Jonathan Franzen stands up for the pursuit of truth — however painful

 
Jonathan Franzen Photo: Rex Features
Sarah Sands7 June 2012

Farther Away
by Jonathan Franzen
(4th Estate, £16.99)

This book of essays by Jonathan Franzen covers various subjects but the unifying theme is truthfulness.

He stands for lucidity of expression, which is not the same thing as ease. The lesson of Franzen is that honesty and excellence come from blood, sweat and tears. His first essay, about our love affair with technology and social media, is entitled Pain Won’t Kill You.

Some of the essays were written as academic or literary speeches, so there is a professorial air to them. One was written for the memorial service of his friend David Foster Wallace, the author, who committed suicide. This is Franzen at his finest. He has to pay tribute to his friend and comfort the bereaved without romanticising or mitigating the circumstances. He is finely attuned and precise in his language. Franzen makes a more complete sense of his friend’s life and tragedy in a separate essay in which Franzen takes some of Wallace’s ashes to scatter on an isolated island 500 miles off the coast of Chile.

This story is about several things. It is a bid by Franzen to test himself in the most inhospitable conditions and to re-examine his relationship with humanity by removing himself from it. It is also a literary analysis of Robinson Crusoe — “the great early document of radical individualism, the story of an ordinary person’s practical and psychic survival in profound isolation”. Thirdly, there is a spot of bird-watching.

Franzen thus tells a compelling adventure story which also serves as a metaphor for Wallace’s depression and contains the secret of redemption, in a bird’s plumage. Bird- watching is what Franzen means by happiness. It takes patience and attention but the rewards are a sense of equilibrium in the world.

He once tried to show Wallace a long-billed curlew, “a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory”. Wallace looked for a few seconds and turned away. “‘Yeah,’ he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, ‘it’s pretty’.”

In a late visit to Wallace’s home, Franzen gazes at a hummingbird while Wallace takes a medicated nap. “I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not.”

To Franzen, Wallace was a complex and loveable man cursed by a mental illness. What he loathes is the attempt by the literary establishment to laud Wallace because of his suicide. In the public myth-making, the truth is lost.

In a terrific essay on social media, he attacks the same falseness of sentiment. He starts by diagnosing the infatuation with the BlackBerry as an erotic ideal “in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object ...”

His suspicion about technology is that it aims “to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts”.

He moves on to social media, “a private hall of flattering mirrors”. Narcissism must never be confused with love. This is Franzen’s distilled wisdom: “What love is really about is a bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.”

He is unflinching about the price of empathy. There is a good essay on autobiographical fiction in which he documents the breakdown of his marriage. He claims his prolonged loyalty to his wife prevented him from creative self-realisation. He felt guilty because his books sold better, when the agreement of the marriage had been that they were created equal. It is tough reading, especially I imagine for the former Mrs Franzen.

As with Martin Amis, Franzen believes literary excellence trumps all other considerations. I especially like his focus on detail. There is a funny short essay entitled Comma-Then. Franzen says that if you use the following construction, he will never take you seriously as a writer.

“She lit a Camel Light, then dragged deeply.” Real people would say: “She lit a Camel Light and dragged deeply.”

This is a book for those interested in how to live as well as how to write.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in