Jonathan Franzen: Freedom (2010)

In an interview with Helena de Bertodano for the Telegraph when Freedom was first published, Jonathan Franzen said the main function of a novel, for him, is '[t]o find an adequate narrative vehicle for the most difficult stuff at the core of me.' Hmm. There's obviously a great concern for the environment in the novel, it has glaring Democratic sympathies, and there are evident worries about technology causing, say, generational conflict (although surely the novel also says something positive about the availability of instant news on tap?). But to me those things are the backcloth to the main events in the book.

Franzen says that Americans already know what they've lived though, but I'm not so sure that many people notice social changes: it's in our nature to concentrate on the little things in the present and in so doing fail to notice how a gradual build-up creates (sometimes huge) social changes. Anyway, we should be reminded of these changes, and I think Franzen reminds us well, if perhaps unintentionally. For instance, we have a multicultural society that most people seem to accept (such as Walter's cross-generational relationship with the Indian Lalitha), and there is a certain amount of gender reversal (such as Lalitha's confident (even reckless) driving), and both Lalitha and (to a certain extent) Jenna take the sexual initiative with Walter and Joey respectively.

A number of writers have been mentioned in relation to Franzen – DeLillo, Pynchon, Philip Roth, etc, but I feel the presence of Reynolds Price more than almost any other: sex (pre-martial, extra-marital, etc) is of great importance here, and its effects can be really devastating, particularly on the future of the family. And the family is also very important in Price's work, especially in relation to genetic behavior, notably where alcoholism is concerned: Price's characters can either go with the genetic drink flow, or resist, just as Walter Berglund resists his negative inheritance in Freedom.

Above all, though, I feel the presence of Franzen's late friend David Foster Wallace. There's not the same digressive content as with Wallace, but some of the characters could have come straight out of Wallace's fiction. Joey and Connie have a rather familiar wackiness, particularly when Joey swallows his wedding ring and manually fishes about for it in his turds in the toilet pan. (I'm undecided about Richard Katz, the addictive type who takes forever to grow up because he plays guitar and therefore has the freedom to poke his dick into as many holes as he chooses.)

Stephen Burn once suggested that Wallace was moving fiction beyond the cynical postmodernist impasse and onto a more human, caring level. Maybe this is what Franzen is alluding to in that quotation at the beginning of this post, and he's picking up the torch? It's worth a thought.

Ian McEwan remarked that the only great American novelist around now is Philip Roth (well, Toni Morrison and Ann Tyler are women of course, so no doubt they don't count for McEwan), and Franzen takes a minor swipe at McEwan in Freedom – it's a pity it wasn't a bigger swipe: how many great living English novelists are there? Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980 – thirty-two years ago) is a great novel, although McEwan and his chums have never produced a novel anywhere near as brilliant. Is Franzen a great writer? I think it's probably still too early to really judge, although Freedom shows greater confidence and control than the excellent The Corrections (2001).

Addendum 1: Ann Tyler, I note, doesn't like Patty, which I find slightly odd: I sympathize with anyone who's been raped, and find it impossible to judge someone who has suffered such torture.

Addendum 2: I've also added a link to Franzen's fascinating essay about 'Status' and 'Contract' writers below.

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Jonathan Franzen: Telegraph interview with Helena de Bertodano

'Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books', by Jonathan Franzen

Dorothy Allison: Cavedweller (1998)

Like Reynolds Price, Dorothy Allison comes from North Carolina. And like Price's first novel A Long and Happy Life, which I wrote about here, Allison's Cavedweller begins with a motorcycle, a macho guy riding with a young woman behind him. The difference, though, is that the ride in Price's novel leads to a funeral, whereas the ride in Allison's novel causes a funeral.

The state is California and the dead man is the rock singer Randall Pritchard, who - before becoming too reckless – had lived with Delia Byrd, who had run away from her abusive husband Clint in Georgia.

Delia then decides to leave Venice Beach, where she lives with Cissy – her young daughter by Randall – to return to Georgia, where Amanda and Dede, the two daughters she had by her husband – are living with her mother-in-law.

So Delia drives Cissy across America, away from a rock-and-roll lifestyle in coastal California to smalltown Cayro, which like Cairo, GA, is some way off the I–75, although this is fictional and north of Atlanta, and the nearest town is Marietta.

The novel charts Delia's painful progress through the still extant perceptions – on the part of most of the population – of psychological damage of her own making, through living with her three daughters and for a short time with Clint, whom – teeth firmly gritted – she nurses through the terminal stages of cancer.

And as the years pass, the attention shifts to the development of the daughters, all of whom are very different: Amanda, a religious fanatic, marries another religious fanatic; Dede loves Nolan, but will only ever live with him unmarried as she fears love dies after marriage; and Cissy - surely by no means the only  'cavedweller' of the title, as this must be multi-layered – has an increasingly serious interest in speology, and will return to California to try her hand at studying a related university subject.

But to return to the comparison between Reynolds and Allison: when Dede shoots Nolan in a fit of jealous madness, Delia says: 'What did I ever teach you but how dangerous love is?' The line might have come straight out of a Reynold Price novel, as a central theme in his novels is that love often kills (although in this case, Nolan survives).

And another major theme of Reynolds's is how genetic traits are passed on from generation to generation. In Cavedweller, Delia also tells Dede, in the same scene: '[I]f you want to know a man's heart, look at his mama. Look into her eyes, not his. That will show you what to expect.'

Reynolds Price (1933-2011)

'GAY SOUTHERN WRITER DIES'

Well, maybe some time ago that would have been the headline, but not today. But there's still a problem with the 'Southern' ghetto tag, and the function of the word 'gay' too is still often not a mere identifier, but an emblem of stigmatization, or reduction at best.

To typecast Reynolds Price - a writer of many underrated novels, and a number essays - as merely 'Southen' or 'gay' would be to cram him into a straitjacket that he refused to conform to, to reduce his works to the regional and homosexual, when they are clearly universal and polysexual.

Price writes about the continuation of genetic elements from generation to generation, and of the individual either attempting to overcome the negative inheritance, or simply succumbing to it. He was a great writer, but essentially a realist, even in some ways a naturalist, at a time when others were gaining fame for their experimentation. His voice was largely drowned, but his time will come again.

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina and taught for 50 years at Duke University, Durham, N.C. Rather depressingly, he is called 'a voice of the South' in his New York Times obituary. No, he was the voice of everyone, of all races, and his work bears that out.

Reynolds Price's A Great Circle trilogy: The Center of Earth (1975), The Source of Light (1981), and The Promise of Rest (1995)

Reynolds Price's trilogy, A Great Circle, occupies a very important place in Price's work. Otherwise known as 'The Mayfield Trilogy' (James A. Schiff, Understanding Reynolds Price (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996)), these three novels chart 90 years in the history of the Mayfield family, and the first volume, The Surface of Earth, is a large novel of almost 500 pages that represents about half of the work as a whole.

In this trilogy the family exerts an extremely powerful influence - more powerful than other relationships, even marital ties. And yet, 'off-center' relationships - homosexual ones, mixed generational sexual ones, platonic ones, ostensibly casual ones, can be overwhelmingly powerful too.

In Price's trilogy, loves kills, and its repercussions are devastating.

The importance of The Surface of Earth was, Schiff points out, generally lost at a time when it stood out of sync with postmodernist works, between John Barth's Chimera (1973) and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1974), and William Gaddis's JR (1976). In the New York Times Book Review, in an article entitled 'A Mastodon of a Novel, by Reynolds Price' (29 June 1975), Richard Gilman savagely attacked the book as, among a number of other things, 'a great lumbering archaic beast'.

The Surface of Earth is Price's family saga, and stretches from May 1903 to June 1944, encompassing three generations of Mayfields as it does so. The story begins when 16-year-old Eva Kendal learns that her grandmother Katherine Watson died while giving birth to her mother Charlotte, whereupon her grandfather Theo committed suicide. Eva has already decided that that same evening she will elope with her 32-year-old school teacher, Forrest Mayfield. Following this, Eva's mother Charlotte commits suicide, Eva almost dies in childbirth, and leaves her husband to return to her father with her son Rob.

Forrest Mayfield is one of the main characters in the first book of the novel (May 1903-February 1905), and his priapic son Rob is the main character in the second book, (May 1921-July 1929) which leads up to Rob's marriage to Rachel Hutchins, who dies while giving birth to their son Hutch.

'[Mayfields] don't come separate', Min much later (in The Source of Light) tells Hutch's girlfriend Ann Gatlin, which is a very perceptive comment. All her life, Min has been in love with Rob, through his marriage and after, but in Book Three (which is set in twelve days in June 1944, when Hutch is 14), Rob's attention - when not distracted by the alcoholic tendency he has inherited - is focused on his son.

 

The Source of Light covers a much shorter period of time - the ten months between May 1955 and March 1956 - and is mainly centered on the development of Hutch, particularly his days in Oxford, England, where his gay propensities are clearly shown, as well as his devotion to his father Rob, whose death in the South he flies home for at the expense of much of his planned Christmas tryst with Ann in Rome.

Price was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he wrote his B. Litt. thesis on Milton, and it is evident that there is some degree of autobiographical detail in his descriptions of his journeys in England.

This is Joyce Carol Oates's review of The Source of Light, 'Portrait of the Artist as Son, Lover, Elegist', in The New York Times of Wednesday, August 18, 2010.

The Promise of Rest occupies an even shorter time period - the five months between April 1993 and August 1993, and is Price's AIDS novel. Here once again, it is the relationship between parent and child which is crucial, and we see Hutch bringing his son Wade, who is almost blind and dying of AIDS, back from his Upper West Side appartment to North Carolina, where he can look after him. Hutch has recently separated from his wife Ann, and there will be no suggestion of resolution of their marital problems until Wade is dead. His death is not long in chronological terms, but Price makes no bones about describing the horror of Wade's physical situation. And just as A Great Circle began with people 'killing' others through love, so Price makes the point that AIDS kills through a different kind of sexual love.

Hutch, like Price, teaches at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and is quick to point out that love killing is nothing new: syphilis, for instance, was responsible for the deaths of a number of 19th century writers.*

It appears that the Mayfield line ends here with Wade's death, although things are not as clearcut as that. Throughout the trilogy, blacks are present (often as angels, but that's another story), but long gone is the 19th century 'niggering', or using female blacks for sexual release. Instead, there is an strong attempt on the part of the Mayfields and their friends and relations to bring black and white together as complete equals. In a sense, Wade Mayfield's enduring love for the black Wyatt Bondurant, who killed himself on learning that he had given Wade AIDS, is a symbol that union. But Wyatt was only too well aware of the difficulty of this, of the still-burning psychological legacy of slavery. When Wade dies, Wyatt's sister Ivory, who looked after the Wade in Manhattan before Hutch brought him to the South, shows Hutch a letter Wade had written him some time before. In this letter, Wade reveals his sexual relationship with Ivory, and that there is 50% chance that the eight-year-old Raven Bondurant is his grandson.

Elsewhere on this blog, I have also commented on two of Reynolds Price's Mustian novels, A Long and Happy Life and Good Hearts.

*It is perhaps surprising, though, that there is a reference to the 'famous diary' of 'Mary Chestnut' instead of 'Mary Chesnut', and a reference to Keats dying at 26, when he died at 25.

Reynold Price's Good Hearts (1988)

This is a strange, complex, and disturbing book. At the end of A Long and Happy Life (1962) Rosacoake Mustian, pregnant by Wesley Beavers, is not entirely happily entering a shotgun wedding. But ever since she fell in love with Wesley several years before, when he was up tree and threw pecans down to her, Rosacoake had her eyes on Wesley. Even if it had taken a crude rhyme like 'Pull down your petticoat, pull down your drawers/Give him one look at old Santy Claus' from her one-woman-only brother Milo to encourage her to relinquish her long-preserved virginity, she'd kept her man, hadn't she?

Twenty-six publication years and twenty-eight fictional years later, in Good Hearts (1988), Rosa (who has dropped the 'coake') and Wesley (who now feels dead) are still married. Reynolds Price called this his 'druggy novel' not because of the drug content - which is reduced to a casual comment on the contemporary inappropriate nature of Rosa's original final syllable - but because he wrote this novel on prescribed drugs after he'd been diagnosed with a cancerous tumour. Drugs or not, this is an interesting book.

It helps enormously to be aware of the family politics in Price's novels (in which families are of great importance) although even then things are difficult. Horace is Rosa and Wesley's son and Pris is his wife; Rato is Rosa's brother, and although he has mental problems, this knowledge doesn't make this conversation any easier to understand:

'Rato said "I learned to love spice in Spain. I can't see why it don't work in America."

'Pris said "It does now. At my house anyhow."

'Horace said "She's got me massaged in garlic. I can't see how I grew up without it."

'Rosa said "Well, you did. Somehow against all odds you survived. And look at you now, strong and healthy to watch."'

The key to this is that Rosa hates Pris, and thinks she's far too refined. But generally, people get on in Price's world without gouging each other's eyes out. Brothers-in-law Wesley and Milo have limits concerning how far they can mock each other, and those limits can be stretched greatly, although Wesley almost breaks those bounds when he, a very experienced motor mechanic, is invited by Milo to comment on his new Pontiac, of which he's very proud:

'No, Milo, look - you love your new car. It's exactly what you wanted, and it matches [your wife's] hair. Just roll back, cross both hands on your belly (it's swelling nicely by the way), and try to forget that day by day Wesley works on Mercedes, BMWs, Bentleys, and moviestar-customized Alpha-Romeos. Every now and then I lower my standards, double my prices, and tune up a Jag. But it's been six years since my soft hands ever touched a piece of Detroit tinfoil dogshit'.

But these men know each other's 'destruction buttons', and intend to grow old together: 'old and even more knowing, more nearly each other's mirror-self like the best male friends who stop short of touching'.

Wesley is welcomed into his extended family even after he's walked out on his wife and his job in Raleigh, North Carolina, and driven to Nashville, Tennessee, where he lived with Wilson for three months, a woman half his age, and the sex was great until she told him to get a divorce to leave her free to marry him, or get out of her life. So Wesley returned to his wife, but did supernatural means force him to do this?

The main problem the novel has is Wave, who appears towards the end and is a person or a symbol, or perhaps both, but who poses problems in terms of both the plot of the book and to the book's approach to moral concerns. Wave, if he is to be understood as a real character, is some form of sociopath who not only feels no remorse about raping women, but believes that he is performing them a service. But if, on the other hand, Wave is a kind of angel who brings Wesley back together with Rosa, then is this divine intervention entirely acceptable - particularly to a contemporary reader?

Reynold Price's A Long and Happy Life (1962)

'Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody's face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep, spraddle-legged on the sheepskin seat behind him was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl and who had given up looking into the wind and trying to nod at every sad car in the line, and when he even speeded up and passed the truck (lent for the afternoon my Mr. Isaac Alston and driven by Sammy his man, hauling one pine box and one black boy dressed in all he could borrow, set up in a ladder-back chair with flowers banked round him and a foot on the box to steady it) - when he even passed that, Rosacoke said once into his back "Don't" and rested in humiliation, not thinking but with her hands on his hips for dear life and her white blouse blown out behind her like a banner in defeat.'

This amazing first sentence - all 192 words of it - marked the debut of a major novelist: Reynolds Price is from North Carolina, and was praised by, among others, Harper Lee and Eudora Welty for this book, A Long and Happy Life (1962), also the first book in the Mustian trilogy.* Constance Rooke called it 'a clarion call annoucing the start of a long career', and Price continues that distinguished career today, although he is surprisingly little known.

In Understanding Reynolds Price, James A Schiff calls the language 'sexually charged', and although he notes Price's ability to 'cross gender lines', he also realises that Price is in a sense proclaiming, and rejoicing in, his homosexuality in many of his works: 'Price seems far more interested, at least in his Mustian novels, in male sexuality and beauty. The central erotic figure in each Mustian novel is a desirable, handsome, and virile male [...], who attracts the gaze of women and men alike'. Price has turned around the norm: Rosacoake is just as (if not more than) central to the book as Wesley, but it's the male rather than the female body that is seen as sexually exciting.

*The two other novels are A Generous Man (1966), which concentrates on Rosacoake's brother Milo Mustian and is set in 1948, when Milo was nine year younger, and Good Hearts (1988), which is set 28 years after A Long and Happy Life, when Rosa (as she is now called) and Wesley Beavers have been married 28 years. A precursor – the long short story concerning the Mustians, 'A Chain of Love' – was published in 1958, and the play Early Dark (1977) is not a dramatization of A Long and Happy Life so much as it is that novel viewed from a differnet perspective.