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Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.3.2.0254

2333-9934

Layne Neeper,

Jonathan Franzen, considered by many to be the most important writer of serious fiction of his generation, has proven in his most successfully realized novels that humor serves a serious function in his work. No reader of The Corrections (2001) can forget Chip Lambert stuffing an expensive salmon fillet into his pants at a haute supermarket called Nightmare of Consumption or, pages later, Chip's drugged, impassioned lovemaking to an antique chaise lounge, nor will readers fail to recall the repellant Joey Berglund of Freedom (2010) forced to knead his own excrement in search of the wedding band he had ingested. Franzen's enormous potential is apparent as a novelist in general and as a comic writer in particular, so it is unsurprising that he has become the subject of academic scrutiny. With The Comedy of Rage, Philip Weinstein offers the first critical biography of Franzen to date. Weinstein, a Swarthmore professor and the author of several books on literary modernism and Faulkner most especially, offers an overview of Franzen's life and works up to the time before his latest novel, Purity, was published in 2015.Weinstein describes a central tension that animates Franzen's body of fiction, a tension between what he sees as highbrow rage on the one hand and mainstream acceptance and love on the other, and he grounds his claims in the biographical evidence he amasses. Weinstein's project raises the question of how “a suspicious intellectual loner and the mainstream writer idolized by millions … come together as one person” (2), and for Weinstein, the answer is that Franzen's once-corrosive rage becomes tempered over time by love and that this “oppositional encounter produces … the inimitable comedy of his work” (3). Weinstein charts the early childhood of Franzen as one of alienation and uncertainty, characterized by a distant and taciturn father and an emotionally suffocating mother. He recounts Franzen's formative years as a German major at Swarthmore and details the harrowing dissolution of his marriage, life experiences figured here as the necessary constituents for his career as a novelist.Weinstein, like most commentators on Franzen's fiction, argues that Franzen's first two novels, while promising and intermittently brilliant, are less than wholly successful. The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992) are ambitious but also marred by postmodernist pretensions, and both suffer because Franzen creates caricatures—strawmen—on whom he heaps his curdling invective rather than complexly realized characters capable of evoking compassion and censure in readers. At this stage of his evolution as a writer, Franzen had not tamed his dogmatic predilection for withering highbrow critique of a bankrupt America. In Weinstein's binary reckoning, Franzen chose a “status” over “contract” ethos (Franzen's terms) in his early novels (89). Significantly, Franzen's decision to mine his own fraught family's struggles and transmute the personal into art signals his claim to greatness for Weinstein. The Corrections (2001) abandons formulaic types and gains emotional heft from Franzen's choice to love the characters enough not to judge them; we now witness Franzen's generous attention to dynamic, complex characters drawn from his reimagining of his own father and mother. Likewise, Freedom (2010) features his most complex female character in the person of Patty Berglund, whose many sides are revealed in his sustained and pitch-perfect dramatization of marital discord and resilience. Weinstein's concluding chapters are devoted to Franzen's sometimes notorious New Yorker essays and a cursory overview of Purity (2015), still an unpublished manuscript when Jonathan Franzen went to press.Despite Weinstein's contention that substantial parts of his biographical portrayal of Franzen have been gleaned from interviews and private email exchanges with the author, the evidence suggests that actual engagements with Franzen were limited. Instead, most of the biographical data has been cobbled from previously available and well-known sources, including Franzen's own autobiographical essays, his memoir The Discomfort Zone (2006), and published interviews, such as the lengthy one in the 2010 Paris Review.1 For the rest of the book, Weinstein builds his claims about his subject's steady maturation on what amounts to character studies of Franzen's five novels.In the end, the most perplexing problem posed by Weinstein's book is one of purpose. Why write a critical biography of a young novelist (Franzen was born in 1959) who is, God willing, so emphatically mid-career? In a book-length study, conclusions about such a novelist's place in literary history can be only contingent at best. Moreover, can one really lay claim to writing a biography if the resulting work is more or less a compendium of existing biographical factoids and autobiographical admissions?The book reveals other lapses as well. When stripped to its essence, Weinstein's central argument is simplistic, a variation on the cliché uttered in creative writing workshops: “Write what you know.” In Weinstein's estimation, Franzen's fiction assumes an urgent potency only when he ceases to write difficult postmodernist fiction and instead creatively reworks the particulars of his family life as he does in The Corrections and Freedom. It is unfortunate that Weinstein's book was published before Purity was released; if he had been able to read the final version, he might have found he could no longer endorse such a biographically informed thesis.In his treatment of the biographical evidence of Franzen's life, especially with regard to Franzen's parents, Weinstein is bluntly Freudian in his pronouncements. He avows that Franzen's mother is the prototype for all his female characters over five novels. He asks rather breezily, “Is there any doubt that, behind these troubled maternal portraits, there lies the clamorous figure of Irene Franzen?” (19). He argues that son Jonathan is locked in Oedipal agon with his father, Earl, and with other strong novelists such as Thomas Pynchon and most pointedly David Foster Wallace, concluding that “this Oedipal model lodges at the core of Franzen's imaginary” (22). Readers, however, may well find such psychologizing dated and perhaps a little hackneyed. And just because Franzen has admitted in an essay to a youthful fondness for the muted somberness of comic strip character Charlie Brown, it does not follow that the adult Franzen would relish, as Weinstein maintains, the “Schultzian comedy of his former identity” (38). The comparison to Charles Schultz seems unnecessarily infantilizing.The book is marred by stylistic infelicities, too. The phrase “warts and all” is used no fewer than four times. The book is studded with examples of tortured syntax and at least one mixed metaphor: “This new scene sprays its poison like a second electric chair” (132). Stilted phrasing is too common. “You cannot ride with the horses of Status and at the same time run with the hounds of Contract” (94) may be whimsical, but an observant editor would have excised it. Even more awkward are the several instances where, one presumes, Weinstein wishes to normalize vulgarities in the most casual, hip way, but results in producing howlers like this: “Granting how powerfully dick and cunt see what they want, we may ask: can they see—and let us see—beyond what they want” (170)? Or this: “The mother's vagina was a pussy prior to becoming a womb” (209).If the book is bedeviled by Weinstein's hazy sense of purpose, it is also beset by his unsure sense of the work's intended audience. Whom will this book serve? Academic readers will have no doubt read Franzen's autobiographical essays in their original form and would not need Freud's concept of eros explained (88). But neither would scholars necessarily be gratified by a long account of Franzen's abortive attempts to adapt The Corrections as an HBO series. Conversely, would nonspecialized readers find any merit in Weinstein's lengthy explication of Franzen's labor of love, The Kraus Project (2013), his translation with footnotes of the Viennese intellectual Karl Kraus's essays? It would seem that Philip Weinstein's The Comedy of Rage wrestles with the same conundrum that he argues for in Franzen's work, a confused tendency to write for an academic audience that wants more analytic depth and a general readership that wants less.