A Book A Week: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2010. 

If you haven’t read this book, and want to enjoy it unsullied by the taint of spoilery revelation, then you might want to stop reading this post and come by when you’ve experienced Freedom first-hand (see what I did there?). See you in a few weeks.

[whistling]

Finished? How’d you like it?

Me?

First, Franzen makes it difficult for me to enjoy his work. If he’s not flogging Twitter he’s lamenting eBooks, cell phones, and instant gratification business models. I would have finished this book much sooner if he hadn’t been standing on his Old Media lawn shaking his fist at newfangled sociodigital networkishness. I don’t completely understand my reaction to Franzen’s positions either,  because I don’t really disagree with him.

This book is smart, wryly funny, and painfully insightful about American behavior. Here are a few ideas I jotted down while reading.

- By the time people realize a relationship is bad news, they’re too ensnared to escape without shedding some flesh. So more often than not, they stay, letting the punctures heal and calling the snares body jewelry.

- All relationships (or hookups, mates, best friends, parents, kids, business partners, roommates) are bad news in one way or another.

- All of the relationships in the story are circular. In families especially, behviors are repeated generationally. The details change, but the essential actions and emotions repeat over and over. The payroll gets bigger and the drugs of choice come and go.

- Core relationships are galvanized around age twenty. After that, all emotional actions yo-yo back to that twenty-year-old triangle. Embracing, rejecting, tolerating, reconstructing, tolerating, pining, blasting, aching, loving.

I’m not sure I agree with those staked out points. And I could really be spared Franzen’s one dishonesty: the happily-ever-after ending. I could not believe it, and when I got it, I didn’t want it. But the ending was a small problem compared to the surprising lack of emotional connection I felt reading the book.

I’m a crier. Poignant moments, sadness, pain, death, frustration, injustice, joy, victory, gratitude, love. They all make me cry. Sometimes just a quivery vapor. Sometimes book dropping sobs and shuddering.

So when I reached the climax of this story, the moment when an important character dies a tragic, ironic, unexpected death just when we think that a renewed sense of peace or happiness or contentment is possible? Nothing. It was a showstopper for me. Not because of my emotional reaction, but because of my lack of emotional reaction. I even reread that bit, wondering how I could be so crass, so unfeeling toward these characters I’d been hanging out with for hundreds of pages.

And then I realized that as plausible Franzen’s portrayal of these characters might be, I felt nothing, did not care about them. I only vaguely liked one or two of them. Oh sure, I can identify with Patty Berglund’s struggle to define her own purpose and self-identity. I can enjoy the banter and style of Patty and Walter and Richard and believe in their human characteristics as if they are people that I know in real life. But I still did not care about them. And that made me feel a bit empty, wishing that on top of this engaging book about complicated ethics, about business and personal relationships entwining and mirroring one another, if Franzen had just been able to communicate an equally real sense of empathy and compassion, then this merely smart and interesting book could have been a great book.

ABAW (or three): Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy

All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy, Alfred A. Knopf 1992 (via Picador paperback 2010).

McCarthy’s writing intimidates me. It demands attention to read and it demonstrates a finely tuned attention to the essential details of objects, places, and people. McCarthy’s ascetic attitude toward technology and publicity is also manifest. He clearly weighs every word in these stories that often feel more like tense, tightly wound poetry. 

I don’t know if I completely understood the meaning of the stories. They haunt me though, coming back to me again and again in the two months since I read them. And the ending of the final book still irritates me. 

All the Pretty Horses is the story of John Grady Cole, a teenager with a talent for training horses who wants to be a cowboy. But the world is changing. His grandfather has died, his mother has sold the family’s ranch. So John Grady sets off to Mexico to slow down time and find a place where a ranching life still exists. He finds trouble in the form of another wandering boy and a rancher’s daughter. In spite of the pain and the ugliness, John Grady always tries to do what’s right. The Badlands of Mexico don’t change that in him.

The Crossing is the story of Billy Parham, another teenage cowboy, this time in New Mexico. Billy’s life takes a strange turn as he follows trap lines to catch a wolf that has wandered up into the mountains out of Mexico. Though he knows she will kill him if she gets a chance, Billy can’t bring himself to kill the wolf once he’s caught her. She is an anachronism, and he decides to try to lead her back to her home range in Mexico. We are reminded repeatedly how dangerous and crazy Billy’s idea is. Early on, his character is almost indistinguishable from John Grady, chasing a philosophy of doing what is right at all costs to himself. Billy and his wolf are captured and he kills her rather than allow her to be a slave in a dog fighting pit. That choice earns him no friends. He returns home to New Mexico to find that his family - except for his younger brother - have been murdered, and their horses stolen. With nowhere else to go, Billy gathers his brother and returns to Mexico to reclaim the horses. Billy’s losses only grow, and he does change, becoming a cynical young man who sees himself as a broken sinner, but who cannot turn away from service to a good man, or to his country in a time of war.

I don’t entirely trust myself to talk about Cities of the Plain because the ending felt so incongruous and trite. The story brings together John Grady and Billy, working together on a dying New Mexico ranch that is about to be swallowed up by the White Sands Missile Range. John Grady is a decorated veteran (the All-American Cowboy, as his buddies half-disdainfully call him behind his back), but Billy’s heart condition kept him (bitterly) out of service. When Billy leads him unwillingly to a brothel, John Grady falls in love again, this time with an epileptic Mexican prostitute named Magdalena. Magdalena’s owner also loves her. Things don’t go so well for the American men when they attempt to rescue Magdalena, but their actions at every turn are consistent with their characters through the entire trilogy. They act on their anguish, their anger, their disdain, and their loyalty to one another to the end. In a way they are brothers, bound by their love for a lifestyle or world view that probably died before they were even born. I was ok up to that point. But the aged homeless wanderings and underpass conversations with a character that might have been Death? That felt too much like ham-fistedly trying to cram a THEME onto a trilogy that had up to that point been more nuanced about potential meaning and symbolism.

Still, McCarthy gives us evocative and stirring imagery of the Southwestern landscape, about plains, horses, and men out of place in their own time.

First Aid Kit

There’s one in the kitchen and one in the car, with band-aid, ointment, and gauze. But sometimes the hurts aren’t blood or sting. Sometimes it’s a pinch to the ego or a bruise to the feelings, an accidental bite on an old worry, or the lying crush-hug of depression. Then conventional band-aids won’t do. In those cases, I need another kind of first aid kit.

Contents:

* Comfortable clothes.

* Sunshine.

* A few sheets of paper and my favorite kind of pen.

* An inspirational poem.

* A fluffy, clean towel to rub against my face. 

* A small, safe space into which I can first crawl, then press against, then escape.

* A box in which to keep the sadness, frustration, rage, confusion, apathy, and all the other feelings that make up the weft and weave of the heavy cloak of impossibility and self-doubt. 

* A pretty, humane surprise, a demonstration of genuine love between people. A tiny daisy-in-the-fist-of-a-three-year-old of human compassion.

* A play list of music. Some songs can be angry, but not defeatist; there must be a kernel of hope. Some thumpy-asskicking-boots drum lines are helpful now and then. Clever lyrics about anything in the world would not be remiss.

Some bits expire (just like medicinal ointment), so I should check them for efficacy from time to time and make replacements as necessary.

Now, what sort of container will hold all of these things? 

We had a birthday: Sonar X9!

(I didn’t forget. I’ve just been distractable.)

Someone kicked off his Spring Break (a few weeks ago) by turning 9.

We should all be so lucky as to get birthday cake for breakfast. <3

The Clutter

The clutter doesn’t bother me as much as what the clutter represents. Putting away the stuff is an act of handling the ideas: throwing away some, resolving some, making a management plan, moving some to a position of greater comfort or utility (for me), or simply putting things away until I’m more ready to deal with them.