Strong Emotion
Image courtesy of the Centre for Literary Arts of San José
It marks a decade now since my best friend and I decided we’d take our talents to South Africa, a la LeBron James and Chris Bosh taking their talents to South Beach for the Miami Heat. (There’s nothing like a strikingly appropriate sports metaphor to justify a potentially misguided life decision.) We packed up for Johannesburg with nothing much in our bags, or bank accounts, eager to ply our artistic and literary trades in a city that might listen. Personally I was walking away from my first real job in advertising, a real opportunity to cash a paycheque for writing — but it had to mean something, and I wasn’t sure it would mean anything in my homeland.
In my probation period, I used the office Internet to read everything I could on The New Yorker’s website, in between increasingly mundane tasks. I must have read ‘Good Neighbours’, an extract from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, at least a dozen times. In a sweeping first chapter Franzen uses the suburban radius of Patty Berglund’s homestead to reduce men and women alike to their baser instincts — ruthlessly diminishing folks that work their jobs, pay their bills, negotiate midlife malaise, as simply lacking the agency to do anything besides. As no better morally than they believe themselves to be.
I own a copy of Freedom and have never ventured past a few chapters, for fear that the rest of the book might not match the magic of that New Yorker extract. After a long and winding description of somebody’s car engine, amid a larger treatise on how a particular woman can’t help but stick her nose in her neighbours’ business, Franzen informs us that, “Patty frightened nobody,” and the rest of that sentence just slaloms across such perilous ice. I was not well-read in contemporary fiction, at the time, for being unable to afford books — so to hear anyone pirouette like that, collapse and resuscitate a paragraph so effortlessly, was astounding. I could hear a melody in this man’s cynical tirade, but also precious little emotion. As though all Franzen was doing was reporting on the silliness and abject futility of human nature, of ever trying to care about anyone and anything.
Between quitting that job and making for Johannesburg, I read everything that had Franzen’s name on it. I related to the loneliness of this man, to his penchant for being misunderstood when he spoke outside the confines of a novel. I’d been agnostic for ten years by then, all the way out of high school, and Franzen was apathy embodied: a sharp and sober observer of worldly concourse and sociological phenomena, who didn’t let any manner of fanaticism get in the way of writing the most devastating sentences possible. The last of Franzen’s Ten Rules for Writing, “You have to love before you can be relentless,” didn’t mean anything to me at the time, and didn’t at all seem connected to writing. But I clung to every last word, and quite tragically I’ve been nothing but relentless ever since. I told myself I wanted what Franzen had: the power to impact a room without ever actually entering it.
Johannesburg was good fun. It was being dragged to braais without making any prior arrangements, and it was barely affording fish and chips or Oreo cookie sundaes when my pal and I scored a few rand off a random job. I spent some of that on Strong Motion, Franzen’s second published novel. I tried to inflect a postmodernist fairy tale for tax-paying adults, in which a knight-in-shining armour embarks on a serial-killing spree, with his poise and brutality, and just a little bit of my own disregard for rules. Back then I believed I wrote books not just to make it to New York but to interest and impress Jonathan Franzen. Somewhere along the line I learned of his passion for bird-watching, and took to noticing what creatures stooped down onto the grass, the sidewalk. I felt proud to be channeling the modern day master of American literature in that way, with nature for a muse. At night I slept on a floor, softened some by a wintry blanket, and I sometimes had to eat the peels off oranges to make oranges feel like supper. But I had Franzen for a few weeks, if I read Strong Motion slowly, carefully, and that made up for quite frightening odds economically.
An earthquake hits Boston in what should be the late 80s, in Strong Motion. The event acts as a catalyst for friction within the Holland family, whose matriarch leaves behind an unsettled estate. Her grandson Louis is the novel’s pseudo-protagonist, who falls for a seismologist named Renee and with whom he has a less than healthy relationship. Franzen demonstrates an unreal ability to write to scale, to alter dimension constantly as he uses the era’s Red Sox baseball team to encapsulate the city’s mood and fortunes — frames the excess of Big Oil against the progressiveness of idealists like Louis and, really, actually, Renee — and loudly questions the values and tactics of an anti-abortion religious movement.
I stuck with a novel that swooped up and down more than Johannesburg’s streets did. I remember marvelling at the coupe de grace in which Renee disrupts a pro-life gathering with a megaphone, and yells all her personal details at the crowd: her birth date, her social security number, etc, to protest the idea that her body belongs to anyone besides herself. There are no doubt points in all good difficult novels where one sequence of blazing genius justifies all the hard work a reader puts in. I rewound that paragraph when I read it, as though a remote control had been turning the book’s pages for me.
I came back to Zambia and I completed more manuscripts and I queried more agents, and I learned more indirect lessons about all the different ways literary fiction could be devised and presented. I’m hard-pressed to produce the evidence in my own career of any real forward movement, and honestly I never really committed to any of Franzen’s subsequent releases. The Corrections remains half-read, in my closet. I may never finish Freedom. Purity, to me, reeked a little of apology for questionable men, and spoke less to Franzen’s intellectual condition (which interested me) than to a cultural moment that kept trying to prod him in the eye (which didn’t). I also just took it upon myself to diversify the college education I’d had to design from scratch — by exploring the manic outbursts of Paul Beatty, the density of Donna Tartt, the quantum lyrics of Ben Lerner, the immediacy of Lena Dunham.
I have big, meaningful emotions centered on the fact that it’s been ten years since I read Good Neighbours, and doubled all the way down on the idea that I wanted to write for a living. It’s certainly something right now to hear Franzen all mellowed out as he discusses Crossroads, his latest release, with so little of the confrontational nature that precedes and defines him. I’m just glad he made it through the Internet, the pandemic, the decade in one piece. I just hope he’s happier now than all the brilliant words ever implied.
