[ed. Wow. Don't see book reviews like this very often.]
Probably no one alive is a better novelist than Jonathan Franzen, and this is frustrating because his novels are awful, excellent but awful, books you read quickly and remember ponderously, books of exhaustive craft and yet a weird, spiraling cluelessness about the data they collate. They analyze the wave frequency but don’t hear the sound. They are full of people who talk and act exactly as you imagine such people would talk and act in real life; everyone in them is forever buying the right brand of granola bar or having believable thoughts about their mother or fantasizing in a particularly characteristic way about fucking on a hotel-room air conditioner. And yet they don’t feel like real life. They feel like real life irritably recreated from a spreadsheet, by someone who is a genius at reading spreadsheets. Whether a novel ought to feel like real life is of course a separate question. Many novels that I love don’t, but those novels aren’t trying to, and as far as I can tell, Franzen’s are.I’m going to voice the obvious caveat here and say that I mean Franzen’s novels don’t feel like real life to me. It’s possible that I am simply wrong, that my own equipment for measuring life is faulty. “Who are the judges of reality?” Virginia Woolf asks, and when I try to think of an answer to that question, the image that floats into my mind looks a lot like the committee that decides on the cover of Time magazine and not very much like yours truly. In fact, it’s precisely because I’m so worried about my own judgment, so ready to believe that there is something strange or distorted in how I view the world, that I find reading Franzen so disorienting. Strangeness and distortion are crucial elements of contemporary American culture as he portrays it; they surround and afflict his characters, are in some way his literary quarry. But the way he goes about pursuing them leaves me feeling like an addict in an opium den listening to a preacher deliver a speech outside. That isn’t what it feels like, the addict thinks. But the preacher has all the statistics, and the addict is too blurred to respond, and if the addict drags himself to the window he sees a crowd of sensibly dressed and sober onlookers nodding at the preacher’s explication of the drug problem. (...)
It’s a good book. But this is where I worry about my reality sensors again. Because the feeling Purity left me with was disquiet, not with the theme or form of the book but with the nature of its gaze. I think Franzen is trying to capture a kind of dissonance in contemporary reality, one of which many people are acutely aware, one that many people experience now as the undertone of their everyday experience. Only I don’t have the sense that Franzen himself is acutely aware of it, except by secondhand report. And I have the sense that he is addressing himself to it less out of inner urgency — as, say, Dickens did to the reality-dissonance of his moment — than simply because addressing it is the condition for realizing novelistic ambition in 2015, and he happens to be the best novelist alive.
This could be totally unfair to Franzen. Is likely to be, even. I am talking about something vague, an impression, and the terms are necessarily imprecise. Still, I can only speak up for my own small portion of the real, mistaken though my idea of it may be. And maybe you have had these moments yourself. You have been, say, in the parking lot of a Walgreens just after dusk, when the sky behind the Walgreens was huge and purple and wild, and a man in a cowboy hat was standing under the overhang looking at himself in a pair of mirrored sunglasses, smoothing out his mustache with his thumb. Or you have been driving across the plains at night, on some skinny black yardstick of a highway, watching tiny lights blink at indecipherable far-off elevations, when the strangest song came on the radio and you all at once started to cry.
by Brian Phillips, Grantland | Read more:
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