February 2011 Archives

I have really been loving Haiti Noir, Akashic's latest addition to its series of noir collections.  This one is edited by the luminous Edwidge Danticat (who also has a story in the book).  My favorite pieces were the stories by M.J. Fievre, for its blunt honesty, and by Nadine Pinede.  Thank you, Edwidge, for this beautiful collection! 

And hey:  did anyone else think that Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs was a deliberate reworking of the Jane Eyre story?  It didn't hit me until the last passage, when one is gob-smacked with it, but then all the pieces fell into place.  As someone who teaches the triad of Jane Eyre, The Yellow Wallpaper, and Wide Sargasso Sea to college students, I'm really interested in how Moore seems to be offering a twenty-first century response to these narratives of female innocence and madness--and mothering.  Maybe it's my training in modernism, but I get all excited when texts have archetypal scaffolding--and within the tradition of Anglo-American women's literary fiction, Jane Eyre's about as archetypal as it gets (though Brontë herself, of course, was invoking archetypes from fairy tales. . . .  I'll stop.)

I'm about 300 pages into Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, and as much as I'm enjoying its gossipy feel, I'm kind of underwhelmed.  All the claims by reviewers about how the novel provides everything we want in a novel are, alas, leaving me kind of cold, because it kind of doesn't.  Slapping those excerpted effusions onto the back of the book begs me to beg to differ.

Also, it depresses me to be inside the male gaze for too long.  Not all of the novel dwells there--one of its sections is an "autobiography" in the third person, authored by its female lead--but I've been mired in a lengthy stretch in which every female character, every one, is assessed explicitly in terms of whether her appearance is enticing or not to a male character, and it just wears me down and bores me.  Curiously, the repeated move almost feels forced, obligatory, as if even Franzen's heart isn't in it, as if he's cheaply mocking his poor male characters with their limitations and wishes he were permitted to stop.

Also:  the whiteness.

Also:  the wealth.  Even the character with the poor, hardscrabble background has parents who owned an inn and a mother who left him a house when she died.  Way to struggle, man.

Weirdly, a chunk of Freedom is set in Wyoming County, West Virginia, which is where my mother and stepfather took us to do horrible missionary preaching when we were children (and thus where some of the most harrowing scenes in The Truth Book take place).  Cognitive dissonance alert!  It's weird to read about West Virginia from Franzen's perspective--the sneer is graciously subdued, thanks much, but still, for me, who lived in the state from fourth to twelfth grade, it doesn't convey West Virginia at all.  It's like a tourist's quick appropriation, a cartoon to make a point.

But then, the whole book doesn't really convey place very well.  Maybe it doesn't care very much about place.  Georgetown doesn't feel like Georgetown; St. Paul doesn't feel like St. Paul. 

The houses do feel like houses, though, and the apartments feel like apartments.  Maybe the novel really only cares about people in rooms, talking, competing, complaining, and furtively lusting, because the texture of all those elements is pretty believable.  (Helpless mental aside:  "Do you know that you're right? . . . .  When I think of you it's always as in a room," as Lucy says to Cecil in A Room with a View.  And thus is poor Cecil damned.) 

The book's interesting enough--and, like I said, compellingly gossipy--but I don't get why Freedom is supposed to be the great novel for our moment.  Nothing about it feels new or unique.  Reading it, I don't feel moved, or opened, or changed, or shown.  You know:  think of Milan Kundera, or Tolstoy, or Jean Rhys, or James Baldwin, or Anzaldúa, or even just someone half-crazy and brilliant like Miranda July.  They risk--hugely--and when they hit it, they open doors in the mind.  This book doesn't.  Does Franzen have vision, or just an eye for detail?

But hey, it's hard to write anything for 500+ pages, much less something a lot of people admire and enjoy, so big props for that.  And maybe it'll get better.