Literary Vice

Everyone has an opinion about Jonathan Franzen: great American novelist; sexist scumbag; piercing insight; overhyped nonsense. If you don’t have an opinion about Jonathan Franzen you make one up. You nod knowingly in bookish conversations about that time he refused to let Oprah endorse his book because his books are Literary and Important and her book club is for trash (trash like Toni Morrison). Or you sheepishly admit to not having made your way completely through The Corrections but you know about the scene with frozen salmon and doesn’t have something to do with the American family? Jonathan Franzen has the quality we most want in a novelist who writes 500 page novels: you don’t have to read the to have an opinion about the book and its author. No wait, that’s not what we want? We want people to properly engage with the story?

Well if we did read the book, and if we did want to talk about the book (and not about the pretensions of its author), we could say three things:

1. It’s funny. Read out loud to the person in the room with you funny. On purpose funny (a disclaimer I feel I have to make with Franzen, though I’m not sure why – his other novels are funny, too): demonstrate the absurdity of our mores, the logical extension of our ideology. Sure, the wack-a-doo feminist asks her husband to sit down to pee because that’s how we’ll take down the patriarchy: one seated-peeing-man at a time.
2. It doesn’t want you to miss the part about it being an Important Commentary on Our Times. It wants to comment on secrets, surveillance, (unintentional) self-sabotage through social media/technology, the state of reporting in a post-wikileaks/social media era. Mostly it’s about things being Clean and other things being Dirty, and there being Secrets and there being Truth. And that we want the truth but we can’t handle the truth. Titled ‘Purity’ the novel follows Purity, or Pip, as she tries to find her father. Along the way we encounter the stories of her father, her mother and for reasons unclear, the backstory of the Julian Assange-esque Andreas, founder and leader of the Sunlight Project (aka: wikileaks). [I say reasons unclear because I think the novel could do without the entire character of Andreas, his backstory, his motivations, his involvement with Pip and lose nothing but 250 pages.] Mostly YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH.
3. It’s too long and not that interesting. I almost cared about the scene when Pip confronts her mother with the truth about her father. To be fair it took me ten days to summon the strength to finish the last thirty pages, so saying I almost cared is a bit of a stretch. I was sufficiently motivated by the danger of not finishing after having already read 520 pages that I put myself in the bath with a bottle of wine and refused to come out until the damn thing was done. So what you might want to say instead: it’s a bit bloated. Scenes describing bird song that are only there because Franzen is kinda into birds (see Freedom). And really, what does Andreas add to the novel except the cache of being a bit of an expose of Assange?

Other people liked it a lot. Big fancy reviews giving it high fives for revealing the truth about American life. And sure, it takes some work to demonstrate the extent to which we all have secrets, and secrets are worth having, and maybe we shouldn’t be so excited about technology to trace our secrets and… that’s it. So you know, read it if you like, or don’t read it and you can still sound like you have (which is, I’m pretty sure, how most of the world operates when it comes to Franzen). Or you can be like me and take a month to finish it all the while hating yourself for being too proud to quit. (here’s a secret: I didn’t like it).

I’m teaching this one to a lively, engaged and curious class of undergraduates. It’s safe to say it’s great (because why else would I pick it for the syllabus?), but also that I read it with a different set of questions circling my brain than I might have otherwise. Questions like: how will I teach this? And what do I want my students to know at the end of two classes discussing this text? And how can I possibly sustain a rich conversation with 100+ students on a novel this beautiful and complex?

So with those caveats, I’ll say that if you haven’t read Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, I’m not sure what you’re waiting around for. The book’s been out for years, it’s won all the prizes, you’re here on this site right now (when instead you should be reading the novel).

The frame narrative has Patrick Lewis driving with his daughter Hana to meet his lover, Clara. While in the car he tells Hana the story of meeting Clara, and the attendant threads of stories that surround it. We witness the literal building of Toronto with the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct and the Waterworks. We follow immigrant labourers in the dangerous work of building Toronto, and the way official history forgets (or ignores) their stories. We see Patrick engaged in union organizing, and the tremendous losses and suffering that accompany and propel this work.

Ondaatje is a poet. So the whole novel is gorgeous. Writing that makes you weak in the knees. And a story that leaves you aware at the end of your role in hearing it.

How then to teach it? (stay tuned)

Oh I’m behind. Woefully behind. Behind on books I want to be reading, behind on writing about the one’s I’ve read. Mostly I’m behind on laundry, but that’s a pile I’m fine to let overtake me. The pile of books… less so.

So here we go with pulling myself out from under it all. Maybe the reason I’ve been stalling is that I didn’t want to have to write terrible things and ruin your Sunday. (It’s fun to imagine I’m being selfless in my not-writing instead of… selfishly doing work and eating).

I chose Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P for my book club because of its cover (how could you not?) and because it had five hundred (probably closer to fifty) positive reviews covering the back jacket as well as several insert pages. Which had to be pages of irony reviews because the book is about a pretentious author who doesn’t realize that book reviews don’t matter much if you’re an asshole. And that the book (probably Nathaniel’s) (and most certainly Waldman’s) is terrible. And the reviews are nothing but a quid pro quo. Or at least I have to believe that, rather than the idea that no one knows this is a terrible book but me (and the weight of that responsibility would just crush me. Crush me.)

Our titular Nathaniel is incredibly annoying and exhausting to be in the same head space with for 250 odd pages. He’s self-conscious, he’s always looking somewhere else for validation and affirmation, he can’t trust his own talents, he’s jealous of other people’s success. I don’t need to read about a head space I already properly occupy on my own without needing to read. Ha.

We follow him as he dates a couple of women (but not series of women you might expect from the ‘affairs’ title), and mostly as he dates Hannah. He treats her terribly (because of his insecurity) (because she lets him) (because he’s a 30 something writer in New York. I mean Brooklyn. I mean, who cares). It might be interesting to be in Hannah’s head: why does she stay with him? why does she doubt herself so much? why does she keep expecting him to change? But, no. We’re stuck with Nathaniel (and to be fair, I’ve been in Hannah’s head before, and mostly the reasons are “because maybe I can’t do any better,” and that’s a pretty depressing place to spend 250 pages, too). So…

Let me be the one reviewer who will say it: Yawn.