Not just for the birds

FARTHER AWAY

By Jonathan Franzen

Available at National Book Store

Jonathan Franzen is for the birds. Literally. Anyone who read his last opus, Freedom, knows he spent great swathes of that book (which presumably resulted in lots of cut trees, too) decrying the devastation of our feathered friends brought about by man’s progress and development. In Farther Away, Franzen’s latest collection of essays, he indulges in one of his favorite literary techniques — the rant — to convey how important the environmental cause is to his personal growth. This may sound really dull and tree-huggerish, but Franzen has other weapons in his arsenal — namely a self-effacing honesty, humor and often sparkling prose — that make his theme palatable.

The book opens with a commencement speech given at Kenyon College in 2011 in which Franzen (predictably) offers a curmudgeonly perspective on Facebook and the culture of “liking.” But his real agenda is to show how our tendency to “like” things numbs our ability to love, or to “raise the stakes.”

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love evey particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the technoconsumerist order: it exposes the lie.

Generally, spending 300-plus pages in close space with a writer who uses terms like “technoconsumerist order” may not sound like anyone’s idea of a good time. But as I recently stood in line at Heathrow Airport’s snail-paced passport control line, consuming big chunks of Franzen’s perspective while waiting for the line to inch imperceptibly forward came to seem like a natural pastime. And lots of fun, too.

If Franzen were a bird, he would probably be a black crow, cawing occasionally at all the entropy in his midst. He lays his cards on the table here, talking about his failed marriage, the difficulty of following up his breakthrough novel The Corrections, and how it led him to look for things in the real world he could actually love and be passionate about.

He chose birds. One of his many birdwatching chronicles involves a trip to Masafuera, a small island off the coast of Chile that was the model for Daniel Dafoe’s island in Robinson Crusoe. There he tries to live in isolation for several weeks, spotting rare birds and living in a tent. But another part of his mission is more personal: to cast into the sea a small box of ashes given by the wife of suicidal writer David Foster Wallace. Franzen and Wallace were close friends, and the deceased writer’s widow astutely guesses that Franzen still needs to come to terms with his friend’s suicide.

So the title essay becomes a much larger rumination on his friend Wallace, and how that writer’s crippling isolation came to overake his life, his ability to feel pleasure, or to even write. Again and again in the book, Franzen comes back to the subject of Wallace, until he seems almost like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, stirring up questions and more questions (Included also in the collection is Franzen’s eulogy for Wallace, which provides some closure on the subject).

Naturally, Franzen’s sojourn on the island leads to another rant about technology and the theme of Wallace’s opus, Infinite Jest, which is modern culture’s desire to be permanently, identically entertained. We track Twitter feeds, check who’s trending now, and tune into the same viral YouTube videos, minute by minute. “The nonlinearity, the hyperlinkage” of Wallace’s novel anticipated our modern demand for personalized entertainment, says Franzen. “Instead of the news, my news. Instead of a single football game, the splintering of fifteen different games into personalized fantasy-league statistics. Instead of The Godfather, ‘My Cat’s Funny Trick.’ The individual run amok, Everyman a Charlie Sheen.”

You have to admit, he’s a good ranter.

Along the way, Franzen includes book reviews of willfully obscure works, and this is like a cleansing sorbet between courses of grist. He cites Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers, the Swedish crime series The Laughing Policeman, and Canadian short story writer Alice Munro. Other than Munro — who is wonderful — you’re unlikely to find those other authors in your local bookstore shelves. Franzen, it turns out, is a rare book spotter as well.

Many of the other essays concern Franzen’s efforts to prevent bird slaughter in Italy, Cyprus, China. The one about China is particularly amusing, opening with the author contemplating a plush toy puffin bird golf club cover he received as a gift. He marvels at how wonderfully made it is, even while thinking how the bird itself is greatly endangered. He takes the puffin golf cover under a light, reverses its carefully stitched fabric, and finds he words “Handmade in China.” Aha! A place that is killing birds by allowing uncontrolled tree cutting has made this cute plush toy of an endangered species! He has to go there!

In China, Franzen visits conservationists, a bird preserve that allows trucks to rumble in for yearly reed “clearing,” and tours a top-line golf club factory. All the evidence points to an emerging economy that is not quite ready to take the environment seriously, but Franzen also pokes fun at his own hypocrisy: gifted at the end of his tour with a set of the best clubs the company makes, he feels the simultaneous tug of liberal guilt (“You don’t even like golf!”) and strong consumer desire at possessing such a sleek and beautiful product. It’s this type of contradiction that made Freedom such a compelling read.

Perhaps the most controversial piece is “I Just Called To Say I Loved You,” in which Franzen posits that his favorite peeve, cell phones, came into vogue in Manhattan in the ‘90s as a replacement for smoking (“Instead of the pack of Marlboros in the front breast pocket, it was a Motorola”). He particularly detests public yakking on cell phones, especially public declarations of “Love you!” He feels 9/11 is mostly responsible for this very need to insist on our love for loved ones so publicly. Or, could be he just doesn’t like public displays of affection.

As entertaining as he is, eventually you can’t help feeling Franzen complains too much. He is the 50-something “Grampaw” prone to rant over mod cons, complaining that we should be more in tune with art and great literature. Yet I consumed Farther Away in three sittings, and while I won’t say it’s anything like junk food, a steady diet of rants and anti-tech positions is not exactly fine dining either. It did make a pretty good appetizer, though.