Category / Franzen, Jonathan

by Edward Champion

The Discomfort Zone

There’s a good deal of commotion over Michiko Kaukutani’s review of Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone. Has Michiko gone too far? Having read most of the contents of this disgraceful essay collection, I don’t think so at all. Where Franzen’s previous essay collection, How to Be Alone, presented Franzen’s interests in a thoughtful and benign (if whiny) tone (the postal system, an almost nostalgic concern for mechanics, etc.), The Discomfort Zone presents Franzen as a middle-aged enfant terrible, a spineless yuppie who hasn’t grown up and who clings to narcissistic self-absorption as if it were oxygen.

franzen190.jpgReading this collection and having this misfortune to experience some of these essays for the second time (many of these were published in The New Yorker; the Peanuts one is by far the worst), I felt the need to beat Franzen repeatedly with a thick newspaper or at least rob the bastard of his riches. This collection is the best he can do? Five years of putzing around with the coffers filled and what does Franzen give us? Not a novel, but a medley of hyper-neurotic essays that are embarassing as hell to read.

Does the world need another book from an upper middle-class Caucasian whiner? I think not. Particularly when his main beefs are being asked to give to the Katrina refugees. David Remnick, for whatever reason, has been responsible for bankrolling Jonathan Franzen’s writing as therapy. I’m thinking that Remnick is doing this because he’s hoping for more essays of the How to Be Alone variety. But what nobody expected was Franzen transforming into a smug upper-class twit, not unlike those bowler-hatted morons in the famous Monty Python skit. The fact that Frazen is, for the most part, humorless and fond of framing uninteresting generalizations in ponderous language makes The Discomfort Zone one of the worst books of the year. To wit, here’s a small sample from the aforementioned Peanuts essay:

To the countercultural mind, a begoggled beagle piloting a doghouse and getting shot down by the Red Baron was akin to Yossarian paddling a dinghy to Sweden. The strip’s square panels were the only square thing about it. Wouldn’t the country be better off listening to Linus Van Pelt than Robert McNamara? This was the era of flower children, not flower adults. But the strip appealed to older Americans as well. It was unfailingly inoffensive (Snoopy never lifted a leg) and was set in a safe, attractive suburb where the kids, except for Pigpen, whose image Ron McKernan of the Grateful Dead pointedly embraced, were clean and well spoken and conservatively dressed.

Observe the uncontained (and unpursued) comparison to Catch-22 here. Or the sad effort to spin “square” into a second standard definition. Or Franzen’s desperate obsession with dichotomies (establishment or hippie) and inability to plunge further into the subject? Or the wordy clause extended to Pigpen. Or the prim modifiers conjoined in the final sentence.

Even casting aside Franzen’s shameless solipsism, this is bad and needlessly wordy writing. And a legion of editors needs to be strung up for allowing this copy to escape unfixed to the printed page.

Of course, if you like keeping company with smug twits, then Franzen’s your man. Franzen has become a highbrow Chuck Klosterman. He’s that insufferable prick right before you at the salad bar, who feels the need not only to complain about the offerings, but who holds up the line.

For those fond of taking in the great oxygen of life and avoiding those who believe the entire world is about them, Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist (another slim collection of New Yorker pesonal essays) is a far more compelling and thoughtful alternative.

by DrMabuse

Morning Pileup

  • Frederick Forsyth has decided to run against Tony Blair. Well, if this is what it takes to get him to stop writing, count me in as one of his most febrile supporters.
  • Chang-rae Lee’s next novel will center around the Korean War. The story will involve “a refugee girl raised in America after the war, a solider and an aid worker during the war.” Lee also confessed that he made a mistake titling his last novel Aloft, pointing out that too many people were hoping for a gripping tale about real estate developers fighting over a flat.
  • Somehow it escaped our eyes, but “Harry Matthews” gets an appropriately mysterious writeup in the Gray Lady. But an interesting side note is that nobody should trust John Strausbaugh with an “off the record” comment.
  • We all know about Kathryn Chetkovich’s infamous Granta essay about J-Franz. But what I didn’t know is that Franzen’s ex-wife stopped writing and reading after the breakup. The lesson here is that if you hope to keep up your writing career, DON’T DATE J-FRANZ! This has been a public service announcement for the Society to Preserve Creativity.
  • Alice Hoffman was “deeply affected by The Twilight Zone.”
  • Fumio Niwa has passed on. He was 100. Also RIP David Hughes.
  • There’s a campaign in place to restore Ohio’s image by the Ohio Secretary of State. Unfortunately, what the campaign doesn’t tell you is that most of the writers and artists (including Toni Morrison, Michael Dirda, and Roger Zelazy) ended up moving away from Ohio.
  • Oliver Stone + James Ellroy? Say it ain’t so. What next? Paul Verhoeven and Donald E. Westlake?
  • The Cumberland County Library in North Carolina has catered to its constitutency. They’re paying $18,000 of their hard-earned money to offer 700 audio books. By my math, that’s $25.71 a pop, or considerably more than a wholesale or library-rate hardcover.
by DrMabuse

A Special Therapeutic Column from Jonathan Glandzen

In May 1981, a few months into the Reagan administration, my father and my brother Colin and in fact every member in my family started fighting. They weren’t fighting about Reagan, per se, but they wanted to give me a solid foundation for long-term neruosis. I never blamed anyone for the fight, but years later, after making a mint off of my novel, The Peregrinations, I felt stifled by the smell of cash around me. I had been approached by several financial advisors who suggested long-term savings and IRAs. They wanted me to live and travel and roll around like a self-entitled pygmy while my fellow writers starved. Had I been rude to Oprah? Had I forgotten the little people?

In considering my sordid sobbing history, I remember that it was Colin who first suggested that a real man took control of his life and that obtaining this confidence was easier when one was well grounded. Every time I tried to be myself, I was faced with Colin’s menacing shadow. Colin made less money in his life than I had in a single year, and yet he was secure, happily married, and encouraged me to roll into a fetal position at family reunions.

I think back to those halcyon days of 1981, because, despite my upper middle-class upbringing and a stable, albeit occasionally combative family, I was frightened every time I had to make a decision. I didn’t learn to tie my shoe until the age of 26 and it took a Iris Murdoch type who knew what she wanted to deflower me in grad school. She must have anticipated my hunky looking author photo — the bane of my existence since my success. She never revealed her name.

But there was some comfort growing up — no thanks to Colin, thank you very much. On my night table was the Marmaduke Omnibus, a dogeared (if you’ll pardon the pun), decaying paperback that I had found one day in the dumpster. I opened its pages and discovered that someone had written “This shit isn’t funny” on the inside front cover. This austere warning didn’t faze me one bit. Indeed, there was a sense of comfort in seeing Marmaduke’s innocuous disruption of the household. Like me, Marmaduke didn’t know any better. My heart quivered over Marmaduke’s long ears, and I soon developed an intimate relationship with Brad Anderson’s creation that posed certain problems during adolescence. Marmaduke, as you might imagine, was the only dog that counted. It took several Siamese cats, four parakeets and a few goldfish before I could allow another dog to roam in my own home.

Thankfully, my therapist understood this. After the unfortunate sprinting incident at a cocktail party, I was given a ritalin prescription. This, I might add, at 36.

Throughout the years, Colin suggested Bloom County, The Far Side or “hell, even Doonsebury.” But my mind was made up. Even Boondocks was too much for my refined sensibilities. It was Marmaduke or nothing. Other people I met had bad heroin habits. For my own part, I had a sociopathic obsession with a comic strip that wasn’t particularly funny.

by DrMabuse

J-Franz Returns

Rake points to a new story from J-Franz in the New Yorker. Our immediate impressions can be summed up as follows:

  • Hey, J, ever heard of paragraph breaks?
  • Was there ever a clunkier lead sentence wrought in Remnick’s pages?
  • This “young husband,” does he have a name?
  • “The divorce was done by mail.” How convenient!
  • “[H]he feared his only purpose on the planet was to insert his penis in the vaginas of the greatest possible number of women.” Mock clinical language is so 1986, Franz.
  • “But Ron insisted that he had never seen this word before, that her vocabulary was much larger than his, and, absurdly, that he had never in his life scored eighty-seven points in one Scrabble play.” Dave Eggers-style nonsequiturs are a sudden influence on J-Franz?
  • “..but he was forty years old, and it was time to grow up…” Or autobiographical?
  • “In later years Antonia never, in her stocking-footed friends? hearing, spoke of him with anger, always only pity, because, she said, he knew himself so poorly.” Comma, comma, commala!