insolence is not invective

Jonathan Franzen has a new book out, The Discomfort Zone. Are those crickets I hear chirping in my apartment now? However, as if his reappearance on the literati radar weren't irritating enough for me, I goaded myself into reading the review by Michiko Kakutani in today's NY Times.

And after I stopped cursing him for forcing me to actually agree with Kakutani, having wiped the tears of laughter from my cheeks over the irony of a Times reviewer using phrases such as "self-absorption," "pompous," "preening," and "odious" to describe both Franzen and his characters, I realized, no. I am not going to read this book. Not interested. I fell for the hype once before with The Corrections (that Salon.com review is interesting if only to note the further irony of the opening sentence against the date the review was published). That book was long enough and the publicity furor endless enough to count as a "fool me twice, shame on me" moment. MobyLives' Dennis Loy Johnson called that one right just a month after its publication when he wrote, "It's official: Jonathan Franzen is a buffoon."

Not that a criticism such as that would ever faze someone such as Franzen. Someone with his level of self-interest has all his own needs covered. So, in this new tome, which is more self-referential and autobiographical than The Corrections, I need know no more. I'm already familiar with the fact that he's a petulant prig with a narrow entitled view of the world. I don't need to hear any more of how much pleasure he gets at his own self-involvement, in paragraphs that tell us he is freed from the concerns of global warming because he chose not to have kids. In all honesty, how can we be asked to take a man who understands suffering as having been "cocooned in cocoons that were themselves cocooned" seriously as anything other than an overgrown spoiled MFA graduate? I mean, poor baby. Someone who must now, at forty-five battle demons that find him:

"grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments, I run around town in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage, I define as uncool any group to which I can't belong, I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I'm never going to die."

My stomach lurches when I think of how he has crowned himself chronicler and scribe of twenty-first century society and pop culture. G*d help us, even I, on a particularly cynical day, do not believe humankind to be so utterly bereft as to deserve judgment by his adolescent suburban high-hand. Because, if I want to read about a "character" who revels in "deploring other people" and "their lack of perfection" I'd read a novel by a truly talented author, one who did not take pride of ownership in that myopic perspective, but who created from the recognition and observation of the world outside his head. In other words, an artist.

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Illustration © Patricia Storms, care of her blog, BookLust (a terrific blog, despite the defense of Franzen ... her homage to a cover of a book published by Fantagraphics is a brilliant take on Franzen's love of Peanuts).