Good teeth

Lucy Kellaway lunches with Jonathan Franzen for the FT. I am laughing, I have been a Franzen defender in my time (his books are better than 95% at least of those with a reasonable claim to be worth reading, why trash him?), but he does have a nearly unprecedented ability to say things that make him sound utterly insufferable!

I bogged down halfway through Purity (might finish it this weekend) - the East German scenes seem to me embarrassingly bad, and the limited range of characters and emotions (especially female characters and female emotions) struck me more here than with his last couple books, but it is certainly well above the bar of basic readability...

Crusoe's island

I was both interested in and strangely bored by Jonathan Franzen's essay in this week's New Yorker on his friendship with David Foster Wallace and the strange allure of visiting a desert island with only a copy of Robinson Crusoe.

It is appropriate to the subject of the essay that it should be boring in parts.

(I was tickled by the birding detail about having already seen Crusoe's "two endemic land-bird species" and losing patience with the notion of another week on a small and isolated island where one wouldn't see any new birds!)

(Also tickled by Franzen's evident enthusiasm for Pamela - but he really should read Clarissa!....)

The bit that most caught my attention, both because I found it extremely sharp and perceptive in its phrasing and because I wondered whether it would be endorsed by others who spent intimate time with DFW in the last year of his life (it refers specifically to DFW's decision, after twenty years, to stop taking the antidepressant Nardil):

He made strange and seemingly self-defeating decisions about his care, engaged in a fair amount of bamboozlement of his shrinks (whom one can only pity for having drawn such a brilliantly complicated case), and in the end created an entire secret life devoted to suicide. Throughout that year, the David whom I knew well and loved immoderately was struggling bravely to build a more secure foundation for his work and his life, contending with heartbreaking levels of anxiety and pain, while the David whom I knew less well, but still well enough to have always disliked and distrusted, was methodically plotting his own destruction and his revenge on those who loved him.

It is like something out of a novel by Susan Howatch, somehow; but is it perceptive and true or perceptive and false? Impossible for me to say...

Monday miscellany

Death at age 98 of a Danish actor said to have been a model for Tintin.

The desk of Oliver Sacks (thanks to Dave Lull).

An Explosionist review, an Invisible Things review.

Suggestive excerpts from Jonathan Franzen's "art of fiction" interview in the forthcoming Paris Review.

A mighty appealing essay by Alexander Chee about book surpluses, e-readers and a life of reading.

Unedifying results

There is a glibness to all of these essays (written in response to a college-application-style prompt with a constraint of one hour), but they would be perhaps worth contemplating by those in a position where such such constraints are familiar (college applicants, academic job-seekers, etc.).

Also at the Guardian: Ed Pilkington interviews Jonathan Franzen. Hard to see how one would read this interview and not feel that almost any life would be better than the novelist's ("I don't owe anybody anything and I don't have to feel bad today because I just wrote 1,200 words")!

Toffee composition

Just finished Freedom. Not War and Peace, certainly, but highly absorbing in a way that I value. Here's a relatively late paragraph I liked quite a bit, about the Berglund tins of candy that "had gradually morphed, over the years, from a treat into a reminder of treats past":

The candy job was too large and important to be left to Dorothy and Walter alone. Production began on the first Sunday of Advent and continued through most of December. Necromantic metalware--iron cauldrons and racks, heavy aluminum nut-processing devices--came out of deep closets. Great seasonal dunes of sugar and towers of tins appeared. Several cubic feet of unsweetened butter was melted down with milk and sugar (for chocolateless fudge) or with sugar alone (for Dorothy's famous Christmas toffee) or was smeared by Walter onto the reserve squadron of pans and shallow casseroles that his mother, over the years, had bought at rummage sales. There was lengthy discussion of "hard balls" and "soft balls" and "cracking." Gene, wearing an apron, stirred the cauldrons like a Viking oarsman, doing his best to keep cigarette ash out of them. He had three ancient candy thermometers whose metal casings were shaped like fraternity paddles and whose nature it was to show no increase in temperature for several hours and then, all at once and all together, to register temperatures at which fudge burned and toffee hardened like epoxy. He and Dorothy were never more a team than when working against the clock to get the nuts mixed in and the candy poured. And later the brutal job of cutting too-hard toffee: the knife blade bowing out under the tremendous pressure Gene applied, the nasty sound (less heard than felt in the bone marrow, in the nerves of the teeth) of a sharp edge dulling itself on the bottom of a metal pan, the explosions of sticky brown amber, the paternal cries of God fucking damn it, and the querulous maternal entreaties not to swear like that.

Reality hunger

Sam Anderson on Jonathan Franzen's new novel:

I hadn’t expected to be nearly so engaged by all of this. I picked Freedom up out of a sense of duty, then read it semi-addictively and finished it in just a few days. The difference between reading Franzen firsthand and thinking about him from a distance is the difference between having a dream and trying to tell someone about it three years later. I had forgotten the special pleasures of living inside a Franzen text: the precision with which he charts the excruciating compromises of adulthood; the order he imposes on his characters’ muddled self-consciousness; the strange catharsis of self-sabotage and psychic pileups; the escalating comedy. (There’s a classic scene in which Joey, after accidentally swallowing his wedding ring, is forced to deal with the digestive consequences several days later while sharing a luxury hotel room with another woman.) Some of Freedom’s sentences are so well-written you want to pluck them out, stab them with little corn holders, and eat them: “Like a cold spring at the bottom of a warmer lake, old Swedish-gened depression was seeping up inside him.” And the stakes here feel a little higher than they did in The Corrections. Franzen seems more deeply invested in his characters’ happiness. He’s tilted the compassion:contempt ratio slightly toward the former. I found myself identifying with the book—thinking in new ways about recent events in my friends’ lives, in my own life. It made me think, many times, of one of David Foster Wallace’s favorite edicts about fiction: that the good stuff can make readers feel less lonely.