The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  Her editor had developed a sort of obsession with her, constantly calling, taking her out for fancy meals, and eventually confessing his love. Meanwhile, he wasn’t reading the chapters she gave him; in fact, he was doing barely any work on the manuscript at all. She wasn’t really into him, though she admitted that if she’d been more attracted to him, it might have been another story. But for him it was escalating. He wanted to leave his wife for her! There were kids too, a bunch of them. Still no feedback on the chapters.

  Meanwhile he was Skyping her in his underwear from hotel rooms and complaining about his marriage, and she was letting it go on because she felt that her fate was in his hands. Nothing really happened between them—well, maybe a bit of fumbling, but she kept him at a distance. The thing was that she didn’t want to rebuff him too bluntly because she was worried about the fate of her book—worried he’d reject the manuscript, she’d have to pay back the advance, and she’d never get it published anywhere else.

  I’d actually once met this guy—he’d edited a friend’s book (badly). He was sort of a nebbish, hard to see as threatening. “Did you talk to your agent?” I asked the woman. I was playing the situation out in my mind, wondering what I’d do. No, she hadn’t talked to her agent, for various reasons, including fears that she’d led the would-be paramour on and that her book wasn’t any good.

  Suddenly the editor left for a job at another press, and the publisher called the contract, demanding a final manuscript, which was overdue and nowhere near finished. In despair, the author finally confessed the situation to our mutual friend, another writer, who employed the backbone-stiffening phrase “sexual harassment” and insisted that the woman get her agent involved. Which she did, and the agent negotiated an exit deal with the publisher by explaining what had taken place. The author was let out of the contract and got to take the book to another press.

  What struck me most, hearing the story, was how incapacitated this woman had felt, despite her advanced degree and accomplishments. The reason, I think, was that she imagined she was the only vulnerable one in the situation. But look at the editor: he was married, with a midlevel job in the scandal-averse world of corporate publishing. It simply wasn’t the case that he had all the power in the situation or nothing to lose. He may have been an occluded jerk, but he was also a fairly human-sized one.

  So that’s an example of a real-world situation, postgraduation. Somehow I don’t see the publishing industry instituting codes banning unhappily married editors from going goopy over authors, though even with such a ban, will any set of regulations ever prevent affective misunderstandings and erotic crossed signals, compounded by power differentials, compounded further by subjective levels of vulnerability?

  The question, then, is what kind of education prepares people to deal with the inevitably messy gray areas of life? Personally I’d start by promoting a less vulnerable sense of self than the one our new campus codes are peddling. Maybe I see it this way because I wasn’t educated to think that holders of institutional power were quite so fearsome, nor did the institutions themselves seem so mighty. Of course, they didn’t aspire to reach quite as deeply into our lives back then. What no one’s much saying about the efflorescence of these new policies is the degree to which they expand the power of the institutions themselves. As for those of us employed by them, what power we have is fairly contingent, especially lately. Get real: what’s more powerful—a professor who crosses the line, or the shaming capabilities of social media?

  For myself, I don’t much want to date students these days, but it’s not like I don’t understand the appeal. Recently I was at a book party, and a much younger man, an assistant professor, started a conversation. He reminded me that we’d met a decade or so ago, when he was a grad student—we’d been at some sort of event and sat next to each other. He said he thought we’d been flirting. In fact, he was sure we’d been flirting. I searched my memory. He wasn’t in it, though I didn’t doubt his recollection; I’ve been known to flirt. He couldn’t believe I didn’t remember him. I apologized. He pretended to be miffed. I pretended to be regretful. I asked him about his work. He told me about it, in a charming way. Wait a second, I thought, was he flirting with me now? As an aging biological female, and all too aware of what that means in our culture, I was skeptical. On the heels of doubt came a surge of joy: “Still got it,” crowed some perverse inner imp in silent congratulation, jackbooting the reality principle into assent. My psyche broke out the champagne, and all of us were in a far better mood for the rest of the evening.

  Intergenerational desire has always been a dilemma as well as an occasion for mutual fascination. Whether or not it’s a brilliant move, plenty of professors I know, male and female, have hooked up with students, though informal evidence suggests that female professors do it less, and rarely with undergraduates. (The gender asymmetries here would require a dozen more articles to explicate.) Some of these professors act well, some are jerks, and it would benefit students to learn the identifying marks of the latter breed early on, because postcollegiate life is full of them. I propose a round of mandatory workshops on this useful topic for all students, beginning immediately.

  But here’s another way to look at it: the longue durée. Societies keep reformulating the kinds of cautionary stories they tell about intergenerational erotics and the catastrophes that result, starting with Oedipus. The details vary; so do the kinds of catastrophes prophesied—once it was plagues and crop failure, these days it’s psychological trauma. Even over the past half century, the story keeps getting reconfigured. In the preceding era, the Freudian version reigned: Children universally desire their parents, such desires meet up with social prohibitions—the incest taboo—and become repressed. Neurosis ensues.

  These days the desire persists, but what’s shifted is the direction of the arrows. Now it’s parents—or their surrogates, teachers—who do all the desiring; children are conveniently returned to innocence. So long to childhood sexuality, the most irksome part of the Freudian story. So too with the new campus dating codes, which also excise student desire from the story, extending the presumption of the innocent child well into his or her collegiate career. Except that students aren’t children.

  Among the problems with treating students like children is that they become increasingly childlike in response. The New York Times Magazine recently reported on the tangled story of a twenty-one-year-old former Stanford undergraduate suing a twenty-nine-year-old tech entrepreneur she’d dated for a year. He’d been a mentor in a business class she was enrolled in, though they’d met long before. They traveled together and spent time with each other’s families. Marriage was discussed. After they broke up, she charged that their consensual relationship had actually been psychological kidnapping, and that she’d been raped every time they’d had sex. She seems to regard herself as a helpless child in a woman’s body. She demanded that Stanford investigate and is bringing a civil suit against the guy—this despite the fact that her own mother had introduced the couple, approved the relationship every step of the way, and been in more or less constant contact with the suitor.

  No doubt some twenty-one-year-olds are fragile and emotionally immature (helicopter parenting probably plays a role), but is this now to be our normative conception of personhood? A twenty-one-year-old incapable of consent? A certain brand of radical feminist—the late Andrea Dworkin, for one—held that women’s consent was meaningless in the context of patriarchy, but Dworkin was generally considered an extremist. She’d have been gratified to hear that her convictions had finally gone mainstream, not merely driving campus policy but also shaping the basic social narratives of love and romance in our time.

  It used to be said of many enclaves in academe that they were old-boys clubs and testosterone-fueled, no doubt still true of certain disciplines. Thanks to institutional feminism’s successes, some tides have turned, meaning that menopausal women now occupy more positions of administrative power, edging out at least some of
the old boys and bringing a different hormonal style—a more delibidinalized one, perhaps—to bear on policy decisions. And so the pendulum swings, overshooting the middle ground by a hundred miles or so.

  The feminism I identified with as a student stressed independence and resilience. In the intervening years, the climate of sanctimony about student vulnerability has grown too thick to penetrate; no one dares question it lest you’re labeled antifeminist. Or worse, a sex criminal. I asked someone on our Faculty Senate if there’d been any pushback when the administration presented the new consensual-relations policy (though by then it was a fait accompli—the senate’s role was “advisory”).

  “I don’t quite know how to characterize the willingness of my supposed feminist colleagues to hand over the rights of faculty—women as well as men—to administrators and attorneys in the name of protection from unwanted sexual advances,” he said. “I suppose the word would be zeal.” His own view was that the existing sexual-harassment policy already protected students from coercion and a hostile environment; the new rules infantilized students and presumed the guilt of professors. When I asked if I could quote him, he begged for anonymity, fearing vilification from his colleagues.

  These are things you’re not supposed to say on campuses now. But let’s be frank. To begin with, if colleges and universities around the country were in any way serious about policies to prevent sexual assaults, the path is obvious: don’t ban teacher-student romance, ban fraternities. And if we want to limit the potential for sexual favoritism—another rationale often proffered for the new policies—then let’s include the institutionalized sexual favoritism of spousal hiring, with trailing spouses getting ranks and perks based on whom they’re sleeping with rather than CVs alone, and brought in at salaries often dwarfing those of senior and more accomplished colleagues who didn’t have the foresight to couple more advantageously.

  Lastly: the new codes sweeping American campuses aren’t just a striking abridgment of everyone’s freedom, they’re also intellectually embarrassing. Sexual paranoia reigns; students are trauma cases waiting to happen. If you wanted to produce a pacified, cowering citizenry, this would be the method. And in that sense, we’re all the victims.

  JORDAN KISNER

  Thin Places

  FROM n+1

  The electrode is the width of angel-hair pasta. A surgeon has threaded it through one of the four dime-sized holes in the patient’s skull, and it is advancing into her one millimeter at a time, controlled by a small knob that another surgeon is turning and turning with great concentration.

  This morning a nurse shaved off the patient’s hair, and the surgeon drilled these holes around the crown of her head, two in her temples and two in the back. Then he fastened a metal brace the size of a dog cage around her head to hold the wires steady as they enter her brain. Surrounding the patient, the brace, and the doctor is a giant O-shaped machine the color of tangerine sherbet, which is taking live images inside her head. The patient is awake.

  First the electrode passes through the part of the brain closest to the bone, the part of her that knows the names of things and left from right. Then it bores down through the part of her that knows how to draw, the part that recognizes her mother’s face and remembers what she said to the nurse when he asked about the birthmark on her temple. Down through the part of her that likes sex and the part that knows how to talk. Down almost to the deepest part of the brain, the stem, which is responsible for her breath and her heart. This movement, from outside the patient’s body through the opening in her skull and into the core of her brain, is called transversal.

  The transversal has been plotted carefully. The path of the needle is precise to the millimeter, avoiding important veins and arteries as well as nerve clusters better left untouched. The destination is Area 24, also known as the ventral anterior cingulate. Hers is suffering from either underdevelopment or hyperactivity, depending on which doctor is explaining it. The electrode will stay inside her to deliver electric currents to Area 24 for the next several years, or possibly forever.

  The patient finds herself strapped to a gurney with wide belts, naked under her paper gown, because this morning, like every morning, she thought, 117 times, “I am going to kill a stranger.” A pacifist by nature and in her politics, she finds this thought sickening and goes to great lengths to ensure that it doesn’t come true. An elaborate protocol has arisen: every time the thought “I am going to kill a stranger” pops into her mind she jerks her head hard and declares silently, “I am a peaceful person, I am a peaceful person, I am a peaceful person.” This quells the panic that rises—Is she peaceful? What if she killed someone by accident? What if she flew into a sudden rage? What if she is, at heart, monstrous?—and works like penance: three peaceful thoughts for every murderous one keeps the balance tipped in the right direction. This becomes more difficult when the thoughts come quickly. The number of times she thinks “I am going to kill a stranger” has to be prime or the thought’s power increases, so she’ll restart the cycle as many times as necessary to bring the count to a prime number. A twenty-minute reprieve is as much as she hopes for in a day.

  She has thrown out all her knives, scissors, heavy blunt objects, needles, and sharp pens. She stopped driving a long time ago. She never stands near train tracks or close to people on the sidewalk, just in case something were to come over her and she were to push someone into traffic. Despite being shy, she feels compelled to introduce herself to almost everyone she sees. Once she meets them, they are no longer strangers and therefore no longer in danger of her. This became exhausting—and alarming to the strangers—so a few years ago she stopped leaving her house altogether. Now she lives in terror of what she might do to deliverymen.

  Over the years doctors have prescribed nine medications in various combinations, as well as talk therapy, exposure therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and electroconvulsive shock therapy, all with meager results. Her case is, to use their terminology, “intractable.” She had to sign all manner of paperwork formally acknowledging this, attesting, for example, that she knows what the word intractable means, before she could find herself in this room with Frankensteinian screws in her temples, counting the ceiling tiles. She consented to everything without hesitation.

  The first electrode’s transversal produces soft, whooshy noises from the monitor in the corner. These noises are her brain waves, tracked by the exploratory electrode, which will forge the correct path before the doctor inserts the permanent electrode. His target is two and a half or three millimeters wide. Once he’s reached it, he will remove the exploratory electrode and thread in the one that will be wired to a battery pack sewn in under her collarbone. It will pulse electricity into Area 24 at a constant rhythm for several years, until the battery dies and needs to be changed. She has to be awake during the insertion so that she can tell them what it feels like.

  The patient is not altogether articulate about what it feels like. She has been strapped down to prevent her from bolting or fighting or trying to tear the metal cage off her head. This is both terrifying and comforting, as the thoughts are coming in inexorable waves now and she is grateful for anything that will help her keep them from coming true. This is a familiar scene: the afflicted tied down while being ministered to by some credentialed man in a robe carrying an instrument. It used to be books and crucifixes. There used to be prayer and incantation. Now there are only the muted sounds of her brainwaves, the rhythmic beeps and clicks of the vitals monitor, and the voice of the doctor as he murmurs to her through her thought torrent. He sounds calm.

  The goal is to alter her experience of reality “with minimal side effects.” No one has been able to tell her whether or why this will work. Only a few dozen people have ever had this treatment for a psychological condition, and so every new patient is an experiment. Initially, doctors hypothesized that the electricity would curb overactive neurons; now they suspect it may actually stimulate neurons, or change the types of information neura
l pathways can transmit, but they’re not sure, just as they’re unsure precisely where in her brain to place the electrodes for best results. They are learning as they go; once this is all over, her experience will be another data point.

  What the doctors do know is what the anterior cingulate cortex does, generally speaking. It houses consciousness, in the existential sense, and emotional pain. It regulates motivation, impulse control, and the anticipation of both delight and catastrophe. Francis Crick proposed it as the center of free will. It’s also responsible, in part, for the human capacity for empathy.

  There are, naturally, a number of things that could go wrong. Possible but unlikely: hemorrhage, brain damage, stroke, seizure, infection, death. Possible but slightly more likely: memory “problems,” trouble speaking, depression, and mania. These latter risks have an aftertaste of irony. The electrode might turn her from a person who speaks compulsively to strangers to a person who cannot speak well at all; it may transform her mind from one reduced to four obsessive thoughts to one hyperexpansive with mania. She wonders what it would be like to go from having one mind to another and then remembers she has already done that.

  The doctor in the paper bonnet interrupts this line of thinking to announce that they’re ready to begin testing voltages. The electrode has arrived at what they think will be the right place, and now it is time to see what happens to her mind when they turn it on.

  She closes her eyes and waits.

  This procedure is called deep brain stimulation (DBS). The patient described above is a composite of people I’ve met, people I’ve read about, and people whose surgeries I’ve seen in videos. She is fashioned after the few dozen patients who have undergone DBS to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, an experimental application now in clinical trials at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Brown University, the University of Rochester, and a handful of other medical centers. Her symptoms aren’t so much fictional as typical: thousands of people are crippled by fears of hurting others. It is shocking how many have thrown out their knives.