The Improbability of the Novel

If you take  the last few big novels that have come out and put them along side the other novels that summed up our era then you find they are hopelessly myopic. Jonathan Franzens Freedom gave us a big lazy liberal family slowly disintegrating under the zeitgeist of modern times. But it was limited because it was a wealthy liberal family much like the kind I came from. Except we were not wealthy. But I did recognize the characters much like I recognize the characters in a John Updike novel. They are people I am comfortable with but they are  individuals who are already anachronistic by the time the novel hits the shelves.

If we fast forward to the next big novel of the season then we find Harbach's The Art of Fielding. I am not putting the two in the same category but it is publishing's big foot forward that tells us to wake up and read this book. So I did and I had much the same reaction. Very entertaining novel with a story to tell but no real relevancy to today. And maybe that is asking too much of the novel. Maybe the very speed of today with its instantaneous reckoning puts the novel squarely in the category of telling a very good story but that is about it.

Not that is new thought. Gore Vidal and others sung the death song of the novel thirty years ago with the advent of television and film and of course the Internet. But one does yearn for a novel to sum up our time. You may read  Eugnides The Marriage Plot and come away with the same thought. A good story but not about out time. Of course you can extrapolate our time through the novelists treatment of his characters but it is a bit like stretching out a well chewed piece of gum. There is just no flavor left.

So we fall back to thinking that maybe the the improbability of the novel has hit it's new function. To entertain and enlighten a bit but not really grapple with today. The Great Gatsby was not a big seller in its day and maybe that is the problem. Without the big foot of publishing's approval the novelist is helpless to get his word out. And novels that take on society can be a bit depressing and who wants to read that? So you have your dilemma as the  novelist: write a really entertaining book or starve and write something that comes to grip with the times we live in.

There are many out there who do write about our time. They are busy starving and surviving and collecting rejection letters. Occasionally a few do get through, like Mcinerney's Bright Lights Big City did in the eighties. But that is a galaxy from a long time ago and it is curious that Jonathan Franzen seems to be our only oracle now. Pity he can only cover one family at at time.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Big Book--Tender is the FREEDOM

Well I finished the BIG BOOK--finally. No insult to Franzen, it is just I am a slow reader of fiction and FREEDOM is a big book and so it took me...two months! Wow. But the BIG BOOK deserves  big time and I am very glad I put the time into Franzen's opus after having written on my early struggles with the book (see Falling off the Freedom Train). But to the book. The very large story of the very liberal family the Berglunds. Coming from a very large liberal family myself I certainly recognized the characters and their Correctionseqe adventures in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty first century. Their resolution echoed The Corrections in it's powerful build  and fall and then became Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night with its' final send off the main character Dick who was "ended up in this town or that."

The structure was curious. Patty's journal was wet mud on the normally bracing Franzen prose. Of course again my touchstone is The Corrections. I confess to not minding the New Yorker style of writing of information upon information given in rapid fire urban hauteur cuisine but that all went away the minute Patty dug in with her life story. Not uninteresting mind you and the Big Book certainly gives the author the license to do just about anything and get away with it under the canvas of the big picture but certainly like the old movie the The Bridge over the River Qai one wonders if the construction wasn't worthy of the train. And what was that train?

Well lets throw out the title. Bad title. I know bad titles and you don't name a book for a theme. A bit like hitting someone over the head with a mallet. You know what this book is about FREEDOM! We don't name our books LOVE DESTINY IRONY SLAVERY LIBERTY. The title does not do the book justice. I have read the reviews in the NY Times and the Atlantic and neither of them seemed on the mark. The book is not about FREEDOM. It is not about what FREEDOM has done to the country. It is a statement on the last thirty years maybe. A snapshot of certain parts of American society in the seventies eighties nineties and I certainly will not take from the book it's import in making a statement. It did. A good statement, and what that is I will give to the reader. But on the bottom of all that statement is a  love story.

Whoops. How pedantic. Maybe, but while the book soars in parts with the overall throw of the Berglunds and all their chilluns and their convolutions--at the very bottom is Walter and Patty. Sorry. I do believe the book encompasses much of our world and says a great many things about a great many moments but without the title (remember we took it away) NO FREEDOM...the book becomes more of a movement than a statement.  What more is there than the love story that consumes the book from beginning to end? It is not about the birds, Joey's foray into selling bad truck parts, Walters foray into population control, Katzs foray into music,  Patty's foray into...what? Sports. Depression. Motherhood. It is not about how liberal families empower their children to become monsters. They do. It is about this very liberal family coming apart under the pressure of good old American capitalism and eroding social values. But if we take away the very large title of FREEDOM. What do you have? You have Patty and Walter.

Not a bad thing. Fitzgerald wrote a love story in Tender is the Night in Dick Diver and Nicole and this too was about the dissolution of a couple and their while maybe not liberal tendencies maybe renaissance ex patriot too rich for their britches lifestyle. But the dissolution of Walter Berglund echoes Dick Diver right down to the stripping away of belief in this world and the final line where Dick returns to the Midwest and is to be found in some little town. Walter shares a similar fate in his lake reatreat but then does return to New York in a sort of lost return to his old life, leaving his home as a bird sanctuary for his girfriend whom is given love of his life status though we never feel it....her death is covered in one paragraph and that is that.

So what do we have here in the BIG BOOK. I appreciate the book because it is big and Franzen took a shot at the big prize. I dont' think he hit it. No cheap praise here but of course but The Corrections was better because it did capture a moment in time and knocked it to the floor for all to see--the final showdown of the nuclear Midwestern family of the late twentieth century the American Century and we shall not see it's kind again.  That is the power of The Corrections--stumbling into the great American modality of the bourgeoisie and it's doom. Wow. Great title by the way. But FREEDOM is no CORRECTIONS.

Saying all that. I am a Franzen fan top to bottom. Love his essays. Love his books. That doesn't mean he has to hit it out of the park every time. I enjoy even the grounders.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man due out Januray 2011.

Falling off the Freedom Train

The problem with reading a book that everyone says is great is it colors your natural inclination to decide for yourself if you like the book or not. Writers start out being told what books they should read. The Classics. So you wade through a lot of books early on thinking I should read this I should read this I should read this, even though many times you are bored out of your skull. But that brings up that old saw that some books require the reader to do the heavy lifting for the payoff. Ulysses comes to mind as a example of a book I had to labor through and by the end I was glad I did it.

But I have to confess I have fallen off the Freedom train. There may be no place in heaven for men who read boring books as Saul Bellow said, but there also is no place in heaven for men or women who read books endorsed by everyone on the planet including the big Kahuna--you know her name--Oprah. But I am a seasoned reader who did read old dusty books by DWM (dead white males) for years that required effort to some degree and did not give a lot of payoff. But The Freedom train has proved particularly daunting and I am having trouble convincing myself this will better my literary palate in the long run.

It is Patty Berglunds autobiography that has thrown me under the bus. I just don't care about this woman and her adventures in basketball and being a lesbian. I keep sitting down to read it and I just fall off the back of  the Freedom train every time. I will keep reading for prose alone. Plot does not have to draw me in, but I see none of the flourish of The Corrections or even of Franzen's essays, so... I just stop reading. Now I did stop reading The Corrections also and then I picked it back up. But Alfred and Enid seem like Die Hard II compared to the turgid autobiography of Patty Berglund.

But the real problem is that I am reading a book people have called the book of the century. It seems almost blasphemous to say this book isn't holding me. There must be something here I am missing. I must just be too dumb to see it. Cretin. Obviously the rest of the world including Oprah have seen something incredible, lasting, eminently brilliant that the Cretin is missing. So I will get back on the Freedom train and I will continue to read Patty Berglund's autobiography.  I just hope we come to a mountain, a curve, a town...something. I mean I know the book is great. Everyone says so.

William Hazelgrove's forthcoming novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Plowing through Freedom--makes you wonder

I am just in the beginning of Franzen opus, but I have to confess to  questioning a novel that veers on page thirty to the main character Patty Berglund writing about her life. Talk about stopping the action. I know, wrong book, go read an action thriller. But even in literary land  it is back story, but maybe all the book is back story. Anyway it got me to thinking about how certain authors and books can break all the rules and still sell a zillion copies. I know I know there are no rules for the masters. True, but a biographical diary essentially on page thirty definitely detours from the plot. 

So then you start to think, well if someone is anointed early on then how much is talent and how much is assumption? The publishers assume Franzen is going to write something great and the reviewers assume Franzen is going to write something great (except the Atlantic) and so the public is told this is great and then Oprah hits it with her wand and game over. But what if the book isn't so great?  In real time bestseller land does that matter?

I suppose it is no different with a movie billed to the biggest and best and most expensive ever made. If it doesn't live up to expectations does that matter? The ball of publicity and assumption is rolling and it is very hard to stop that momentum. The second Franzen wrote this book the machine pumped up The Corrections boiled plate and Freedom quickly became Corrections II...except he didn't slam Oprah this time around. And frankly I wonder if Franzen wonders about all the hub-bub over this novel.

I mean we all think what we write is great or we hoped it is. But you know if you wrote a good book before the reviewers weigh in. They may not like it, they may hate it, and the public may not buy it, but you know in your heart of hearts if it good or not. Conversely you know if you write a bad book. You just can't hide from yourself when it is all said and done.

I am enjoying the novel. I'm only on page thirty one, so maybe this Patty Berglund biography will turn out to be a great vehicle for telling the story. But a monster back story on page thirty...well...it makes you wonder.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.
www.billhazelgrove.com

The Atlantic Review of Freedom

Well somebody had to do it. The review in the Atlantic burns Mr. Franzen to the ground and calls him a bad writer, basically a blogger, and skewers the book as trivial. The basic argument is that there is nothing to the novel except a lot of everything but the kitchen sink. The review is extensive and really one should read it because it probably asks the question in a very basis sense...where's the beef?

Truly there is this aspect to Franzen fiction. Dazzled by the run of facts and plot twists and well just words and words and words,  his fiction does leave one thinking that maybe serious fiction took a turn in the road and you missed it. Writers are forever on the lookout for something new and with Franzen you think, well I will never do that...I simply don't know enough. But then does all that information lend itself to novels?

Novels are funny creatures. The perfect novel is elusive, so we settle on something that elevates and hopefully people can enjoy from all walks of life. Along comes Franzen and says no no no the novel is gigantic and sprawling and encompasses just about everything and you really don't have to dip too far into the well of character, just keep moving. I of course am pulling from his novel The Corrections (I have not read Freedom) and books of essays I have read. His style is not that different from nonfiction to fiction.

So I understand why The Atlantic went after him. There is something missing from his fiction. Maybe some sort of  humanism, but that is not it really, because in the final chapter of The Corrections we find a very human family falling apart.  Mr. Franzen writes about family extensively yet he has no children, no family of his own...not that you have to have children to write about families, but it does give you another dimension beyond the oh my God bourgeois family life is a dysfunctional horror theme.You don't want to fall into the old why do you write depressing books because fiction asks questions and gets under our skin if it is any good. But does Franzen skate on the surface while letting go with his staccato observations because  cold intellectualism ultimately gets in his way? Maybe he does know too much.



William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man
www.billhazelgrove.com

The Corrections-- a novel of a world gone by

I reread Franzen's The Corrections as a warm up to Freedom. I have to confess I couldn't stay with The Corrections years ago when I took a shot at it. I just wasn't ready for all that back story. But this time I was. Maybe I was more determined, maybe I just a better reader. I don't know. But I finished the book and of course I had a very strong reaction to the ending chapter which to me was the book.

To me it is a Midwestern novel. No surprise here since the Lamberts are from the Midwest and the  novel pivots around getting together for a last Christmas before Albert the father goes permanently insane and general implosion occurs among the Lambert siblings.  The majority of the novel takes place in the East where the Lambert children struggle through their lives. Like The Great Gatsby we are watching that essentially Midwestern morality bang up against the early twenty first century decadence of America before 9/11. In this way we have an unfair advantage, we know about the planes to come.

But the novel circles back to St Jude and here is where the novel shines. The last days of Albert Lambert and truly the last days of twentieth century America play out in the Lambert household as a movie that has become old, sentimental, and horribly dysfunctional. Nothing fits anymore and the ragged warmth of the Midwest is much like the warm ragged center of the world  for Nick Caraway when he returned from the war in Gastby. The house and the rituals are all in place but they are vestiges of a world that no longer exists. Truly, the horror of the last pages is no one has any place anymore in the world. The stage is set for that fateful day in September

The Corrections is a perfect snapshot of our pre 9/11 World . More than that it pegs that WW II generations fierce devotion to ritual at all costs and shows the futility of those rituals in a world that no longer is anchored in the American century. Lets see where Freedom picks up.

William Hazegrove's novel Rocket Man is due on in the fall.
A Catcher in the Rye for the forty something generation
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Fiction and Politics

I was reading Frank Rich's editorial on Obama's speech on the end of the war in Iraq when he made an interesting connection. He basically said that Obama did not read Franzen's new novel because there is no way he would have made the speech he did if he had. Ahah. Well, obviously Frank Rich read his book because he then gave a mini description and said Franzen had defined freedom in a way that made Obama's speech look shallow and disingenuous. Boy, when the NY Times go for a book they really go for a book!

Invoking fiction is fine. It is even better now that fiction is under siege for relevancy in the digital age. So I applaud drawing a line between big themes and a current novel. Obviously Frank Rich felt in his piece that the President had been laying it on thick on a war that should have never been started in the first place and that Franzen's novel sums up this theme of Freedom, encompassing even our debacle in the Mid East as well.

Franzen might well have put his finger on something here. Presidents are influenced by literature. We all heard about Obama reading Lincoln's letters and that his favorite novel  BF (before Franzen) was For Whom the Bell Tolls and that he is a very accomplished writer himself. Now whether or not he squeezed in Franzen's novel on vacation is any one's guess. It is a long book and so maybe between wife and children and all those pesky duties of being President, he didn't finish the book.

Let's say he did finish the novel, would insights gained by reading Freedom had changed the President's speech on the end of our combat role in Iraq? Ah probably not. No offense to Jonathan Franzen, but the nuances of fiction are more subtle than the hard ball of geopolitics and let's face it...ah, it is fiction.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Dare of Franzen's Fiction

I have gone back to reread The Corrections before taking on Freedom. Reading Jonathan Franzen is a bit like taking a crash course on just about everything. As Oprah said in her famous dispute with the author, "he threw in everything but the kitchen sink." Maybe he did or maybe he didn't, but there is certainly no less is more at play with Franzen's novels. Of course I say that and maybe he cut the book down from several thousand pages so there you go Mr. Hemingway.

But reading Franzen is rigorous. He dares you to let your mine wander. The way he dares your level of erudition if not just outright knowledge on the world at large. The fiction writer as fountain of information certainly is at play here. I do think he dares those New York Times reviewers and editors and New Yorker readers with voluminous knowledge on a myriad of subjects. Fiction writers should have a grasp on pieces of everything ,but Franzen seems to have a grasp on just about everything and it is all there in his prose.

And it is this type of rocket fueled fiction that garners the paychecks and pushes one to the top of the literary mountain. No one can dare to out Franzen Franzen except maybe David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest. The two writers were friends and it would seem to make sense because the same hyper intelligence is at play to some degree in both men. Again the dare comes in...dare to take it all on and come up with a synthesis that puts your fiction into a coherent narrative.

So what am I saying? I admire Franzen's essays and I admire his novels, but I find a curious skating on ice quality to the volumes of information given in block pages with little break. Again the bye given to Franzen would suffocate most editors of other authors fiction. That they deem we should know about (the Corrections) Chips dealings in Soviet Russia or Denise's strange machinations with a restaurateur's wife and the intricacies of being a chef... well it is a testament to the writer. He has obviously dared the critics, the editors, and  a hell of a lot of readers to call him on the volumes of back story in his novels and nobody has called his bluff. In fact with Franzen, one could make the case the back story is the story.

I suppose it comes down to your definition of fiction  If you want the big New York Times book review summation of American life book, then maybe Franzen is for you. But if you want that personal moment defined, the living and breathing of every day life, the little tar bubbles on the roof, or the wet galoshes of your childhood in the closet, or maybe the man in the pink suit watchng over nothing outside the bedroom window...then maybe Franzen is not your man.  Guess I'll read Freedom and find out.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Informational Novel

Jonathan Franzen's new novel from the reviews I have read would seem to have the same scope as The Corrections. His novels seem to encompass the world at large and we are fairly bombed with information on a wide range of subjects. The late David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest comes to mind as another informational novel. Both men have encyclopedic intellects that dump out facts and figures in computer jet streams. Science is important to both authors  and so is technology and we get lots and lots of information.

This doesn't mean there is not emotional underpinning to these novels. But in the case of The Corrections it seemed the novel shifted from an emotional novel in the beginning to an informational one in the middle and then back again. Franzen has wide knowledge and I really enjoy his essays. But it is interesting that in the age of the Internet we seem to have our top novelists painting a wide canvas of intellectual treatises on wide ranging subjects that at time feel more like non fiction than fiction.

The novels of old were more concerned with the existential moment or at least the emotional moment. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac, Faulkner, none of these men really moved out of the small canvas novel.  They would stay in a world and we were expected to learn from a much smaller microcosm. Nick Carraways' world in The Great Gatsby while the world of 1920's jazz age was really confined to his fixation on Gatsby and the personal moment. Fitzgerald never ventures out to the tight emotional cage if you will of his characters. Same with Hemingway. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan's world is limited to what he feels and sees and experiences in the caves of Spain.

Maybe it is the difference between post modern and modern, but I suspect it is also a result of our information age. Information is king now. We want  more and more of it and so our novelists seem to give us the big canvas. But if fiction reveals the irony of truth, are we throwing out the baby with the bath water as our world shrinks a little more with our denotative bits and bytes? Fiction, after all, should be a flight into the other world of the road not considered...at the least it shouldn't be grounded by our information age.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. The story of a man who moves to the suburbs and loses his mind. http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Top of the literary mountain

Writers are covetous. They see someone else in the paper or on television or on the cover of Time magazine and you think well that should have been me. Sames goes for those million dollar advances one hears of (although it seems one hears less of them now) but it kicks off all sorts of authornomics that run the realm of: I must be doing something wrong or there is something everyone knows that I don't. A questioning of ones' reason for writing then rears it's ugly head.

Take Jonathan Franzen. Top of the mountain. His book is being heralded as the literary event of the decade. Well...the decade is ending or beginning however you want to look at it. So he is either first out of the box or pulling up with a final sprint leaving all contemporaries in the dust. Either way he is for now at the top of the literary mountain. Reading about his lifestyle does one no good in looking for clues as to how he made this arduous climb.

He likes to watch birds and is uninterested in media and pushing his book. Wow. Now that is different from our blog-to-you-drop author ethos that every midlist author must come to terms with. The hell of it all is you don't know really where you are in the pecking order until someone like Franzen comes along. Then you realize you have a lot of pecking to go. He hangs out in San Diego and New York. Top of the mountain baby...does it get any better than that?

So is the book any good? Who knows. We will all have to decide for ourselves since the literary community has closed ranks and it has been deemed sent from on high. It happens. Critics can destroy you or they can lift you to the heavens and a lot of the times they run in packs. Franzen has been lifted to the heavens on their shoulders to the top of the mountain. His novel will tell the tale.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Novelist on Time Magazine

Jonathan Franzen is on the cover of Time Magazine for his new novel Freedom. Time is thin gruel for news now but a novelist making it on the cover of any magazine is something to note. Rock stars, politicians, tyrants, terrorists...they have all been there but few writers. Franzen looks like a writer with a stubble and glasses and some kind of strange toning that makes it look like he just might be animated.

That Time decided to put a novelist on the front and declared him the next...what? Voice of all mankind, his generation...a strange bird still at large during the Internet...a literary writer, is very encouraging to all writers. Sure, everyone wants to be on the cover of a magazine but writers get such little play that it is good someone in the editorial offices of Time  took a flyer on that art of old...the fiction writer who might just put substance before money. It did stand out as something different.

The dentists office I discovered this magazine in was plastered in tabloid fair and wannabe People magazine ripoffs. I was alone in my reading of Franzen's life as a bird watcher, his lifestyle between New York and San Diego something to envy, and of course his new novel. They even broke out writers into three categories, literary guard, contemporary novelists (Franzen and a few others) and then the up and coming young Turks. The decisions on these writers is not necessarily books sales which makes it more interesting. Time previewed Franzen on the cover as saying he is not a rich writer. Or the richest. This alone would buck the trend of magazine covers. Superlatives aside, richest in America is usually game over. Most famous for whatever reason including quitting your airline job might be cause for getting on a cover. But to write a literary novel that does well and might sum up our time...well, that usually is found in Publishers Weekly or the New York Times book review.

So maybe it is the fact that Time magazine is on life support they decided to throw one for the gipper. Maybe Franzen really is a breed alone that deserves to be on the cover of Time. He did dish Oprah and sold even more books because of it. But then again, maybe someone, occasionally, puts art over commerce, and we see a man with a stubble and glasses, looking like, well, a writer.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/