(Originally posted in 2005, it appears here newly revised, with some new ideas.)
Jonathan Franzen is a gifted novelist whose last novel, The Corrections, could have used an editor unafraid to blue-pencil some of its baggier prose. Like others of his generation uncomfortable with the idea of providing what amounts to entertainment for a paying public, Franzen evidently equates length with worth, and fills his family portrait with the most minute particulars of domestic misery. Everything is mocked relentlessly, continuously, endlessly, until each paragraph seems ready to burst with sarcasm and scorn. At times you want to use the novel as a weapon against some defenseless thing. Yet Franzen clearly has ideas about American culture and what we're doing wrong to one another, which makes his critical slings at William Gaddis, and particularly Gaddis's masterpiece The Recognitions, all the more peculiar.
Gaddis is, from all appearances, the model from which Franzen fashioned much of his breakthrough novel. Both writers are interested in the fraudulence of American life, the commercialization of culture, the corruption of authenticity, and the comic absurdities of people trying to manufacture meaning in a world increasingly organized around money and status. But where Gaddis turns these concerns into an elaborate, polyphonic architecture of voices, allusions, and competing forms of cultural pretension, Franzen domesticates them, bringing the cultural crisis home to the family dinner table. The debt is not simply one of influence but of ambition: both writers want the novel to account for a great deal of the world.
Franzen is a worrywart at heart, someone who loves to fret about his own comfort, and it's to his credit that he's a splendid enough writer, most of the time, to make us care about the status of his nerves colliding with the world. His essay collection, How to Be Alone, is fine in this regard. It's when he attempts to diagnose the ills of American literature and assign blame, if not a cure, that he becomes a whiner, a sniveler, a sayer of absurd declarations. I am with Ben Marcus on this matter, which is to say that the novel is in relatively good shape and that the point of concern, regardless of style or ideology, needs to be a writer's talent.
These debates about the absolute state of writing have been going on in my life for years, and the result has been to make me, perhaps, a bit of a social retard, one who sees life through a sadly short-sighted lens. When I read Franzen's Strong Motion and The Corrections, there was no reason for me to assume he was someone who wanted to be the general reader's guardian against the legions of literary experimenters whose books he imagines are causing the destruction of coherence and common sense. Franzen, a novelist of ideas no less than those he critiques as too heady and thereby dangerous—DeLillo, William Gaddis—seemed to be one of the smarter writers willing to make readers labor for the treasure embedded in his books. His writing is not composed of short sentences; his descriptions are not taciturn; his metaphors are not of the kitchen-sink variety. He seemed more than willing to be mistaken for William Gaddis Jr.
Now he renounces his love of Gaddis and reintroduces himself to America as the reader's best friend, a writer who has a "contract" with his readers, promising never to stray too far from the conventions of good form or disturb the expectations of readers soured on experiment and genre-blurring. It's a rant that gets resurrected every five years or so. Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Tom Wolfe have all taken major shots at other writers in an effort to decry the decline of contemporary fiction at the hands of various invading goons, geeks, and smarty-pants stack mongers. The terms change, the cures vary, but the diagnosis is always the same: novels today suck, and the death of the novel is always near.
Franzen's lengthy list of complaints seems more self-serving than anything else. The flap over the Oprah Book Club is something he evidently feels he must recover from, and all this fawning over what he assumes are middlebrow audience tastes is unseemly. I agree that it's absurd to demand that a novel be difficult or otherwise complicated in order to be considered great. It's just as foolish to insist that plain-speaking is the only way great ideas can be addressed in fiction. More than anything, the issue seems a dustup between a handful of writers who delight in tweaking one another at length over matters that finally amount to so much energy spent going down the wrong road. It's a handy issue on which to hang a polemic, but it avoids the more difficult issue at hand: the discussion of style.
Curious readers themselves have no difficulty reading so-called difficult writers like Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie and then switching, without controversy, to more conversational scribes like John Cheever or Lorrie Moore, so long as the author displays a mastery of personal style that makes the work worth reading. Readability, after all, is not the same thing as accessibility. A novel can be perfectly readable at the level of its sentences and still offer very little in the way of intellectual or emotional discovery. Conversely, a novel can be demanding, even bewildering, while rewarding the reader with an experience unavailable through more conventional means.
Hemingway, I realized in college, was more than over-the-counter prose sans verbs, adjectives, and metaphor. His mastery of language, his carefully crafted selection of words, enabled him, in his best writing, to convey his notions of bravery, honor, and personal code as felt experience, without arm-waving or excessive bathos. His apparent simplicity was an achievement, not an absence of technique. The language had been pared down, but the experience it conveyed was anything but simple.
Faulkner, by contrast, had a dense style beholden to cinematic flashbacks, William James's notion of consciousness as a stream of associations, and Bergson's conception of interior time. These heady influences might make a novel unwieldy and daunting, but they also allow fiction to become rich in ways that conventional morality plays and situation comedies, with their neatly resolved conflicts and vague faith in invisibly dispensed justice, cannot always manage. Consider the opening sections of The Sound and the Fury, where Benjy's consciousness moves between past and present without the reassuring signposts of conventional chronology. A sound, a name, or a familiar place can send the narrative backward decades, and the reader must gradually assemble a family history from fragments of sensation and memory. The difficulty is not ornamental. It makes us experience a world in which time does not behave like a sequence of neatly arranged events and in which another person's consciousness cannot be reduced to a tidy explanation.
Faulkner's fiction is rich less for its straightforward moral lessons than for its attention to the sheer rhythm, pace, and texture of experience: the actual duration of time and thought between plot actions. It is daunting, of course, but there is an argument that exposure to, and a taste for, problematic fiction—fiction that does not rest on conventional expectation—helps a reader think through problems that have more symbolic complications than tactical ones. There is the hope that a reader lands somewhere on their feet after tackling the tides and eddies of Faulkner's novels and recognizes that life isn't a series of problems to be solved as if it were a take-home math test.
Empathy is the word here. The stories that matter are not necessarily those that reveal the most efficient way to solve a problem or resolve a conflict, but those that allow us to inhabit another person's experience long enough to recognize its complications. Faulkner's ability for empathy and poetic description, again in his best work, moves us along, allowing us to experience something wholly other than the world we inhabit. His formal difficulties make demands on the reader, but those demands can be the very means by which the reader enters a consciousness otherwise inaccessible.
Individual style, how it's developed, and how mastery of language makes a text, conventional or dense, interesting to the ideal reader: this is a more difficult subject to discuss than the cleverly coined dismissals of ideas one doesn't like. It is also a more worthwhile one. We don't need novels to be difficult, nor do we need them to be easy. We need writers who understand what their chosen forms can accomplish and who have the talent to make those forms matter. The argument isn't between the reader and the avant-garde. It's between writing that has discovered its own necessity and writing that hasn't. And no contract with the reader, however reassuring, can settle that question in advance.
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