Read Online Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen - Free Book Online Page B

on page after page the childlike need and weakness at the core of his overbearing masculinity, and to make the reader pity him and like him and, therefore, find him funny. The language he speaks at home, not baby talk exactly, something weirder, is an endlessly inventive cascade of alliteration, nonsensical rhymes, puns, running jokes, clashing diction levels, and private references; quotation out of context can’t do it justice. As his best friend says to him, admiringly, “Sam, when you talk, you know you create a world.” His children are at once enthralled by his words and more sensibly grown-up than he is. When he’s ecstatically describing a future form of travel, projection by dematerialization, in which passengers “will be shot into a tube and decomposed,” his oldest son dryly declares: “No one would travel.”
    The immovable objects opposed to Sam’s irresistible force are Henny and her stepdaughter, Louie, the child of his dead first wife. Henny is the spoiled, amoral, and now operatically suffering daughter of a wealthy Baltimore family. The hatred between husband and wife is heightened by the determination of each not to let the other leave and take the children. Their all-out war, aggravated by their deepening money troubles, is the novel’s narrative engine, and here again what saves their hatred from being monstrous—makes it comic instead—is its very extremity. Neurasthenic, worn-out, devious Henny, given to “black looks” and blacker moods, is the household “hag” (her word) who pours reality-based poison into her children’s eagerly open ears. Her language is as full of neurotic pain and darkness as Sam’s is full of unrealistic love and optimism. As the narrator notes, “He called a spade the predecessor of modern agriculture, she called it a muck dig: they had no words between them intelligible.” Or, as Henny says, “He only wants the truth, but he wants my mouth shut.” And: “He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him.” But she doesn’t scream it at him directly, because the two of them haven’t been on speaking terms for years. She instead leaves terse notes addressed to “Samuel Pollit,” and both of them use the children as emissaries.
    While Sam and Henny’s war takes up the novel’s foreground, its less and less secret arc is Sam’s deteriorating relationship with his eldest child, Louie. Many good novelists produce entire good oeuvres without leaving us one indelible, archetypal character. Christina Stead, in one book, gives us three, of which Louie is the most endearing and miraculous. She is a big, fat, clumsy girl who believes herself to be a genius; “I’m the ugly duckling, you’ll see,” she shouts at her father when he’s tormenting her. As Randall Jarrell noted, while many if not most writers were ugly ducklings as children, few if any have ever conveyed as honestly and completely as Stead does the pain of the experience of being one. Louie is forever covered with cuts and bruises from her bumblings, her clothes forever stained and shredded from her accidents. She’s befriended only by the queerest of neighbors (for one of whom, old Mrs. Kydd, in one of the novel’s hundred spectacular little scenes, she consents to drown an unwanted cat in the bathtub). Louie is constantly reviled by both parents for her slovenliness: that she isn’t pretty is a terrible blow to Sam’s narcissism, while, to Henny, her oblivious self-regard is an intolerable seconding of Sam’s own (“She crawls, I can hardly touch her, she reeks with her slime and filth—she doesn’t notice!”). Louie keeps trying to resist being drawn into her father’s insane-making games, but because she’s still a child, and because she loves him, and because