God in the Details

Jonathan Franzen at the Crossroads

In the Spring of 2010, I was summoned by my institution to have a catered dinner with Jonathan Franzen in a Protestant chapel.  2010 was the second year of the Obama presidency, a time when the world seemed ruined, but it wasn’t quite yet.  The host of Celebrity Apprentice would play a role in that, but then having an entire library of music on your phone hadn’t happened yet, either.  I had already lost my mind and found it again.  I was 37, the age of an irresistible temptress in the latest Franzen novel, but that is now, and this was then.  This was 12 years and innumerable crises ago.  I was among a group of faculty chosen for this mission, and it happened that the man himself was sitting right across from me.  He was proud to tell me of the small number of nights he ever spent in Brooklyn—Franzen, then an ardent Manhattanite, hated Brooklyn and cats, yet was a writer—and never mentioned that he, at one time, actually lived in Syracuse, across the street from the Food Co-Op, around the corner from where I was living then.  His roommate was David Foster Wallace, when he was writing Infinite Jest, and got into a stormy love affair with Mary Karr, which resulted in a restraining order from her.  Franzen was writing a novel called Strong Motion, back when he was still trying to be Pynchon and failing to get attention.

As we know, all of that changed when Franzen stopped trying to be Pynchon and became himself.  FSG sent me a paperbound proof of The Corrections in August, 2001, and I brought it with me to Wellfleet, where I was wading in the last dog days of summer.  It was nearly as absorbing as the Atlantic tide, and I read the whole thing while I was staying in a house owned by the son of Dwight McDonald—where Elizabeth Bishop wrote “Wading in Wellfleet”—and anticipating a year where I would be teaching at Sarah Lawrence, my alma mater, not writing my dissertation, and I couldn’t imagine what could go wrong.  The most lasting episode in the book involved Chip Lambert, a young, untenured New Historicist English professor, who wrote the code forbidding faculty sex with students, then fucks an undergrad and is hoisted by his own petard. Unemployed and broke, he crashes in Manhattan, goes to Dean and DeLuca and finds some smoked salmon he couldn’t afford and stuffs it down his leather pants.  Two weeks later, the world seemed to have moved on permanently, and that sweet book of the summer didn’t seem like it had a chance.  But then Oprah included it on her book club, Franzen allowed her crew to film him, then he pulled out because he felt uncomfortable.  Would you, under any circumstances, refuse an invitation from Oprah?  This seemed suicidal, except that the dustup became a huge news story, the first post-9/11 story that had nothing to do with 9/11.  With the Oprah sales, then the curiosity sales, the book became a best seller, then won the National Book Award.  It was treated as a great injustice that an HBO adaptation filmed by Noah Baumbach was shelved.

Now this man was back in the Cuse, a returning champion, lecturing on something with great self-importance.  He was pompous, puffed up, and couldn’t, I thought, possibly be who he thought he was.  He liked birds better than people—he says he has to write with the blinds closed because he finds them too fascinating—and seemed to think he was the second coming of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy all rolled into this irresistible package.  The dinner got so awkward, I brought up Oprah, and my colleagues couldn’t believe I went there.  (Under his breath, he remarked that the story was really “misreported.”  Ok, dude.)    He was signing copies of Freedom, his new book, but I already had a copy from the good folks at FSG.  I had to go to California for a conference the next day, and, on impulse, I brought Freedom with me.  It wasn’t just because I recalled my pleasure with The Corrections, but that, somehow, his unpleasantness sealed the deal.  Surely such an insufferable egotist must have a reason for being that way.   Dear Reader, before the plane took off, I was absorbed into the Berglund family the way I was with the Lamberts in The Corrections, except with one remarkable difference.  The Corrections is centered on one Thanksgiving, where the siblings find themselves and are forced to take stock.  Freedom ages his characters 30 years.  And I believed every detail.  I sunk into the disappointments and indignities of age.  This book had all the humanity that its author lacked.  The world is filled with nice people.  Give me a real prick who can really write any time.  And the page, not dinner, is the best place to devour him with pleasure. Even Oprah was ecstatic about the book—I think she thought it was the best thing she had ever read—and Franzen came on the show and got an Oprah hug. When Philip Roth announced that he had not only stopped writing novels, but reading them, he paid a visit to Freedom and called it “dynamite.”

I did not finish Purity.  I began it loving the relationship between mother and daughter, but then when a Pynchon-inspired elaborate plot took it over, it lost me, and I moved on to my major problems of 2015.  But then Crossroads came along.  It is a promised first book of a trilogy called A Key to All Mythologies.  Since Franzen thinks he’s George Eliot, this must be a joke. In Middlemarch, the sage Dorothea Brooke punches way downward when she marries the pompous Edward Casaubon, who is comically out of his depth when he attempts to write an unwritable tome called Key to All Mythologies.  Is this the Franzen from dinner?  Is it a joke?  Who cares!

Russ Hildebrandt is a patriarch of a family of four, unsatisfied in his marriage, hopelessly and boyishly in love with a 37-year-old widow named Frances Cottrell, who never seems to be in a state of grief.  Most of the book takes place in 1971, and even though the book centers on a band that is part of a Christian youth group, apart from a reference to Carole King, this, mostly, is not a musical book.  Franzen has discovered his grand theme, and that is the family.  “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” wrote Philip Larkin.  Sometimes, but there’s so much more, and it’s not all here, but it feels pretty damn complete.  God has not been a character in a Franzen book before, and he’s not really a character in this one, either, but his name comes up a lot.  Russ has a rival, Ambrose, younger, cooler, who connects with the kids more, refers to scripture much less, calls Russ out for an inappropriate conversation with a 17-year-old girl—he tells her he’s not sexually attracted to his wife!—and, aware of the business with Mrs. Cottrell, cock blocks our patriarch by separating the groups on a mission to Arizona, telling Russ, “I’m not running a dating service.”

Marion, the neglected wife, is actually crazier and far more interesting than Russ knows, and we go back to the 30s, when she is young, in and out of a mental hospital, has a secret marriage, a secret abortion, endures much trauma, and by the time she deflowers Russ, she, three years older, gives him a carnal education.  This encounter, like every sexual encounter in the book, is as real as flesh, never with purple prose.  It feels like real people with real bodies and souls, not like Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  These people fuck up over and over again, and the hardest fuck up to take is Perry, the genius of the family, who, as a teen, suffers from insomnia, self-medicates with weed, then sells it and moves on to harder drugs.  Clem tries and fails to drop out of college and enlist for Vietnam. Becky wants to be popular, yet yearns for something more when she gets an inheritance that takes her to Europe. These kids all, in their way, try to “get closer to God.” It’s a goal, an attempt to make their lives mean something.  The earnestness of this is heartbreaking, since the ones in charge, especially Daddy, are the last people you would entrust as interlocutors. 

Crossroads is the name of the Christian youth group, and it is the place where every character finds themselves.  It is also a blues song recorded by Robert Johnson, then covered by Cream, about selling your soul.  We get both sides in this book.  Russ is impressed with himself for his knowledge of old blues 78s, and this one is quoted in its entirety, then Mrs. Cottrell steps on them. Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul for greatness.  I cannot comment on the provenance of Jonathan Franzen’s soul.  There is the person at dinner and the words on the page.  My life is richer for having read them.  Whenever I opened it, no matter what was going on—subway rides, sleepless nights, crises du jour—it pulled me back in.  It wasn’t just the fizzy summer read of The Corrections.  It was wiser, deeper, more demanding, and it welcomed me to its world with great generosity.  I thought about Ilja Wachs, my much beloved Sarah Lawrence teacher who taught me big, fat 19th Century novels for a year.  He died at 91 while I was in the midst of this book and much else.  I had many conversations with him in my head about it.  I know it would have been his kind of tome.  He, like Franzen, was all about what George Eliot called “fellow feeling.”  We read Dickens and Eliot and Tolstoy with wonder and awe.  What a remarkable thing to find ourselves in worlds feeling and thinking with people that didn’t exist. 

I found that I, somehow, was a conflicted pastor, a younger more charismatic pastor, a spurned wife, an enticing widow, and angsty teens whose passions and predilections reached hither and thither.  God never speaks back in this entire book.  He is sitting there with indifferent folded arms.  Who knows if there was anyone to actually listen to those prayers, or care?  The Franzen who wrote the book is in the book—nothing more to add.  Trust the tale, not the teller.  Does the God in this book even exist?  No one knows, but the Franzen from dinner would have thought he bore an uncanny resemblance.