Farther Away

The book jacket advises,"In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him". Especially, one might add, the theme of himself. Snark aside, Franzen comes across in these essays as a very intelligent, hard-working writer - a real professional - with a massive sense of self. That's not to say he's arrogant, and he's entirely up front about the approach to writing that interests him: "My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life." (129, from 'On Autobiographical Fiction'). Virtually all the pieces in this (mostly non-fiction) collection reflect that deep engagement. Two factors make them worth reading even for those of us less personally engaged in Franzen's autobiography. First, Franzen delivers arresting insights and observations on other topics - bird habitat in China, Cypress, and Malta; the way technology has changed our behavior; and especially, how writers write well. If you think about it, you probably have a friend or relative like this - everything in their presence is about them, not sooner or later, but continuously; but they're fascinating company, and anyway, you're not going to change them. Here's the second reason to read these essays: in the best ones, such as the reviews of Alica Munro's short stories ('What Makes You So Sure You're Not the Evil One Yourself?') and Paula Fox's Desperate Characters ('No End To It'), Franzen addresses subjects he seemingly can't bring into orbit around himself. The resulting tension lights up these essays, opening up space for the reader to sit, absorb, and think independently. Unlike perhaps the majority of other readers, the one piece in this collection that I think misses the mark is the title essay, 'Further Away', about Franzen's trip to Selkirk Island (setting for Robinson Crusoe's real-life alter ego). There, he contemplates loneliness, risks falling off a cliff while searching for a rare bird in a storm, and mourns his late friend, David Foster Wallace. As always, the writing is elegant; but the piece seems to me to reflect a waypoint in a much longer grieving process, before Franzen had really found a way to absorb Wallace's suicide into the narrative of his own life. For example: Franzen acknowledges that Wallace was depressed and in great pain before his suicide, but on another level, can't let go of a conception of Wallace as a calculating, and therefore morally culpable, actor. The piece is heartfelt and at points beautiful, but lacks the internal balance and integration of most of the other essays.

While I think Franzen's part

* One of the best authors to arise in the past 20 years
* A grumpy old man
* A fascinating trove of bird-love

this collection of essays focuses on a few things, namely book-reviews, his love for birding, the life, times and death of his friend and brotherly rival David Foster Wallace and a few travels, e.g. to China and Italy.

His genius shines through his grumpiness at times, for instance, when writing about modern technology, which doesn't just sound grumpy, but is insightful and funny:

Consumer-technology products, of course, would never do anything this unattractive, because they’re not people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability, the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

Franzen's honesty is at times very striking, both in fiction and also in these essays. While delving into his relationship to his late parents, it is also notable to see his relationship with his current partner - a couple of times referred to as "a Californian" - and his ex-wife.

From a speech on being a writer, where he lists four questions he often is asked during interviews and goes into them on different levels:

The second perennial question is: What time of day do you work, and what do you write on? This must seem, to the people who ask it, like the safest and politest of questions. I suspect that it’s the question people ask a writer when they can’t think of anything else to ask. And yet to me it’s the most disturbingly personal and invasive of questions. It forces me to picture myself sitting down at my computer every morning at eight o’clock: to see objectively the person who, as he sits down at his computer in the morning, wants only to be a pure, invisible subjectivity. When I’m working, I don’t want anybody else in the room, including myself.

He writes on writer's block, on how birds are treated on Cyprus, collates thoughts on his parents in a quite non-soppy way, which is nice, and goes on to dissect a former marriage. It all ties into "Freedom", his magnum opus.

Funny near-luddite things:

One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I’m still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already, Grampaw—this is just the way life is now.

I’m not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late twentieth century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs.

And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor’s television set. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinemagoers, so many openmouthed crunchers of popcorn.

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It’s about sparing me from the intrusion of other people’s personal lives.

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don’t see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I’m very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

From a trip to China:

the final push into a new hemisphere came two years ago, shortly after Ji was named a Model Citizen. Because of China’s population policy, one thing a Model Citizen really can’t do is have more than one child. Ji already had a boy from a previous marriage, and his wife had a daughter from her previous marriage. They were now expecting their first child as a couple, which would be Ji’s second. One night, when his wife was six months pregnant, the two of them decided that she should go to Canada to have the baby. Their child was born in Vancouver three months later; and Ji was able to remain a Model Citizen.

On the book "The Laughing Policeman" by Sjöwall/Wahlöö, from Sweden:

“The weather was abominable,” the authors inform us on the first page of The Laughing Policeman; and abominable it remains thereafter. The floors at police headquarters are “dirtied” by men “irritable and clammy with sweat and rain.” One chapter is set on a “repulsive Wednesday.” Another begins: “Monday. Snow. Wind. Bitter cold.” As with the weather, so with society as a whole. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s negativity toward postwar Sweden—a theme in all ten of their books—reaches its delirious apex in The Laughing Policeman. Not only does the Swedish winter weather inevitably suck, but the Swedish journalists are inevitably sensationalist and stupid, the Swedish landladies inevitably racist and rapacious, the Swedish police administrators inevitably self-serving, the Swedish upper class inevitably decadent or vicious, the Swedish antiwar demonstrators inevitably persecuted, the Swedish ashtrays inevitably overflowing, the Swedish sex inevitably sordid or unappetizingly blatant, the Swedish streets at Christmastime inevitably nightmarish. When Detective Lennart Kollberg finally gets an evening off and pours himself a nice big glass of akvavit, you can be sure that his phone is about to ring with urgent business. Stockholm in the late sixties probably really did have more than its share of ugliness and frustrations, but the perfect ugliness and perfect frustration depicted in the novel are clearly comic exaggerations.

His love for Alice Munro's writing:

But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences.

This is great writing at times, and at its worst, too navel-gazing for my own liking, but then isn't that how we find ourselves at our most naked or delve into insanity?

Franzen essays are about birds, literature, David Foster Wallace and anti-consumerism. He is able to precisely explain what he likes about literature --pure storytelling, an absence of faux literary tricks and moral ambiguity. Franzen is the most aggressively decent person you will ever come across. Or is he just outlandishly passive-agressive?