I read this review of Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, and decided to settle, once for all, why it is I did not like his previous novel, The Corrections, and am further unimpressed by him as a writer, and even as a human being. I will grant that I understand why many people like Franzen, his writing, his subjects. As the author of the Freedom review notes, however, there are two general camps on Franzen: those who like or even love him, and those who cannot stand him. I was taken to task, derided as a culture-Philistine, for my adamant refusal to find anything worthy to say about Franzen's award winning book. Since then, I have read (or perhaps re-read, because I still subscribed to The New Yorker when it appeared) this essay (subscription required) by Franzen recounting the lingering death of his father. It echoes much of the fictional material in The Corrections. Finally, some personal experience and reflections have only reinforced my earlier, aesthetic judgment.
The Corrections, for all that it attempts to encompass the coterminal collapse of a family, it's fortunes, the mental and emotional demise of its pater familias, and simultaneously comment on similar goings on in our culture and society, fails in my estimation for one simple reason - the characters exhibit no traits worthy of sympathy. Indeed, both parents, the two brothers and sister, their various struggles with life, mid-life, parenting, marriage, are rendered in a simultaneous attention to physical detail and absence of any human heart that left this reader feeling not just cold, but disgust. Reflecting the narcissism that is rampant in America in the post-war, and particularly the post-Vietnam, era, they are void of any center, searching for meaning without any emotional involvement; seeking equanimity and finding the chaos of life more a bother than an opportunity; there seems little to bind parent to child, or sibling to sibling beyond a vague sense that it has always been this way. They cannot even be called automatons. If they were, that would be understandable. Under the circumstances, they aren't even comprehensible, let alone pitiable.
Reading Franzen's article on his father's demise from Alzheimer's disease, I realized the one thing missing from both the fictional family disintegration and the factual account of his father's death - I got no sense that Franzen felt anything about what was happening. It simply was, like the detailed descriptions of the surroundings. In fact, I finished Franzen's New Yorker piece wondering why he had bothered. I got no sense that he did now in retrospect, or in the past, ever love his father. This was the story of an event, not a loss. It recounts the inconveniences his father's illness (as well as his mother's constant seeming badgering about it) created in his own life. I got the sense that Franzen would rather have not bothered. In The Corrections, I got the same impression. None of the characters exhibited any emotive qualities at all (beyond a vague anger and frustration over interruptions in their own never-ending search for meaning).
This past January, my father became acutely ill. I raced back to my hometown and, along with my oldest and youngest sisters and mother, sat and worried and wondered whether or not we were going to be present at the end. In the time since then, the general downward course of the physical, emotional, intellectual conditions of both my parents has been a source of sorrow, concern, and a much-vaunted topic of conversation among my siblings. I cannot speak for them, but in my case what shakes me to my core is the way the man and woman who occupy my childhood home seem so different from my mother and father as I recall them, I could be convinced they have been replaced by elderly changelings. Not just physically more taxed, even smaller, their emotional and psychological and intellectual capacities are withering each day. I think of who they were. My mother, with a friend being wary of men hiding in bushes only to discover in the papers the next day it was the FBI ready to nab the gangster "Greasy Thumb" Gulick; my father sharing a stage with Claude Rains and Eva Gabor and a TV screen with Boris Karloff, entertaining and educating a generation of 17 year olds; my mother taking care of me through a very bad bout of flu at the age of eight; my father running bodily in to Charles DeGaulle on the streets of New York in 1942. The man and woman they were is not negated by the reality of who they have become in their final years. Yet, I cannot help but feel that time and advanced age are robbing them both of something vital. Finally, all this, at least in my case, is rooted in a deep love and gratitude for both my parents, for being the wonderfully flawed persons they are, the wonderfully flawed parents they were and are, the marvelous human beings who came together and had the five of us and raised five very different human beings.
That is what is missing from Franzen's novel and essay. Quite simply put, I never sense that Franzen feels anything, most definitely love. Not for his father. Not for the characters in his novel, nor the characters for one another. While I recognize that there are, indeed, people like this in our world, I fail to see anything uplifting in holding them up as examples of Homo Americanus because we are, generally (I would like to think) better than that.
