Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the 34th one.
I’ve been reading the worst books. Some of them got fantastic reviews and are so bad I feel like people need to be warned against reading them. Like A Calling for Charlie Barnes, by Joshua Ferris, which Janet Maslin called dazzling. She says it is funny, clever, and gorgeously written, none of which is true. Reading it made me angry, because it’s sentimental in the Wallace Stevens sense of the word: a failure of feeling. It is doesn’t feel funny or brave or wise because it doesn’t dare to create real people out of its characters, so the stakes couldn’t be lower; it doesn’t matter if a character dies a horrible death or betrays someone they love or if there are funny turns of phrase now and then.
In his classic essay “Mr. Difficult,” about William Gaddis’s experimentalism, Jonathan Franzen describes William Gaddis’s novelistic crimes:
To serve the reader a fruitcake that you wouldn't eat yourself, to build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn't want to live in: this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any fiction writer.
I think by “categorical,” Franzen means moral—like, the category of fiction writer is a moral designation. But I’ll get to that later. First the bad books, which I think are worse crimes than Gaddis’s, because they’re not even trying something, not really. A Calling for Charlie Barnes isn’t an uncomfortable house—it’s a house that looks like every other house on the street, but it’s made out of particle board. But the architect of the house and all the inspectors are saying, “what’s your problem? this is a beautiful house!” They think it’s good enough for you to live in, because you’re just the reader.
Another book like that: Our Country Friends, by Gary Shteyngart, which I saw called “darkly brilliant” somewhere. This book is also sentimental. It wants its characters to have tragic and sexy lives, but it doesn’t care enough to convince you that they are actual people. They’re just dolls being positioned in different scenarios. One of the characters is a movie star, which is almost as careless as when a character is a writer or a professor of creative writing (there are two English professors and one writer in this book). It’s like the writer is thinking, how can I create a character using as little imagination as possible? There are glimmers that this novel could have been good, if Gary Shteyngart had cared to make it good. Here’s something the movie star thinks: “He didn’t want to be an escape for others. He wanted to be supple. To move through this world like a nobody, like a woman in regional sales gliding through airport lounges in the previrus era, always moving, always herself.” That’s so beautiful and funny, this macho handsome movie star wanting to be a woman in regional sales gliding through airport lounges. The last part of this book is a messy phantasmagoric memory about some of the characters’ lives as young people in the 1990s. It is written in a different voice than the rest of the book, and it’s written really badly. “The visuals in his face played against him”; a “bra strap…flirted out of her sundress.” (I hate it when men write about “sundresses.” Have you ever heard a woman say sundress?) But this part of the book has real emotion in it. It’s probably what the book should have been about, rather than (prepare yourself), “The summer of 2020, that year of imperfect vision.”
Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead, is a crime novel in which, according to The Atlantic, “Whitehead uses the genre to expose the hypocrises of the justice system, and the false moral dictates set by capitalism.” I believe the reviewer is referring to moments like this: “Strivers grasped for something better—maybe it existed, maybe it didn’t—and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system,” where obvious pronouncements that gesture vaguely toward social structures are superimposed onto the action. Colson Whitehead is a genius and I love his books, but I think it’s okay to say when they aren’t good. As The Atlantic’s hagiographic review noted, it is a genre novel, and for that reason, I understand that it’s not going to have the attention to sentence-making that I want in a book. That’s not the convention of the form. But “his belly, which perched on his belt like an egg”?! Another particle board propping up the house the writer wouldn’t want to live in. What am I supposed to be picturing in my mind when this image of a belly “perched” a belt like an egg is presented to me? He didn’t bother to imagine it himself, but it’s good enough for me, the reader. And the same information—like that the main character’s wife grew up in a house on street nicknamed Strivers’ Row—is repeated to us again and again as if for the first time. In other words, you’re punished for paying attention. As in Our Country Friends, you get these glimpses of how good this book could have been. A grizzled but good-hearted old criminal watches two tough young guys coming toward the room where he’s hiding and he touches at his stomach, where he has recently been stabbed. “It already hurt from the fighting he was going to do.” That’s so awesome! to read it is to understand something deep about the character, his resolve, humor, and spirit.
Back to Franzen. I told you last time I was going to write about his new novel, Crossroads, but I feel like it’s not substantive enough to write about. While I was reading it, I was so delighted because he's a beautiful writer of sentences. But in the couple months since I read it, I’ve noticed that none of it has stayed with me. I never think about it. Kathryn Schultz had a brilliant review of it in The New Yorker. She calls it “an imperfect novel that is nonetheless a great one, its inner operations lofting it high above its flaws.” She goes on,
Unlike Perry [the young addict who throws everyone’s life into turmoil], in other words, Franzen does not always seem to be doing the best he can. That impression is enhanced by the unmistakable fact that, from time to time, he towers above his own work. I don't just mean that "The Corrections" was the best of his novels; I mean that at some point within each novel he demonstrates the full, showstopping range of what he is capable of doing.
That’s so funny, that Franzen isn’t doing the best he can. She’s right: it’s glaringly clear that there are better novels Franzen can write than the ones he writes. He totally towers above his own work. He would rather write a bad book, or a not great book, or a great but boring book, than to build the reader an uncomfortable house he wouldn’t live in himself. He doubles back to ensure we’re comfortable. I think he considers that his moral work as a writer, to imagine us. I love him for that. But I wish he would enrage and confuse and surprise me in addition to delighting me. There is an Infinite Jest in him. Perry, that addict, could be from Infinite Jest, with his grandeur and delusions of grandeur on endless loop, but he exists within a much more lovingly constructed, less interesting novel. If he were in Infinite Jest, he would be a participant in the loosely knit world that everything—every incident, every person, every thought, every vision—threatens to unravel entirely. The risk in that, that it rubs right up against chaos, might make Infinite Jest an uncomfortable house, but it’s not one that David Foster Wallace wouldn’t have wanted to live in.
When I open my favorite books, no matter how long it’s been since I last opened them, it’s like they were already open in my mind. But in order to get there and stay there, they had to almost be carved. It almost hurts to read a great book. Uncomfortable houses you want to live in.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Lucy woke up and chose violence
Just got directed here from Hilary Plum's website. Looks good, and yeah, Our Country Friends was kinda with worst. He is someone I need to remember to get at the library, if ever, tho I think I'm done forever with him... It's fiction for the elites who need their hands held.
And Franzen's Crossroads felt like a draft that if he weren't Franzen any agent would say, this needs work. I'm feeling a little cranky about dudes with big swinging books right now bc reading The Blizzard Party and it's like, NO ONE has ever told this guy to wait, or defer, or reconsider, or step aside. That sort of I'm-a-guy-and-I've-never-been-challenged-repeatedly-and-so-I-expect-and-find-open-arms-and-success-whereever-I-go,-even-when-I'm-digressing-into-the-expensive-1970s-fishing-gear-of-wealthy-manhattanites-on-Montauck-for-8-pages,-still,-you're-going-to-just-let-me-get-away-with-it,-aren't-you? thing. I'm halfway thru wondering, how do I make it thru the rest? Soulless.