the verdict, a week stale.

After ruminating upon it, I’ve concluded that, while Freedom has its merits and Franzen cannot be disregarded as one of America’s great novelists, I much preferred The Corrections over Freedom and was rather underwhelmed by Freedom.  I’m fully aware that part of this is influenced by the critical frenzy that swathed the novel, but, frankly, objectively, I can’t say I’d jump on that bandwagon of effusive praise any time soon.  The environmentalism and political/social commentary often bore down too heavily and too long, and I had a difficult time separating Walter Berglund from Franzen the Bird Enthusiast, although I’ve read speculation on Richard Katz being the stand-in for Franzen.

That said, it’s really not possible to discredit Franzen’s ability to craft.  He makes it seem so effortless and simple; he isn’t prone to sweeping prose or beautiful language; but his prose is deceptively plain, almost to the point of disappearing under the radar as you, the reader, rage with loathing for his cast of characters — for loathe it is indeed you do freely because there’s nothing redemptive about these people.  And, yet, even that speaks of Franzen’s mastery of craft; you may be heaping all manner of curses upon these characters; but you don’t cease to read because you want to know — you’ve read 300 pages, so you must push through the final 200 in hopes of reconciliation, and, in the end, Franzen does deliver a satisfying and fitting ending that allows you to sigh and not count the past few days a waste.

(Next in my Franzen reading will be his debut novel.  Although I think Freedom might and might not be worth picking up, I do recommend The Corrections and very highly praise his essay collection, How To Be Alone.)

the question 'why?' is one that goes unanswered so often.

It is a strange thing to love a city. In the end because no city is entirely knowable. What you love really are pieces of it. You are like Dr. Aadam Aziz forever peering at sections of his beloved through the perforated sheet. In Midnight’s Children the sheet was finally dropped and the beloved revealed, but with cities that never happens. That is perhaps part of the allure, what brings us back to the cities we love: our desire to accumulate enough pieces so we can finally have it whole within us. But to love a city is also to love who we were at that time we fell in love. For me, my love for Tokyo is intertwined with my love for my best friend, who did, in the end, survive his surgery.

-  Junot Diaz, 'Junot Diaz Reflects on Tokyo'

For me, my love for New York City is intertwined with the lost child who had nothing but the written word as faithful companion, with that first reassurance that I’m perfectly fine the way I am, with old friends of the rare breed that compels respect who have been absorbed into the emotional space I identify as home.  ‘Home’ is an amorphous tag that means both nothing and everything, and, whether or not I finally learn to lay my roots down in the city that’s called me back since youth, I hope I never lose this feeling of loving a city that’s always forgiven me and offered me the hope I so desperately needed when I was spiralling down the abyss.

'freedom' is an amusingly 'hip' novel.

I’ve roughly 150 pages to go, and, thus far, as far as I remember off the top of my head after midnight on a Friday night (Saturday morning), Franzen has mentioned Natalie Portman, Blackberries, texting v. e-mailing and how Blackberries basically mean e-mailing = readily accessible = fancy upgraded sort of ‘texting,’ and Bright Eyes.  And not only did he mention Bright Eyes, he expounded upon Bright Eyes via Walter Berglund for a good, solid page or two.

As expected, Franzen surprises me with the extent to which I absolutely loathe and detest his characters.  The one redeemable soul in this dramatic cast is Richard Katz, and, even then, I wonder if that isn’t merely because he’s a rock star or if it truly is that he is likeable, even when taken away from the context of a high-strung, overwrought, drunk-on-self-pity-and-self-righteousness bunch of neuroses.  Nonetheless, despite loathing them all, I cannot stop reading, and it isn’t that I’m four hundred pages in and must complete the novel for the sake of the time and effort I’ve thus invested, but that, truly, Franzen has a way with words and dismantling the despicable aspects of humanity and laying them out to make you wonder, Is this just the way you choose to present the world, or is mankind truly this damnable?

voices tell secrets, too.

Sylvia Plath’s voice is deeper than expected and tinged with inflections of the British accent — very proper, very film star.  Camus sounds just as French as I thought he would.  Sartre is more nasal than expected, Heidegger more breathy.  Ted Hughes is more precise, higher-pitched, less intense and wild.  Virginia Woolf could be a professor at Hogwarts; Dame Maggie Smith’s manner of speaking in the Harry Potter films is very reminiscent of Woolf’s way of speaking.  Anne Sexton has a low, husky drawl.

Amongst those living, Ian McEwan is very proper, Jonathan Franzen very collected, and Nicole Krauss simultaneously diminutive and assertive — and these are the voices I’ve amassed in my own person, and, hopefully, more will be heard and experienced in the near future.

so much of the human experience is familiar.

One of the last times I talked to him after that, in August, on the phone, he asked me to tell him a story of how things would get better.  I repeated back to him a lot of what he’d been saying to me in our conversations over the previous year.  I said he was in a terrible and dangerous place because he was trying to make real changes as a person and as a writer.  I said that the last time he’d been through near-death experiences, he’d emerged and written, very quickly, a book that was light-years beyond what he’d been doing before his collapse.  I said he was a stubborn control freak and know-it-all — ‘So are you!’ he shot back at me — and I said that people like us are so afraid to relinquish control that sometimes the only way we can force ourselves to open up and change is to bring ourselves to an access of misery and the brink of self-destruction.  I said he’d undertaken his change in medication because he wanted to grow up and have a better life.  I said I thought his best writing was ahead of him.  And he said:  ‘I like that story.  Could you do me a favour and call me up every four or five days and tell me another story like it?’

Unfortunately I only had one more chance to tell him the story, and by then he wasn’t hearing it.  He was in horrible, minute-by-minute anxiety and pain.  The next times I tried to call him after that, he wasn’t picking up the phone or returning messages.  He’d gone down into the well of infinite sadness, beyond the reach of story, and he didn’t make it out.  But he had a beautiful, yearning innocence, and he was trying.

- Jonathan Franzen speaking in tribute of friend and author David Foster Wallace, 2008 October 23, Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, NYU, reproduced in Five Dials