THE DISCOMFORT ZONE -- "Jonathan Franzen"

I have come uncomfortably near reaching a conclusion that "Jonathan Franzen" is the most ingenious, elaborately implausible hoax ever perpetrated on the New York literary establishment and, hence, the literary world. My evidence is largely intuitive, but is supported in my mind by what I consider significant clues in the text of the 2006 so-called memoir The Discomfort Zone, of which New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani's severe panning prompted "Franzen" to call her "the stupidest person in New York City."

This, in fact, this girly sounding tantrum (contrasted with Norman Mailer's "one-woman kamikaze" response to the Kakutani castration effect), is the first clue to support my hypothesis. The supposition grew out of an intense distaste for the very name "Franzen," which I associated early on with an incident of shrill elitist arrogance. So far behind the curve of "high" literary fashion at the time (2001), I'd been unfamiliar with the name when it arrived to my attention in a breaking news item. The reputed literary novelist known as "Jonathan Franzen" had just insulted millions of TV megastar Oprah Winfrey's fans by whining publicly her picking his recently published novel The Corrections to feature on her program would endanger his reputation with "high" literary society. Appalled by such shrieking hubris, I banished "Jonathan Franzen" from further literary consideration despite The Corrections proceeding on to bestsellerdom and a National Book Award.

Yesterday, in an unusually forgiving mood, I read my first and likely final "Franzen" work. It seemed an appropriate compromise to break my sixteen-year boycott with the book Ms. Kakutani described as "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed." All true. Ms. Kakutani overlooked one thing, though, as I see it. She assumed the jackass is one person. Nuh uh. The "Jonathan Franzen" who is nearing the pinnacle of commercial and critical literary renown despite his proudly proclaimed noisesomeness is the prankish creation of a group of high school girls allegedly in the upper-middle-class St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves.

My evidence is in the book.

Narrated by "Jonathan Franzen" as a bildungsroman (fashionably literary for "coming-of-age book"), the girly voice gives us glimpses of comically awful parents, and of a not surprisingly awful, oversensitive childhood and early adolescence. Exhibit A:

Of the many things I was afraid of in those days—spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive—I was probably most afraid of my parents. My father had almost never spanked me, but his anger had been Jehovan when he did. My mother possessed claws with which, when I was three or four years old and neighbor kids had filled my hair with Vaseline to achieve a kind of Baby Greaser effect, she’d repeatedly attacked my scalp between dousings of scalding-hot water. Her opinions were even sharper than her claws. You just didn’t want to mess with her. I never would have dared, for example, to take advantage of her absence from the country and break her rules and wear jeans to school, because what if she found out?

"Jonathan Franzen"

To my ear that sounds like a very articulate girl trying to sound like a very articulate boy. More evidence? This, from adolescence, while sounding a tad more boyish, is yet to me the very same voice:

For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. But the real cause of death, as I saw it, was my mother’s refusal to let me wear jeans to school. Even my old friend Manley, who played drums and could do twenty-three pull-ups and was elected class president in ninth grade, could not afford to see me socially.

I must admit remembering a few similar anxieties at that age. But I had no interest in Tolkien, am not much of a punster, and I cannot imagine at any age deliberately insulting any girl who was friendly to me. I'm rather certain, as well, I did not exhibit the flighty attitude.

With our narrator now in college one might expect the self-conscious tone to have cowboyed up beyond suspicion. It hasn't. It's gotten worse. He visits a girl he'd been sweet on (yet calls her by her last name, Siebert) at her college. She'd broken her back trying a silly stunt our narrator characteristically thinks she did to compete for his affection with a different girl he'd dated who did the same stunt (it's complicated). Siebert is healed now, and she and our narrator are talking about Freud and how maybe some subconscious notion caused her to let go and fall from the Eden Seminary bell tower downspout she'd been trying to climb. Our narrator starts pondering, to himself, his own susceptibility to awful subconscious notions, like when as a boy he suddenly dropped his pants to entertain a couple of neighbor girls peeking through a window at him from their house. His pondering gets the best of him: "I started screaming in terror. I screamed at the top of my lungs, which freaked both me and Siebert out. Then I went back to Philadelphia and put the whole episode out of my mind."

"Franzen" 1977

Puzzling, isn't it? Hard to imagine a college male not on drugs (which our narrator never mentions in this scene) doing something like that, so excessively. And then writing about it so coyly. Puzzling, unless you buy my assumption, which depends of course on more evidence than merely a purported man's unmanly voice, of a grand conspiracy. I see plenty of conspiratorial clues in the high school portion of this bildungsroman.

Our narrator claims to have been the brains of a tightly knit group of fellows calling themselves DIOTI (don't ask) that on several occasions broke into their high school to pull highly sophisticated, labor-intensive, and, in one instance quite dangerous, pranks. Again, nuh uh. Not credible. No self-respecting group of high school dudes, including a football player, would suffer such a preening, punning, horn-rimmed dork as their brains in a dangerous undertaking. Not a chance these pranksters did what the book claims. Not a chance they were guys. They were girls. Brilliant, literary, highly imaginative girls, and they've played--are playing--one helluva mind-jiggling, thigh-thumping, literate-world-embracing prank. Middle-aged now, these ladies continue cranking out literature highly regarded by high literature's golden gatekeepers. Why, at this rate they might wind up winning a Pulitzer, even the Nobel. And if they do win one or the other, or both, their figurehead, DIOTI's token male whom the world knows as "Jonathan Franzen," whom DIOTI no doubt took unto its collective bosom primarily for his improvisational acting talents, will gladly and gracefully deliver whatever statements and/or speeches of gratitude the women of DIOTI create for him to hail the socially realistic "New Sincerity" glories of humanity, which will not merely endure, but will prevail, etc. etc.

But...you know? Come to think of it, I really can't imagine anything even remotely stupider.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION -- Ben Lerner

One and possibly two good things came of my not knowing then that Jonathan Franzen had given Leaving the Atocha Station a two-eyebrows-up recommendation. The good things are sequentially related. First, solely because Maureen Corrigan praised Ben Lerner's debut novel as "one of the most compelling books about nothing I've ever read," I read it. Then (a word smarmy, smug Jonathan Franzen preemptively scolds any serious writer for using) because I so liked Leaving the Atocha Station, I've since, upon learning of his endorsement, decided to break my lifelong shunning of anything by Franzen and read one of his goddam books.

No doubt it was sheer cosmic cooperation back in 2011 that shielded me from knowing the novelist New York Times literary assassin Michiko Kakutani reduces to choking, self-pitying sobs whenever he so much as begins to associate something with her had deigned to bless Leaving the Atocha Station. Nor can I rule out the possibility knowing one of Kakutani's favorite whipping boys had shone his tepid countenance upon Leaving the Atocha Station wouldn't have preempted my welcoming such Corrigan exuberance as “flip, hip, smart, and very funny” and “unlike any other novel-reading experience I’ve had for a long time,” and then (haha, Franzen, you pusillanimous pecksniff) going on to say Flavorpill, a self-described “daily guide to [high] quality cultural events in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and London.," had anointed Leaving the Atocha Station as “the coolest indie press book going around right now.” Franzen schmanzen, I mean who doesn't want to be seen as cool by those who count? And Lerner was already a National Book Award finalist in poetry. Solid literary creds, probly why Franzen wheezed and scrabbled his way onto the Lerner bandwagon--they even look a little alike. Had I known this then...nah, I'd have read it anyway. I've always pretty much trusted Corrigan (despite her having once praised a Franzen novel--every human's entitled, we are told, to occasionally err). I shall probably always detest Jonathan Franzen, on strictly intuitive principles, but, then (yeah, hahahahaha) he was right about Lerner, so...

So what's so hot about Leaving the Atocha Station? I'm giving you some links to professional opinions. In a New York Times review novelist Gary Sernovitz insightfully compares Lerner's novel with Hemingway's debut, American expatriot classic The Sun Also Rises. Sernovitz calls Leaving "a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice. It is also a revealing study of what it’s like to be a young American abroad." (I figure anyone who uses a word like bildungsroman as easily as, say, then, is no one to mess with.) And Sernovitz adds that Adam Gordon (Lerner's answer to Hemingway's Jake Barnes), "a poet, having bluffed his way into a fellowship in Madrid, makes friends, struggles with Spanish, smokes hash, wanders around, writes poetry, doubts poetry and has two low-energy love affairs."

No bullfights, no stoic, macho triumphs or beautiful final lines like "isn't it pretty to think so." It does have the kind of spectacular drama a Jake Barnes would have waded into, flinging subtly charged monosyllables at all the right moments: the terrorist bombing of Madrid's main train station, but Adam Gordon can't summon enough concern to give it much of a hoot. It's even doubtful the Atocha bombing has more than a coincidental name-recognition link to the book's title, which the pro critics say more than likely relates to a nasty little poem by the hugely celebrated (among the entendring patriciate) post-post-post-post...(not sure how many we need here)...modern poet John Ashbery. Here are the first few lines should you think I'm being unfair with the "nasty":

LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION
       by John Ashbery

The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness 
And pulling us out of there experiencing it 
he meanwhile ... And the fried bats they sell there 
dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds...
Other people ...               flash 
the garden are you boning 
and defunct covering ... Blind dog expressed royalties 
comfort of your perfect tar grams nuclear world bank tulip
Favorable       to         near the night pin
loading formaldehyde. the table torn from you
Suddenly       and we are close
Mouthing the root           when you think
generator       homes enjoy leered

The worn stool blazing pigeons from the roof 
         driving tractor to squash 
Leaving the Atocha Station    steel 
infected bumps the screws
everywhere wells 
abolished top ill-lit 
scarecrow falls   Time, progress and good sense 
strike of shopkeepers dark blood 
no forest you can name drunk scrolls 
the completely new Italian hair ...
Baby ...   

Catch the drift? I'm no poet, obviously, and knowing this connection, the Ashbery one, and that Lerner himself was a celebrated poet presumably of that ilk, might have helped with the insipid Franzen's endorsement to steer me away from this novel. So glad I was ignorant of all that, and while I seriously doubt I will ever read any of Lerner's poetry--even the collection he's archly titled I Hate Poetry (the poems therein I suspect intended for academics, dilettantes, and other post-post-post, etc. modern poets)--I would with hungry anticipation read another novel of his were he to write one.

pecksniff

Leaving Atocha Station carried me back to my own youthful wanderings in Paris and Barcelona pretending to be a writer and romantically presuming to fathom life and trying desperately to be cool. The essential difference between us (me and Adam Gordon) is that Gordon is brilliant. He understands his narcissism and uses it to what he hopes is his advantage. This means he can laugh at himself, like when he attends an upscale party and realizes he's woefully outclassed:

As we entered the party I reminded myself to breathe. There were a lot of handsome people in the sweeping whit-carpeted living room with minimalist furniture and monumental paintings on the carefully lit walls.

Various people greeted us and Teresa detached from me to kiss them and I was acutely aware of not being attractive enough for my surroundings; luckily I had a strategy for such situations, one I had developed over many visits to New York with the dim kids of the stars: I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opened them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up into the implication of a smile. I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings. A look that contained a dose of contempt I hoped could be read as political, as insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the front lines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null.

The goal of this look was to make my insufficiencies appear chosen, to give my unstylish hair and clothes the force of protest; I was a figure for the outside to this life, I had known it and rejected it and now was back as an ambassador from a reality more immediate and just.

Coffee House Press, Lerner's publisher, includes blurbs on its website from many review's of his book. One I especially like, from Open Letters Monthly, says, “. . . Leaving the Atocha Station is as much an apologia for poetry as it is a novel. Lerner’s ability to accomplish both projects at once is a marvel. His sense of narrative forward motion and his penchant for rumination are kept in constant competition with one another, so that neither is allowed to keep the upper hand for long. Leaving the Atocha Station is a novel for poets, liars, and equivocators—that is, for aspects of us all. It is also a poem, dedicated to the gulf between self and self-ego and alter ego, “true me” and “false me,” present self and outgrown past.”

Wish I could grasp good writing that way and discuss it as intelligently. Wish I could write prose like Lerner's.

Franzen? That insufferably overrated, Kakutani-whipped, sob-sister prima donna? We'll see.

More links to excellent reviews:

Jenny Turner in Great Britain's The Guardian

James Wood in The New Yorker

Maureen Corrigan on NPR's Fresh Air

[find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog:

http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/]