Jonathan Franzen: Freedom (2010)

In an interview with Helena de Bertodano for the Telegraph when Freedom was first published, Jonathan Franzen said the main function of a novel, for him, is '[t]o find an adequate narrative vehicle for the most difficult stuff at the core of me.' Hmm. There's obviously a great concern for the environment in the novel, it has glaring Democratic sympathies, and there are evident worries about technology causing, say, generational conflict (although surely the novel also says something positive about the availability of instant news on tap?). But to me those things are the backcloth to the main events in the book.

Franzen says that Americans already know what they've lived though, but I'm not so sure that many people notice social changes: it's in our nature to concentrate on the little things in the present and in so doing fail to notice how a gradual build-up creates (sometimes huge) social changes. Anyway, we should be reminded of these changes, and I think Franzen reminds us well, if perhaps unintentionally. For instance, we have a multicultural society that most people seem to accept (such as Walter's cross-generational relationship with the Indian Lalitha), and there is a certain amount of gender reversal (such as Lalitha's confident (even reckless) driving), and both Lalitha and (to a certain extent) Jenna take the sexual initiative with Walter and Joey respectively.

A number of writers have been mentioned in relation to Franzen – DeLillo, Pynchon, Philip Roth, etc, but I feel the presence of Reynolds Price more than almost any other: sex (pre-martial, extra-marital, etc) is of great importance here, and its effects can be really devastating, particularly on the future of the family. And the family is also very important in Price's work, especially in relation to genetic behavior, notably where alcoholism is concerned: Price's characters can either go with the genetic drink flow, or resist, just as Walter Berglund resists his negative inheritance in Freedom.

Above all, though, I feel the presence of Franzen's late friend David Foster Wallace. There's not the same digressive content as with Wallace, but some of the characters could have come straight out of Wallace's fiction. Joey and Connie have a rather familiar wackiness, particularly when Joey swallows his wedding ring and manually fishes about for it in his turds in the toilet pan. (I'm undecided about Richard Katz, the addictive type who takes forever to grow up because he plays guitar and therefore has the freedom to poke his dick into as many holes as he chooses.)

Stephen Burn once suggested that Wallace was moving fiction beyond the cynical postmodernist impasse and onto a more human, caring level. Maybe this is what Franzen is alluding to in that quotation at the beginning of this post, and he's picking up the torch? It's worth a thought.

Ian McEwan remarked that the only great American novelist around now is Philip Roth (well, Toni Morrison and Ann Tyler are women of course, so no doubt they don't count for McEwan), and Franzen takes a minor swipe at McEwan in Freedom – it's a pity it wasn't a bigger swipe: how many great living English novelists are there? Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980 – thirty-two years ago) is a great novel, although McEwan and his chums have never produced a novel anywhere near as brilliant. Is Franzen a great writer? I think it's probably still too early to really judge, although Freedom shows greater confidence and control than the excellent The Corrections (2001).

Addendum 1: Ann Tyler, I note, doesn't like Patty, which I find slightly odd: I sympathize with anyone who's been raped, and find it impossible to judge someone who has suffered such torture.

Addendum 2: I've also added a link to Franzen's fascinating essay about 'Status' and 'Contract' writers below.

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Jonathan Franzen: Telegraph interview with Helena de Bertodano

'Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books', by Jonathan Franzen

David Foster Wallace: The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (2011)

On the day of his suicide in September 2008, David Foster Wallace left lamps shining on a partial manuscript on his workdesk in his garage: he'd been working on his third novel for several years, and it was still unfinished. To his editor Michael Pietsch, Wallace had described his problem as 'like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind'. No doubt Pietsch recalled this phrase only too well when charged with the task of editing the chapters on the desk, and working them – along with much more work in progress – into something like a novel.

The above cover is of the American edition, which is not the same as the UK edition. The American edition shows the design created by Karen Green, David Foster Wallace's artist widow, in which she incorporates elements from one of Wallace's tax return forms after shredding. It is much more striking than the UK edition, which was designed by gray318, or Jon Gray:

The novel is considerably less than half the wordcount of Infinite Jest, and the major theme is boredom: it concerns the Inland Revenue Service (IRS) offices in Peoria, Illinois, and a number of its new recruits.  A few passages – intentionally, I think – are very tedious indeed, but by far the majority of the sections are brilliantly Wallacian: long rambling sentences exploring the minutiae of human consciousness, constantly qualifying, melding the esoteric with superfluities of everyday speech ('like'), laboring over the most detailed descriptions of physical objects, etc. Needless to say, there are many involved details about tax return processing arcaneness.

And, of course, there are unforgettable characters:

– David Cusk. David Foster Wallace had a sweat problem, which is why he is often (as in the photo on the back flap of the dust jacket of this novel) seen wearing a headscarf, although the reader assumes that Cusk's complaint is a gross exaggeration of Wallace's complaint: he's gets so soaked in sweat in the car taking him to the IRS that he also severely dampens the jacket of his fellow passenger David Wallace (of whom more below); in any class he's more comfortable away from a radiator and at the back where he can't be seen sweating; he tortures himself with fears of having another attack, etc. The hallmark digressions and/or qualifications are there, of course, both in the text itself and in the sparing footnotes (as opposed to the copious endnotes in Infinite Jest).

– Toni Ware comes from a trailer park background, where she was abused and from which she is irrevocably damaged.

– Claude Sylvanshine is 'fact psychic', meaning that unimportant details about a person - often a total stranger - just float into his consciousness, such as the details of an employee's 'mitochondrial DNA and the fact that it was ever so slightly substandard due to her mother's having taken thalidomide four days before it was abruptly yanked from the shelves'. 

– Meredith Rand is 'wrist-bitingly attractive', although she's painfully aware of this, and can talk and talk and talk about the problems this (the wrist-biting attractiveness, that is) causes her.

– Shane 'Mr. X' Drinion (whose nickname is an ironic reference to the fact that he's not perceived as 'exciting') certainly finds Rand interesting - perhaps even exciting- to the point that he concentrates so much on what she's saying that he actually levitates 1¾ inches from his seat.

– And there's a character called David Wallace, who authorially intervenes in the ninth section (page 66) with what he terms 'AUTHOR'S FOREWORD', which begins (as does section 22) with 'Author here', and he wants us to believe that he's the real author, and that the publisher's legal disclaimer, saying that all the characters in the book are fictitious, (and any resemblances to real characters is coincidental), is in fact a lie, as 'This book is really true'.  But then, some of what he says is irrefutably untrue about David Foster Wallace, the author.

David Wallace the character in the book is down as 'David F. Wallace' at the IRS, and as a GS-9 he's a pretty low-grade employee, although he's confused with another recruit - another David F. Wallace who will start the following day, although he's a much higher status GS-13. But although the GS-9 (David Foster Wallace) has a different second name to the GS-13 (David Francis Wallace), the IRS only recognizes the middle initial, leading to the GS-9 receiving a preferential greeting from Chahla Neti-Neti: a blowjob.

Not all of the parts of the book sparkle with wit, and under the circumstances it definitely can't be expected to hold together wonderfully. But all the same, there are moments in it equal to any other moment in DFW's previous work.  It was therefore a very good decision to publish this. It's just such a pity that there'll be no more to come.

Inman Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Inman Square is in Cambridge, but away from the center, and describes the area around the junction between Inman, Cambridge, and Hampshire Streets.

Ryle's is on Hampshire Street, and is mentioned several times in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, notably by this quotation:

'Ryle's Jazz Club's upscale pub-type bar, guys in tweed caps and briar pipes in mouths at angles taking all day on a pint of warm stout.'

There's another of these Bukowski Tavern dive bars (which are affectionately known as 'Buk's') in Boston, but this is on Cambridge Street and is everything you might expect with a name like this. Shame about the cars in the way, though.

Lorem Ipsum Books, also on Cambridge Street, has the right idea by telling people to read instead of watching TV.

David Lipsky and Rick Moody: David Foster Wallace's 'The Pale King' - Bookworm on KCRW

Just click on the title, then click on 'Listen' for Michael Silverblatt's 29-minute radio interview.

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996)

Why write about such a well-established novel when David Foster Wallace's new (and of course posthumous) one The Pale King has just been published? Because I began re-reading this literary behemoth (set in Boston and Cambridge, MA) a few weeks ago as I'm going to Boston shortly: I wanted to re-acquaint myself with it.

I have no intention of repeating the various intricate strands of the story, which have been covered so many times, and are more than adequately discussed on The Howling Fantods! website. I just have a few comments to make about this wonderful book which stretches to 1079 pages, 96 of those consisting of 344 endnotes, several of which last for several pages, and several of which have footnotes.

There are a few references to the the seventeen-year-old intellectual and athletic prodigy Hal in this novel as 'Prince Hal', although the most obvious reference to Shakespeare is in the title Infinite Jest itself, which is of course an allusion to two words in Hamlet when the character Hamlet picks up the skull of the king's jester and says: 'Alas, poor Yorick! - I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy'. Significant to the novel is the fact that Infinite Jest is also the title of Hal's father James Orin Incandenza's last film, which is so addictive that anyone who sees it is spellbound and dies watching it, being incapable of performing any other action: therefore this is the perfect terrorist weapon, but that's another narrative, and this thing could go on, er, infinitely. The film director's initials spell the acronym JOI, the French for 'joy', which ties in with the initial effect of the film at least, but bearing in mind the result of this spectation, it is also ironic. Plus it's ironic because JOI (incidentally called Himself by Hal) was a chronic alcoholic with a sexually promiscuous wife who ended his life by putting his head in a microwave. Suicide is of course also contemplated by Hamlet (and also actually carried out by Ophelia), as well as by several characters in the novel Infinite Jest. Hamlet is also thought to be 'Mad as the sea and wind' by his step-father Claudius.

And almost all the characters in the novel are mad or like hopelessly Xed up in some way, and maybe all come from like disfunctional families: apart, that is, from the briefly mentioned representation of the Robert McClosky's fictional Mallard family in his children's book Make Way for Ducklings, now frozen in bronze in the Public Gardens in metro Boston.

Addiction is another way to self-demap: for instance, Steeply's (unnamed) father's addiction to M*A*S*H, which eventually sends him mad; or Gene Fackelman's retreat into the physical and psychic anaesthesia of Dilaudid when he'd have been better advised (by, say, dear old Don Gately) to run as far as possible away from Boston so as to avoid certain demapping (but torture first) by his enemies.

Many of the characters have O.C.D. (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), and Marlon (R. in n.24, but K. in n.234) Bain is a blazing example of this, with his ritual washing, checking, cleaning, who takes a T-square onto the tennis court to verify the raquet strings are intersecting at 90 degrees, and who sweats excessively. Himself used him in the film Death in Scarsdale, 'if you want to see way more than you want to know about perspiration', says Hal's brother Orin in transcript fragments for Moment mag in an interview with the transvestite Helen Steeply. Plus, Bain didn't trust his senses and would not only take three hours to shower, but another two to get out of shower door, checking the frame, etc. Later, he owned a greeting card company subsequently bought out by a larger one, and now lives on the third floor of the former Waltham Public Libary, which was the Children's Reading Room, and he never goes out, and of course never has to walk through any doors. (Hal's mother, the Moms, has a far less incapacitating variety of this disorder.)

Maybe an example of Wallace's writing style is screaming out to be read - in the example below, there is an endnote reference which refers the reader to an earlier endnote:

'A woman at U. Cal-Irvine had earned tenure with an essay arguing that the reason-versus-no-reason debate about what was unentertaining in Himself's work illuminated the central condundra of millennial après-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun. The essay was turgid to the point of being unreadable, besides using reference as a verb and pluralizing conundrum as conundra.379'

Note 379 states 'See Note 144 supra.'

Note 144 states 'E.g. see Ursula Emrich-Levine (University of California-Irvine), 'Watching Grass Grow While Being Hit Repeatedly Over the Head With a Blunt Object: Fragmentation and Stasis in James O. Incandenza's Widower, Fun With Teeth, Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell', Art Cartridge Quarterly, vol. III, nos. 1-3, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken.'

Wallace, who began his academic career in mathematics before moving to fiction, explains - in an interview with Michael Silverblatt on the radio program 'Bookworm' 11 April 1996 - that the book is based on the Sierpinkski gasket, although there were a number of emendations to the original typescript that made it a lopsided Sierpinski gasket, and it's basically 'a pyramid on acid'. He says that when he was in his twenties he thought the point of writing was to show the reader how clever the writer was, but he'd never experienced loneliness then, and now he thinks art has 'something to do with loneliness', and he wanted to do something sad, 'about what was sad about America'. He says that part of this sadness that is infusing the culture is related to 'this loss of a sense of purpose or organizing principles, somethin' you're willin' to give yourself away to', and that the addictive impulse which is very much part of today is 'interesting and powerful only because it's a kind of a distortion of kind of a religious impulse, or an impulse to be part of somethin' bigger.' This is his fascinating interview with Silverblatt for KCRW .

David Foster Wallace in 2011

This is a very well informed article, entitled The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace by Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It is dated 6 January 2011. Interesting that it mentions Stephen Burn's David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide, which suggests that Wallace is moving literature to a third level of modernism, to a more human face.

And while on the subject of Wallace, this article by Wyatt Mason, on David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, appeared in a July 2010 edition of the New York Review of Books: Smarter Than You Think.

Where, indeed, would Dave Eggers and McSweeney's, or George Saunders or Zadie Smith, be without Wallace?

David Foster Wallace Considered in The New York Review of Books

David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace is reviewed by Wyatt Mason in the 15 July 2010 edition of The New York Review of Books, which discusses Wallace's aesthetic. It is particularly interesting on his use of the vernacular in his serious writing, as well as his attitude to realism versus avant-gardism:
Smarter Than You Think

David Foster Wallace at Pomona

A copy of David Foster Wallace's 2005 Course Syllabus at Pomona College, Claremont, CA – where he taught –has just come to my attention. The choice of reading is interesting, and often his use of language is rather unconventional, as in 'half-assed ad lib lecture' and 'here's a somewhat sexier riff'; A+ is the top grade, which he describes as 'Mind-blowingly good'. And yes, of course there are footnotes.

David Foster Wallace Again (But I Make No Apologies for It)

I was recently reading 'Grammar and American Usage' in David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster when I noticed that he mentions an imaginary 'grammar nazi' objecting to the wording in a supermarket queue: 'Express Checkout: 10 Items or Less'. It took me a full three minutes to realize what was wrong with this sentence: the fact that 'less' refers to mass as opposed to count was not immmediately obvious to me, and I digressively agonized over the other words instead. As someone who taught English grammar for fifteen years, this is a humbling experience. But then: does anyone care? Yeah, in certain ways I care: I particularly care about my vegetables being mis-apostrophized as 'Cauliflower's' or 'Carrot's', about people writing that 'Its a wonderful day, and to prove it the dog is wagging it's tail', or (a real-life example, this) about a college near me in Nottingham – which included four different peoples from different races in its logo – calling itself 'People's College' (now called Castle College, which I think is because someone just realized that it's at the back of Nottingham Castle), where I once told the vice-principal that on the basis of the logo alone this was grammatically incorrect, but she didn't even understand what I was talking about. (1) Anyway, for the record, what I was talking about was that the noun 'people' can be pluralized, so 'Peoples' College' would in this instance have been a more correct apostrophization. But what do you expect from a S.N.O.O.T. like me, or from the vice-principal of a college who obviously isn't interested in grammar?

(1) I've just noticed that the Carlton Road annexe of Castle College now seems to be calling itself 'Peoples College', which I suppose is a kind of neutral compromise. I imagine that they're retained the name because some people complained (the name goes back over a century but who cares about small details like that?)

David Foster Wallace (continued)

Another thing Wallace mentions in the article 'Consider the Lobster' which had never occurred to me before is our tendency to use euphemisms for the meat of higher animals: 'pork', 'beef', 'veal', 'venison', etc, which keep carniphiles (a Wallace neologism?) an emotional step away from the fact that an animal is being eaten (1). (1) I wasn't aware of the existence of the word 'dysphemism' until I read the article 'Grammar and American Usage' (also in the book Consider the Lobster), and had to check that it wasn't another neologism. No, it's pre-Wallace: a dysphemism is a kind of exaggeration, like an opposite of a euphemism, as in some of Wallace's examples: 'grammar nazi', 'syntax snob' and 'usage nerd'. But imagine (as he claims, anyway) his family inventing the acronym S.N.O.O.T. to avoid dysphemisms when describing language usage fanatics: depending on whether you were one or not, this stood for 'Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance', or 'Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time'. Who'd of guessed it?* But then Zadie Smith, who was apparently too (intellectually) 'scared' of Wallace to interview him, is quoted on the front cover of Wallace's Oblivion: '[H]e's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him.' Jealousy is fruitless now. A final point: when Wallace was an undergraduate, he was so thrilled that a philosophy lecturer had called him a genius that he thought he'd never have to go to the bathroom (he used the American euphemism) any more: he'd transcended it.

*Grammar nazis note: 'of' for 'have' is intended!

David Foster Wallace Digresses, as Was His Wont: We Shall Miss His Vegetarian Leanings

David Foster Wallace's article 'Consider the Lobster', which he was originally commissioned to write about the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine, is an amazing piece of writing, although Wallace was obviously the first person to note that a food magazine wouldn't necessarily take too kindly to his obsessive footnotes, and would probably not be too happy at all that about half of his article was a (very scientifically pitched) argument that read in parts like a vegetarian tract. This, of course, was one of David Foster Wallace's hallmarks: he was more digressive than Lionel Britton. The video here was created by a buddhist vegan organization, but let that put no one off: Wallace's words have been heavily simplified, but this still makes for good viewing, in spite of the black and white words without pictures. We can only hope that the publicity surrounding Wallace's suicide will make him more widely known in the UK: he was a major writer in any generation, not just this. But the fact that an intellectual maggot like Gordon Ramsay is (by common definition) also a human being seems to suggest that we are indeed, as Lionel Britton claims, moving in intellectual reverse: don't we need a way of categorizing human beings according to basic brain capacity? (Politicians would never allow this, of course, and for obvious reasons.)

Digression: last year I spent several weeks in Carbondale, IL (Wallace used to delight in the two-letter abbreviations of states, among acronyms and other abbreviations that would make you flip back pages to find out if you could see what he was talking about), and as well as driving out to surrounding states such as Missouri (MO) and Kentucky (KY), I visited nearby Murphysboro, IL, for its apple festival (Wallace is quick to point out in 'Consider the Lobster' that some of the other festivities in the U.S. include the Kansas beer Festival, the Tidewater crab festivals, the Midwest corn festivals and the Texas chili festivals, for instance), although this was only on the way to Chester, IL, a small town tucked right up against the Mississippi River, where there's a tiny Popeye Museum dedicated to the work of the creator of that cartoon figure, Elzie Segar, born in Chester in 1874.