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LUDIC LOG

Jonathan Franzen has the advantage of me.

I have never read any novels by the celebrated author of "The Corrections"; however, he has read (well, almost) several books by one of my favorite novelists. He has, in fact, according to his article "Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books" in the September 30 issue of the New Yorker, tested the titular author and found him severely wanting. And, along the way, he has handed down a rather severe judgment of those who dare to enjoy any of the books or writers he finds light in the balance. So while he makes sure to measure me and mine, I am sadly unable to do the same to him. Therefore, I am unable to apply one of the tools of deconstruction (a practice he finds deplorable) -- the assessment of the author when reading the author's works -- when approaching the article.

Franzen the novelist is widely acclaimed, but Franzen the critic enjoys a curiously muddled reputation. He caused a stir when accepting the National Book Award for The Corrections by saying a few ungracious words about Oprah Winfrey's 'book club', which had endorsed the novel, for peddling unchallenging, relentlessly middlebrow bourgeois-lit; but (oddly, for someone who has been more than once accused of postmodernist tendencies -- does defensiveness play a role in his critical sensibilities?) he has also made waves by openly endorsing B.R. Myers' cranky, stubbornly anti-experimental, pomo-reviling "Reader's Manifesto". One might well wonder: whose side is he on? Happily, "Mr. Difficult" clears up all confusion: hard books, says Franzen, are just not worth it.

The central figure of Franzen's thesis (briefly: difficult fiction is crafted by angry showoffs whose distaste for compromise render their books unreadable) provided a great deal of inspiration to the man: The Corrections took its title from Gaddis' first novel, The Recognitions. Throughout, however, Franzen takes pains to establish that he has come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. While he still calls Gaddis a literary hero of his, and has threads of praise in the tapestry of scorn he weaves around The Recognitions and JR, all in all Franzen finds himself increasingly agreeing with a Mrs. M____, who wrote him a scolding letter about the difficulty of his own books: that their author must be "a pompous snob, and a real ass-hole".

Dripping with contempt for anyone juvenile enough still enjoy Gaddis' novels outside the "student-slum apartments" of undergraduate study, Franzen disavows his past as one of the "skinny young men in scary glasses and thrift-store clothes". One outgrows such adolescent posturing, just as one grows into the fulsome maturity of traditional storytelling and ditches "hipster" style and "skinny-young-man attitude". So arduous was the task of wading through The Recognitions (Franzen confesses to a long list of books he's found too difficult or unrewarding to finish, including Remembrance of Things Past, Naked Lunch, and, bewilderingly, Moby-Dick and Don Quixote) that he as much as openly questions whether anyone else has ever read Gaddis' books. After all, if a decorated novelist like himself could hardly get through The Recognitions and couldn't finish JR at all (Franzen conspicuously notes the lofty page count of Gaddis' first two novels, neglecting to mention that at 592 pages, his own National Book Award winner is hardly a lightweight), what are the odds that dumbasses like me could slog through them? As evidence, he notes that while the book was, "like Patti Smith LPs and the Moosewood Cookbook, a common sight" in his college years, he noticed that "the spine of JR was often suspiciously uncracked".

The usual condemnations of postmodernist writing are here in spades. Perhaps since he hasn't, by his own admission, read much of it, he seems convinced that the characters of difficult fiction are little more than cardboard cutouts meant to stand in for the "satirical judgments and intellectual obsessions" of their authors. Their stylistic trickery serves only to "discourage intimacy". Employing the 'I'm too dumb too get it, so anyone who says they do is a pretentious poseur' method of criticism (first identified in a 1954 essay by hated postmodernist Roland Barthes entitled "Blind and Dumb Criticism"), Franzen disengenously praises by self-condemnation, calling attention to his unfashionable love of strong characters: "to my shame I seemed to like them". Postmodernism in both its aesthetic and philosophical manifestations are intrinsically childish, he says: "the essence of postmodernism is an adolescent fear of getting taken in". Franzen leaves little doubt that he is ultimately on the side of Mrs. M____, "the average person who just enjoys a good read".

There is, however, more than a little whiff of the jilted lover, the disillusioned cultist in Franzen's piece. After having vested so much emotionally in The Recognitions, he seems almost heartbroken that JR was so hard to read that he couldn't get through it, and downright weepy that Gaddis' subsequent novels were nothing but "husks". Franzen gives no quarter in killing his idol. He goes on an extended Freudian tear (apparently the Frankfurt School isn't quite as bad as the rest of the pomo canon), tracing Gaddis' anger to childhood abandonment issues and essentially calling his entire oeuvre an extended temper tantrum. "Did I betray (Gaddis)," he asks, "or did he betray me?" At the end of the article, there can be no doubt: the conveniently deceased Mr. Gaddis is the Judas in this scenario, and character-loving Johnny the pure and innocent Jesus. Scoffing at fools like me who enjoyed JR, he vents, "I wanted to grab Gaddis by the lapels and shout 'Hello! I'm the reader you want! If you can't even show me a good time, who else do you think is going to read you?'" He even notes that Gaddis was no fan of Pynchon's, and implies that condemning people to read his difficult fiction, when he didn't read the difficult fiction of others, is "the ultimate breach of contract".

The use of 'contract' isn't a frivolous choice of words; Franzen posits the existence of two models of literature. In one, the status model, the value of a novel exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it; in the other, the contract model, a compact between reader and writer is created -- a compact not unlike that you might find in a business transaction in the shops and stores of the "friendly egalitarian suburb" of Franzen's youth. Franzen claims at the beginning to be in the sway of both models, but by the end, he has come out entirely on the side of the contract-consecrators. Gaddis' greatest sin, it seems, was to violate that pleasant arrangement between reader and writer by bringing more to the table than his audience (none of whom, we assume, are at all interested in being challenged or provoked) was willing to buy. Not only does Franzen support a contractual, entertainment-based model of fiction (ultimately agreeing with his father, who asked him when he embarked on a career as a novelist "What are you contributing to society with your abilities?"), but ultimately uses his distaste for difficulty to jettison 50+ years of literary theory in one fell swoop: "the work of reading Gaddis makes me wonder if our brains might even be hard-wired for conventional storytelling, structurally eager to form pictures from sentences as featureless as 'She stood up.'"

I would like someday to read some of Mr. Franzen's novels. They have been highly praised (although I'm sure this is irrelevant to him, as he goes to great lengths to inform us that as Gaddis' novels got worse, his reviews got better) and seem to be the sort of books I would enjoy. Indeed, you might say that I'm the reader he wants. And although he vilifies the postmodernist (and indeed, anyone who allows "literature and its criticism to become co-dependent") as "the kind of boor who propagandizes at friendly social gatherings" -- novels apparently having no rightful role other than that of a sociable little parlor game -- I will be happy to ignore his contempt for me. After all, it has never bothered me one bit that other people, even writers of whom I am very fond, don't share my taste in literature. It seems to really bother him, though; one can only wonder, as he rages against some imaginary soulless postmodernists, hidden away in their garrets and lofts, showering ichor on "the Stupid Reader" like Franzen and good ol' Mrs. M_____, why he finds it so hard to ignore the contempt he thinks I feel for him.