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Never Enuff Jonathan Franzen!
Jun. 1st, 2019 08:36 amEvery time you reread a book, it’s a different book because a different person’s reading it. Changes, imperceptible on a day-by-day basis, are suddenly obvious when you look in a mirror, and a good book is that mirror.
Stayed up till midnight finishing Freedom.
Trying to think why Freedom made me think of Larry McMurtry and A Hundred Years of Solitude.
Larry McMurtry used to wear a sweatshirt imprinted with the words “Minor Regional Novelist.” He’s a wildly uneven author, and his two best novels are his two first books, The Last Picture Show and Horseman Pass On from which the movie Hud was made. (Not a big Lonesome Dove fan myself.)
But my favorite Larry McMurtry novel is Moving On, which earned a collective Meh from the critical establishment when it was first published in 1970, although I believe it’s assessed more favorably now: Surviving long enough will do that for an author.
Moving On is the story of Patsy Carpenter—the bored wife of a Rice University graduate student—and the characters who drift aimlessly in and out of her orbit. Where the language in McMurtry’s two earliest novels is taut, the language in this one meanders: really long paragraphs; sentences with one, two, three, four subordinate clauses, etcetera. Franzen writes those meandering sentences, too, though he has a penchant for metaphor that McMurtry does not have.
So, I suppose that’s one similarity.
But the more relevant similarity is the way Moving On deals with change.
When you finish the Moving On, you have a very real sense that you’ve lived Patsy’s life with her. The Patsy at the beginning of the novel is a very different person from the Patsy at the end of the novel—although recognizably the same Patsy—and you, Dear Reader, have been privy to those transactions, small and large, meaningful and inconsequential, that have wrought these changes, that have created this wiser; in some ways happier, in others, sadder person. Storytelling 101! It’s a Tolstoy trick, I guess. And not easy to do.
Franzen does it in Freedom. I found Patty, Walter and Katz’s narrative arcs amazingly relatable to. Actually cried when I read the last paragraph: The purposeful, almost musical symmetry between the opening and closing passages with an ending that’s a half-diminished chord, emblematic of broken pieces that can still be fitted together in a meaningful way but a way that’s not the same as when the whole was beautiful and new.
The Hundred Years of Solitude hit is a bit harder to explain since I haven’t read A Hundred Years of Solitude in 40 or so years. Again, though, it’s a book about the passage of time. It’s very difficult to write about the passage of time! You have to absorb your reader into the reality you’re creating, create an alternate sensory reality because otherwise your reader will continue to rely upon their quotidian highway markers.
Rereading Freedom, I had the sense of having lived through 30 years with the characters. It was a kind of remarkable experience, and I’m not sure it’s an experience that other readers might necessarily share. The characters didn’t specifically remind me of people I know, but they were certainly people I might have known.
Stayed up till midnight finishing Freedom.
Trying to think why Freedom made me think of Larry McMurtry and A Hundred Years of Solitude.
Larry McMurtry used to wear a sweatshirt imprinted with the words “Minor Regional Novelist.” He’s a wildly uneven author, and his two best novels are his two first books, The Last Picture Show and Horseman Pass On from which the movie Hud was made. (Not a big Lonesome Dove fan myself.)
But my favorite Larry McMurtry novel is Moving On, which earned a collective Meh from the critical establishment when it was first published in 1970, although I believe it’s assessed more favorably now: Surviving long enough will do that for an author.
Moving On is the story of Patsy Carpenter—the bored wife of a Rice University graduate student—and the characters who drift aimlessly in and out of her orbit. Where the language in McMurtry’s two earliest novels is taut, the language in this one meanders: really long paragraphs; sentences with one, two, three, four subordinate clauses, etcetera. Franzen writes those meandering sentences, too, though he has a penchant for metaphor that McMurtry does not have.
So, I suppose that’s one similarity.
But the more relevant similarity is the way Moving On deals with change.
When you finish the Moving On, you have a very real sense that you’ve lived Patsy’s life with her. The Patsy at the beginning of the novel is a very different person from the Patsy at the end of the novel—although recognizably the same Patsy—and you, Dear Reader, have been privy to those transactions, small and large, meaningful and inconsequential, that have wrought these changes, that have created this wiser; in some ways happier, in others, sadder person. Storytelling 101! It’s a Tolstoy trick, I guess. And not easy to do.
Franzen does it in Freedom. I found Patty, Walter and Katz’s narrative arcs amazingly relatable to. Actually cried when I read the last paragraph: The purposeful, almost musical symmetry between the opening and closing passages with an ending that’s a half-diminished chord, emblematic of broken pieces that can still be fitted together in a meaningful way but a way that’s not the same as when the whole was beautiful and new.
The Hundred Years of Solitude hit is a bit harder to explain since I haven’t read A Hundred Years of Solitude in 40 or so years. Again, though, it’s a book about the passage of time. It’s very difficult to write about the passage of time! You have to absorb your reader into the reality you’re creating, create an alternate sensory reality because otherwise your reader will continue to rely upon their quotidian highway markers.
Rereading Freedom, I had the sense of having lived through 30 years with the characters. It was a kind of remarkable experience, and I’m not sure it’s an experience that other readers might necessarily share. The characters didn’t specifically remind me of people I know, but they were certainly people I might have known.
