Fun with Franzen
December 07, 2022
Might get a little in the weeds here. I don’t have the expertise to lay out this context. My framing, owing to my limited reading, the acuteness of my literary prism, is incomplete, exclusionary, based. Many movements happen concurrently. At the end of the day, a lot of this is pretty niche. Enough qualifiers!
So hold this: the recurring thread of our conversation, about authenticity, in literature and elsewhere, everywhere. What it is and how much it matters. A developing theorem: it is/was of greater concern to Generation X, and might mean something different. Selling out. Posing. A heightened awareness of the artificiality of things and anxiety about that, without an outlet, and so anger, aggression, a collapse in––this was Generation X (a segment of it, shall we say? At the least). In The Topeka School, Lerner addresses himself (separate issue for now) and his white middle class peers who were simultaneously the ‘victims’ and cultivators of this foment.
And what of the contemporary literature he might’ve come across at this time (call it mid-90s)? (Here we go) There was growing concern about the power and place of the novel. Look at television and all the fake shit plaguing readership. And in response: acerbic, irony saturated work. Work that identifies the amorphous problem and rails against it, might make you laugh, but doesn’t identify any promising solutions. Systems novels. Or novels obsessed with themselves. Postmodern gluttony. Show our work on this literature thing. That is how you remain authentic.
Jonathan Franzen (eek!) begins as a writer of this ilk. Then comes 2001’s The Corrections. It marks a shift? Franzen does away with the novel as system, and systems, choosing instead to focus intensely on the humans that populate them. Interior experience, interpersonal dynamics––this is what matters in storytelling, in life. This is the future of serious fiction. Intense character study has remained the gist of his project this century. Freedom has its title and detours into conservation politics, but you stay for its people. Purity has its title and detours quite oddly, goofily, into world wide web weaponization, morality, etc., but its best passages are the deeply human ones. His latest, Crossroads, is his most crystalline, its focus fixed on its central family, no extraneous material. This post is about career arcs.
Lerner is of the next generation. When Franzen was first garnering acclaim for capturing the 90s foment, Lerner was coming of age in it. Arriving ten years after The Corrections but set in 2004, the humanism of Leaving the Atocha Station is palpable, its narrator often (intentionally made so) unlikable. 10:04 is even more rich in detail, so much so it ceases to qualify as fiction. It exists in a liminal zone. Don’t we all? All the time. Lerner takes up a postmodern game, toying with fiction. What is a book? Where does it begin and end? Such tinkering suggests a solipsism, and could easily fall into aporaic trappings like so many supposedly edgy and real books before it. But somehow, Lerner’s does not. A livewire act, Lerner having his human novel and eating it too. Tools of a poet?
But so and then The Topeka School. It is Lerner’s most overtly political and ambitious. It does examine a system. It is his first work of polyperspectivity. All books of Franzen are. So inverse progressions. Books about more than people. Books about people. (Grossly oversimplifying, but go with it.) Franzen is divisive. And again, old. An elder statesman. Close to that mantle of archaic literary white male. And seemingly content to take it up; his audience will remain and if you don’t choose to read him, your loss. Lerner is not controversial and he seems to be striving still. To expand the form. To reach people. Where does he go next?
(7 December 2022)
P.S.
I think this is the straw that’ll break things. I wanted to write about Franzen. The contract sort of goes: alright, fine, but make it good. I let everyone down. E.g., “What is a book?”, “an elder statesman” and so forth. The entry has almost nothing to do with ugly feelings. I guess you could argue Franzen has gotten sharper in his investigation of them. And Lerner already dealt in ugly feelings with some sophistication. But I didn’t say that here. The context I provide is quite manipulated. Just call it inaccurate. Even though I throw some tricks out and debase myself, that fact remains. I am excited about whatever Lerner’s next effort turns out to be. I do follow Franzen. I could’ve said as much, to a friend, and then written something else.
P.P.S.
I don’t mean to be so negative. I’m happy with a lot of the writing in this bunch. The postscripts took up a harsh directive and they didn’t have to. Tough love, I guess. What else do I want to say…