that Franzen condescendingly referred to as “schmaltz.” This is why his third book hit paydirt: the ingeniousness of the first couple of novels served, for the first time, a broad and humane story about life as most of us know it.
Franzen’s behavior during the Oprah flap and its aftermath suggests the precise nature of the awkwardness that seems to lie at the heart of both the author and his work. At the most obvious level, there was the perversity of a working writer saying “No” to the prospect of selling a million copies of his book. It is true that, in the now-famous Harper’s essay, which he published five years before The Corrections came out—a long manifesto decrying the woeful state of the American novel, an attention-getting literary cri de coeur—the young writer had idealistically lamented the fact that today “money, hype, a limo ride to the Vogue shoot were the main prize, the consolation for no longer mattering to the culture.” Yet however much you may have admired or agreed with the lofty sentiments expressed therein, Franzen’s refusal to join Oprah’s club in the name of High Art seemed not inauthentic but inconsistent. After all, wasn’t being picked by Oprah a sign that the high-art literary tradition did matter to the culture? Wasn’t having a million people actually read the high-art literary work you’d been telling everyone you were going to write for the past five years the solution to the problem of America’s dire literary situation?
The title of the Harper’s essay, when it was first published ten years ago, was “Perchance to Dream” (it’s since been severely edited and republished as “Why Bother?” in his 2002 collection, How to Be Alone); and as you watched Franzen sabotaging himself, it occurred to you that the allusion to Hamlet was apposite. There was something simply ornery, something late-adolescent, something of the perennial graduate student in the snide superiority that lay behind the author’s willful rejection of a success so tantalizingly within reach; about the refusal to be in and of the adult world—the world of people who realize that success doesn’t necessarily mean selling out, who know that people who are ethically rigorous rarely advertise, with so much energy and so little humor, their own ethical rigor.
Given all that, it was hard not to think that the furious backpedaling that almost immediately followed the Oprah flap came less from the author himself than from his own corporate masters. (His publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, after all, is part of the enormous German media conglomerate Holtzbrinck; apparently Franzen had no qualms about having their logo on his book—nor, despite his published objection to money and hype, did he apparently object to the sizable advance the company had paid him.) Everywhere you turned, suddenly, Franzen was apologizing: on the BBC, in USA Today, you name it. And yet in the apologies, as in the refusal itself, something struck you once again as awkward, as not quite right. “To find myself being in the position of giving offense to someone who’s a hero—not a hero of mine per se, but a hero in general—I feel bad in a public-spirited way,” he told USA Today. What lingered was not the alleged remorse (that somehow childlike “I feel bad”) but rather the insistence on demurral
, the childish withholding that suggested that his heart wasn’t in it. “Feel bad in a public-spirited way”—what does that mean? And then “Not a hero of mine,” equally infantile in its gracelessness; the slight pedantry, too, of “per se.” Listening to all this, we seemed to be hearing voices that we’d heard in the author’s fiction, nowhere more so than in The Corrections: the voices of bruised, petulant children and of arrogant, rather clueless grown-ups.
These voices echo throughout Franzen’s thin and insubstantial new collection, whose greatest virtue, in the end, may be that the essays collected here clearly identify the real-life sources of the fiction, which is often so strong. The question that arises is: Do we really need to be this intimate with the inspiration for the novels?
The Discomfort Zone advertises itself, in a rather optimistic subtitle, as a “personal history,” and was described during its prepublication buildup as a “memoir”—a mischaracterization that further disserves a genre that already suffers from too much approximate thinking and lack of discipline on the part of so many who indulge themselves in it. The fact that four of the six chapters here previously appeared in some form in The New Yorker confirms the suspicion that the author merely padded a bunch of preexisting occasional pieces on a variety of subjects in order to produce the kind of life-story narrative that everyone seems to want to read right now. Around a grab bag of subjects—how Franzen learned German; the Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, much admired by the author; bird-watching—he has interwoven episodes from a youth and early manhood that will seem familiar to readers of his fiction and particularly of The Corrections: the stultifyingly conventional adolescence in a St. Louis suburb; the earnest, aspirational mother; the stern, anhedonic father. But only half the essays properly count as “personal history”: one about the sale of his mother’s house (which at one point, in what turns out to be a too-rare humaneness here, the author touchingly describes as her “novel”), another on the unintended effects of some high school pranks, another on the author’s pubescent experience of a Christian youth group.
The problem here is not one of structure but of content—and, seriously, of tone. An inevitable danger of memoir is the necessary self-absorption of the writer—one that the best memoirists know how to leaven by means of either self-deprecation or humor, or both. But there’s a grimness here, a bitterness, that is not only off-putting in large quantities but spoils the many vignettes in which Franzen seems to want to present himself as a nerd or a loser we can identify with. A wrong note always sounds. There’s a narrative about a grade school “homonym bee,” in which he recalls, of his youthful self, that he “was very much unaccustomed to considering the interior states of people other than myself”; this no doubt accounts for his apparent lack of feeling, at the time, on learning that his opponent in the bee was killed in a car crash. Such moments remind you a bit of what Franzen sounded like when he was making his apology to Oprah—there’s a hard edge here, a sense of resentment masquerading as abjection.
When he widens the focus to include the larger world, the self-absorption can become repellent. It isn’t that Franzen isn’t intelligent or full of interesting things to say. Like many literate and educated people, he has reasonable, liberal-minded opinions on politics, global affairs, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf War. But his pronouncements are marred by the smug, graduate-studenty know-it-all-ness that you recall from his behavior in real life, and which you recognize in certain of his characters—Chip Lambert, say, the awful pomo hipster academic antihero of The Corrections. If someone were to come up to you and say, as Franzen does here, “It seemed to me that helping Katrina’s homeless victims ought to be the government’s job, not mine,” it would sound a reasonable enough claim to make. But in the mood of relentless solipsism established by these essays, this seems like just one more example of what strikes you, in the end, as a kind of political and aesthetic autism.
Hence, for instance, in the bird-watching essay, around which the author somewhat effortfully twines the tale of his disintegrating first marriage, he recalls how “deploring other people—their lack of perfection—had always been [the] sport” of him and his ex-wife. Elsewhere he observes that not having children was his “first, best line of defense” against the environmental pleading of Al Gore: “The climate would be OK until I died, and as a childless person I had no personal connection to what happened after that.” It somehow comes as no surprise that this bird-watching author only starts worrying about the environment when the avian species he has grown so fond of will, like millions of human babies, not survive a climatological catastrophe. When he writes that “what sickened and enraged me were all the other human beings on the planet,” you realize it’s not mere striving for effect.
If these pronouncements seem calculated to offend, I suspect it’s because Franzen wanted to be rigorous and ruthless with himself—wanted, that is, to write about the self without recourse to the glib narratives of redemption so characteristic of memoir just now, without romanticizing his faults. To strip away the layers of self-congratulation (to say nothing of flat-out lies) that we so often get in “personal histories,” in other words, and to say, in effect, “I am an imperfect person and this is what it looks like to be that imperfect person—to insufficiently love one’s fellow man, one’s parents, one’s spouse, even oneself.” This in itself is admirable. Ideally, the memoirist’s revelation of himself should seduce readers into a comparable willingness to examine themselves and their lives without vanity, without props. In this way, a literary experience can lead to a profound life experience.
This project is, however, fatally marred in Franzen’s nonfiction by a flaw that also characterizes even the best of his fiction: that pervasive peevishness, the fundamental failure of genuine good humor—a quality without which, as every stand-up comedian knows, obsessive self-exposure is tedious rather than entertaining or edifying. There is an almost willful resistance to the amusing, the pleasurable, the beautiful in Franzen’s work, a body of writing in which every landscape is a landfill, every season is rainy. (All three of his novels are filled with surreally detailed descriptions of blighted cityscapes: a decaying St. Louis in The Twenty-Seventh City, the grimier neighborhoods of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Strong Motion, the annihilating blandness of suburban St. Jude in The Corrections.) “There was something dreadful about springtime itself,” the author recalls at one point. Oy Vey. This blighted vision—which can have great appeal to readers who like to think of themselves as knowing and sophisticated—owes a good deal to, you might say, art: the debt to the paranoid gloom of DeLillo, the master. But as we now know, it had its roots in the author’s real life—the upbringing at the hands of a dour, almost abusively stern father with “fantastic Swedish protestant prejudices” who is now all too clearly revealed as the model of the crabbed Alfred Lambert in The Corrections; a father whose reaction to the sight of his child reading a book or playing with friends was the contemptuous exclamation, “One continuous round of pleasure!”
Indeed, a strong impression that you get from The Discomfort Zone (the title refers to the heavily symbolic setting on a thermostat that Franzen’s parents continually argued over during his growing-up years) is, in fact, an appreciation of the extent to which he seems to have internalized rather than rejected his father’s resistance to pleasure, his awful severity and contemptuousness; and a corresponding understanding of the son’s embrace of a smarty-pants persona that was, you surmise, the child’s response to such psychic squashing. Even his willingness to refuse an immense success, and the showily overprincipled gesture that served as the vehicle for that refusal, turn out to be echoes of the father’s life: we learn here that Franzen père felt he could no longer make use of a business associate’s vacation home because he’d started to do more business with the man’s competitor.
The two emotional leitmotifs laid bare in these personal recollections—the cleverness, the contempt—make themselves felt not only in the early novels,
The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, which had the showy intricacy of science projects but which curiously lacked adult feeling, but, I would say, even in The Corrections. In what you now see as a characteristic struggle, the brilliance of the novel’s presentation of the tortured dynamics of family life—no one who has read it will forget the devastating portrait of Chip’s older brother, Gary, as he slowly loses a desperate marital battle for the affections of his children—seems at war with an often undisguised distaste for the broken, awkward, imperfect characters whom its author evoked so uncannily well. (There’s something about the way in which Franzen repeatedly ridicules Enid Lambert’s pronunciation of the word “mature”—“matoor”—that’s deeply unpleasant.) Great novelists, in the end, summon a magisterial sympathy for their most flawed, even worst characters: think of Balzac and Vautrin, Melville and Ahab, Trollope and Melmotte. There’s a bitterness in this novel, the residue of some personal resentment that hasn’t been worked out. You realize, after reading the new book, that you were hearing the voice of the author’s father.
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