Read Online Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen - Free Book Online
Authors: Jonathan Franzen
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There are any number of reasons you shouldnât read The Man Who Loved Children . Itâs a novel, for one thing; and havenât we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldnât we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about?
To read The Man Who Loved Children would be an especially frivolous use of your time, since, even by novelistic standards, itâs about nothing of world-historical consequence. Itâs about a family, and a very extreme and singular family at that, and the few parts of it that arenât about this family are the least compelling parts. The novel is also rather long, sometimes repetitious, and undeniably slow in the middle. It requires you, moreover, to learn to read the familyâs private language, a language created and imposed by the eponymous father, and though the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as with Joyce or Faulkner, youâre still basically being asked to learn a language good for absolutely nothing but enjoying this one particular book.
Even the word enjoying : Is that the right word? Although its prose ranges from good to fabulously goodâis lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivityâand although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond . And, worse yet, can never stop making fun of that violence! Who needs to read this kind of thing? Isnât the nuclear family, at least the psychologically violent side of it, the thing weâre all trying to escape fromâthe infernal reactor into which, when outright escape is not an option, weâve learned to stick our new gadgetry and entertainments and after-school activities like graphite rods, to cool the reaction down? The Man Who Loved Children is so retrograde as to accept what we would call âabuseâ as a natural feature of the familial landscape, and a potentially comic feature at that, and to posit a gulf between adults and children far wider than their differing consumer tastes. The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novelâs, and probably not at all like yours.
And then thereâs your e-mail: shouldnât you be dealing with your e-mail?
It will be seventy years this October since Christina Stead published her masterpiece to lackluster reviews and negligible sales. Mary McCarthy wrote an especially caustic notice for The New Republic, finding fault with the novelâs anachronisms and its imperfect grasp of American life. Stead had in fact arrived in the United States less than four years earlier, with her companion, William Blake, an American Marxist and writer and businessman who was trying to obtain a divorce from his wife. Stead had grown up in Australia and fled the country decisively in 1928, at the age of twenty-five. She and Blake had lived in London, Paris, Spain, and Belgium while she was writing her first four books; her fourth, House of All Nations, was a gargantuan, impenetrable novel about international banking. Soon after she arrived in New York, Stead undertook to clarify her feelings about her unbelievable Australian childhood by way of fiction. She wrote The Man Who Loved Children on East Twenty-second Street, near Gramercy Park, in less than eighteen months. According to her biographer, Hazel Rowley, Stead set the novel in Washington, D.C., at the insistence of her publisher, Simon &
There are any number of reasons you shouldnât read The Man Who Loved Children . Itâs a novel, for one thing; and havenât we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldnât we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about?
To read The Man Who Loved Children would be an especially frivolous use of your time, since, even by novelistic standards, itâs about nothing of world-historical consequence. Itâs about a family, and a very extreme and singular family at that, and the few parts of it that arenât about this family are the least compelling parts. The novel is also rather long, sometimes repetitious, and undeniably slow in the middle. It requires you, moreover, to learn to read the familyâs private language, a language created and imposed by the eponymous father, and though the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as with Joyce or Faulkner, youâre still basically being asked to learn a language good for absolutely nothing but enjoying this one particular book.
Even the word enjoying : Is that the right word? Although its prose ranges from good to fabulously goodâis lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivityâand although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond . And, worse yet, can never stop making fun of that violence! Who needs to read this kind of thing? Isnât the nuclear family, at least the psychologically violent side of it, the thing weâre all trying to escape fromâthe infernal reactor into which, when outright escape is not an option, weâve learned to stick our new gadgetry and entertainments and after-school activities like graphite rods, to cool the reaction down? The Man Who Loved Children is so retrograde as to accept what we would call âabuseâ as a natural feature of the familial landscape, and a potentially comic feature at that, and to posit a gulf between adults and children far wider than their differing consumer tastes. The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novelâs, and probably not at all like yours.
And then thereâs your e-mail: shouldnât you be dealing with your e-mail?
It will be seventy years this October since Christina Stead published her masterpiece to lackluster reviews and negligible sales. Mary McCarthy wrote an especially caustic notice for The New Republic, finding fault with the novelâs anachronisms and its imperfect grasp of American life. Stead had in fact arrived in the United States less than four years earlier, with her companion, William Blake, an American Marxist and writer and businessman who was trying to obtain a divorce from his wife. Stead had grown up in Australia and fled the country decisively in 1928, at the age of twenty-five. She and Blake had lived in London, Paris, Spain, and Belgium while she was writing her first four books; her fourth, House of All Nations, was a gargantuan, impenetrable novel about international banking. Soon after she arrived in New York, Stead undertook to clarify her feelings about her unbelievable Australian childhood by way of fiction. She wrote The Man Who Loved Children on East Twenty-second Street, near Gramercy Park, in less than eighteen months. According to her biographer, Hazel Rowley, Stead set the novel in Washington, D.C., at the insistence of her publisher, Simon &
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