Franzen’s ‘Crossroads’ -- A Masterpiece of Contemporary American Literature

 

When Jonathan Franzen’s Purity was published some seven years ago, I expectantly looked forward to his next. Crossroads was well worth waiting for, Franzen moving beyond his usual cerebral examination of his characters finding heartrending and redeeming qualities in the Hildebrandt family, set mostly in the fictional town of New Prospect, Illinois during the early 1970’s Vietnam War era.

 

It is a multigenerational work, Franzen reaching back into the past of the two main characters, Russ Hildebrandt who is an associate pastor of the First Reformed Church, a liberal Protestant church probably not unlike the Congressional church in which Franzen was a youth and Union Congressional Church in which I was raised (although I long, long ago dissociated myself from that or any other religion).  His wife’s (Marion) past is also carefully scrutinized by Franzen, revealing secrets that rupture into the plot.  

 

Their children’s stories and their interaction between each other, their parents,  and “Crossroads” a church youth group first headed up by Russ, but later displaced by the more charismatic (and less religious) Rick Ambrose, are central to the novel. 

 

The oldest child, Clem, at first has a close relationship with his younger sister, Becky, but as the novel evolves, Clem is off to college, and his first intense sexual relationship with another student, Sharon. The consequences of that relationship have a lifelong impact on him.

 

Becky, in turn, becomes attracted to Tanner Evans, a young folk/rock singer whose group has a lead singer, Laura, perhaps modeled after Janis Joplin.  Becky is one of those young women considered cool and attractive, a cheerleader.  She joins Crossroads, as does her younger brother, Perry, brilliant but manipulative.  Rounding out the family is the youngest, Judson, who at this stage is the least examined character by Franzen (who envisions this novel as the first of a trilogy, so figure that Judson’s turn will come later).

 

His last novel was concerned with the possibility of a nuclear holocaust and this one is focused on the “nuclear” Hildebrandt family.  Franzen treats the family like a slow moving suspenseful but inevitable explosion, with religion being the main control rod in the nuclear family reactor. 

 

His ability to mix the psychological development of his characters with an element that has been dormant in my own life, religion, is striking.  This novel awakened those recollections of my own teenage religious training.  The confluence of religion, family scars, drugs, and sexual exigency move this novel into the pantheon of an American classic.

 

“Crossroads” goes beyond the usual youth church group, at least the one that existed in my time which was every Sunday night, a chaperoned social mixer (Coca Colas only), dancing to songs like “The Theme from Summer Place” and an occasional theatrical production in the Church’s auditorium (the only stage performance of my life besides playing the piano, “singing” Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In” outlining a fence beginning with the second beat in the measure (imagine, remembering that moment from more than 60 years ago, probably a testament to the stage fright I experienced). 

 

When Russ was in charge of the youth group, it probably resembled more of the one I was a member of so, so many years ago, with the notable exception of a once a year trip Crossroads would go on for a week to a Navajo reservation in Arizona to do Christian good works, building or improving whatever facilities are needed.  There the kids would interact with the local cultures.

 

Russ named the group after Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” one of Russ’ favorite musical genres.  Later in the novel, as he pursues a widowed parishioner, one he has intense fantasies and feels guilt about, she plays the record at her house while they attempt to get it on with marijuana. He comes to the realization he’d never felt more pierced by the beauty of the blues, the painful sublimity of Johnson’s voice, but also never more damned by it. Wherever Johnson was singing from, Russ could never hope to get there. He was an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he.  Social commentary is yet another dimension to the novel and his feeling as a fraud pervades the novel.

 

The reason for choosing the Navajos for such an annual project was Russ’ work there as a conscientious objector at the end of WW II.  There he made friends and his religious devotion was deepened by ties to that community.

 

Franzen’s dissection of Marion’s and Russ’ failing marriage is extraordinary, its rise, fall, and its resurrection.  His writing encapsulates the guilt which overhangs much of the action in the novel, leavened by religion.  Russ thinks about his now middle-aged wife: It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty.

 

But Marion, emboldened by her work with a therapist, Sophie (“the dumpling” as she thinks of the therapist in her mind, confessing her worst sins to a psychiatrist was nothing like her Catholic confessions), stuns her husband later in the novel about his affair: “It annoys me that you want to fuck her.” The kitchen seemed to spin beneath his feet. He’d never heard that word from her. “It’s really quite annoying, and if you think it’s because I’m jealous, that’s even more annoying. I mean, really—me? Jealous of that thing? Who do you think I am? Who do you think you married? I’ve seen the face of God.”

 

When Russ loses control of the Crossroads group to Rick Ambrose, that coincides with significant developments in the novel, both Russ and Marion having realized or fantasized affairs, and the cocaine addition of their son Perry erupting into a disaster on the Navajo reservation and his having to be institutionalized.

 

That incident – again God’s will – ironically brings Russ and Marion together in a competition of guilt: “I was committing adultery while our son tried to kill himself!” “Oh dear. I’m sorry.” “You’re sorry? What is wrong with you?” The ground beneath her was firm. She was secure in God’s punishment. “I’m just thinking how terrible that must feel. If the two things really did happen at the same time—that’s terrible luck. No one deserves that.” “Terrible?” He staggered to his feet. “It’s beyond terrible. It’s beyond redemption. There’s no use in praying—I’m a fraud.”

 

Meanwhile, Becky becomes estranged from her once close brother, Clem, and her parents as well as she become Tanner’s lover, and then wife.

 

Clem and his father Russ grow apart, Russ hardly realizing the extent of Clem’s contempt until they have a face to face confrontation, Clem saying “Because I’m so fucking sick of you.” “And I am sick of your disrespect.” “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son?” “I said that’s enough!” Clem would have welcomed a fight. He hadn’t thrown a punch since junior high. “You want to hit me? You want to try me?” “No, Clem.” “Mister Nonviolence?”

 

Clem has an epiphany, a moral, not a religious one, realizing that his college draft deferment and low draft number is the reason why a less advantaged young man is being sent to Vietnam.  This realization  is ironically prompted by his girlfriend Sharon who is devastated by Clem’s informing his draft board that he will not return to college and therefore can be reclassified 1-A, in his mind righting that wrong.  His parents in their deep religious state are similarly shocked.  Ultimately, he is not drafted but winds up in a long labyrinth to Peru as a laborer, an education which ironically turns him, the non believer, into a sort of a Christ figure, finally returning to the conundrum of his nuclear family, fittingly (and not fully conscious to him) at Easter.

 

The concepts of free will and determinism are constantly being tested in the novel, with the latter on the wings of religion generally winning out.  At one point in the novel Becky has a confrontation with Laura who had been Tanner’s girlfriend.  It becomes ugly, Becky pleading Laura to do one more performance with Tanner as a booking agent was there to see both in action.  At first Laura declines.  But the inevitability of her relenting is mired in a series of events as if, to Becky, they were directed by God…

 

The fact that Laura, after a moment, made a petulant, hand-flinging gesture of assent—the fact that she would never have done this if she hadn’t hit Becky, which wouldn’t have happened if Becky hadn’t fallen to her knees to pray, which wouldn’t have happened if the spirit of Christ hadn’t brought her to Laura’s apartment, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t found God in the sanctuary, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t smoked marijuana—seemed to Becky, as she followed Laura down the snowy stairs behind the drugstore, the most beautiful proof of God’s mysterious workings. She’d done bad things, she’d accepted her punishment, and now she had her reward. She could feel a whole new life, a life in faith, beginning.

His novel, Freedom, explored similar territory, sans religion.

Stylistically, Franzen weaves these interrelated stories back and forth, time periods as well, retrospective view or present, but at the heart of the writing is deep psychological insight and compassion.  Unlike his previous novels, I hardly met a character I couldn’t empathize with in some way.  His writing is a throwback to the American realism of a Sinclair Lewis or a Theodore Dreiser, but with deep psychological roots.  This is literature to think about, indeed a worthy successor to Updike and Roth.  Bring on the second of the trilogy!

 

Crow Fair and Desperate Characters

One of the pleasures on the boat is having some time to read.   Thomas McGuane’s short story collection, Crow Fair impressed me, reading one short story each evening to completion.  He is a gifted writer and although Montana is his focus and thus the western experience of writers such as Wallace Stegner and Raymond Carver encroach, there are also palettes of Updike and Cheever.  His characters are universal, flawed, sometimes funny, but fundamentally ones you identify or sympathize with, real people in stories that are so natural the denouement suddenly seizes you.  Above all, survival, emotionally as well as physically, is a leitmotif threaded in these stories.  Now I fully understand his close friendship with Jim Harrison.

His story Hubcaps has an exposition that is reminiscent of a Cheever story….By late afternoon, Owen’s parents were usually having their first cocktails.  His mother gave hers some thought, looking upon it as a special treat, while his father served himself a ‘stiff one’ in a more matter-of-fact way, his every movement expressing a conviction that he had a right to this stuff, no matter how disagreeable or lugubrious or romantic it might soon make him….Owen’s mother held her drink between the tips of her fingers; his father held it in his fist.  Owen could see solemnity descend on his father’s brow with the first sip, while his mother often looked apprehensive about the possible hysteria to come.

On a Dirt Road is particularly Carver-like. Ann and the protagonist “need new friends.” A couple moves in a home down the dirt road street where two cars cannot pass, so they see their new neighbors in such a mode neither acknowledging the other. Ann wants to have dinner with the Clearys, old friends, of which our protagonist has tired. Ann says she'll go alone with them to a local pizza joint. Off she goes and our protagonist decides to go meet the new neighbors who turn out to have “issues.”  Nonetheless on the spur of the moment he invites them to go to the pizza place to surprise his wife and the Clearys. The surprise is on him.

In A Long View to the West a man is caring for his dying father who is in the habit of telling or I should say retelling the same stories.  Clay asks his father how he feels about dying, the reply being ‘How should I know? I've never done it before.’  This is when he realizes that he is more frightened than his Dad, also realizing that he needs those stories.

Motherlode is about a “cattle geneticist” who gets caught up in a dangerous scam, way beyond his level of expertise, and he pays the consequences.  The suspense is so carefully built by McGuane that the reader is caught unawares at the end of the story.

Prairie Girl is about a woman who rises from “Butt Hut,” a brothel to bank president, by marrying a gay man from the banking family, having a child by him, and raising the boy as the true love of her life. Peter always wonders about his Mom, never realizing the truth.

River Camp incorporates all the writer’s themes, the role of nature in our insignificant lives, dysfunctional relationships, and the danger that lurks just below the surface because of something which is greater than ourselves.  Two old friends, sometimes adversaries, book a strange guide to lead them on a camping trip in the wilderness, learning more about each, their wives, and then the brutal truth about the guide and what nature has in store for them.

The title story Crow Fair concerns two brothers who learn that their dying mother, suffering from dementia, had a long affair with a Crow Chief who they set out to find. In so doing, the brothers go their separate ways.

Idiosyncratic, funny and sad at the same time, and beautifully written, McGuane tugs at the reader’s heart with simple truths about life.  I’ve mentioned only a few of the stories.  These stories, like Cheever’s and Carver’s deserve to be reread.

Now on to an outstanding novel. Thanks to Jonathan Franzen’s unremitting praise of a “forgotten novel,” I picked up Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters before leaving for the boat.  Here is yet another American classic I could put in the same class as John Williams’ Stoner which was written only five years earlier (Stoner 1965; Desperate Characters 1970).  Those were turbulent years and each novel deals with the turmoil in subtle ways, but mostly through relationships.  Each is written in absolutely exquisite, compact prose. 

Fox’s novel has a special familiarity to me as it is set in Brooklyn, near Brooklyn Heights in the late 1960s, my last years in the exact same place.  Her descriptions of the decadence of New York City are real as it was written at the time when it was experienced.  This is juxtaposed to the decay of the inner lives of the two main characters, Sophie and Otto Bentwood.  They are a childless couple, in their early 40s, living in the slowly gentrified neighborhood bordering Brooklyn Heights.  They also have a Mercedes and a house on Long Island with a barn.  They should be happy, right?

Early in the novel, to Otto’s displeasure, Sophie feeds a feral cat who suddenly lashes out at Sophie, sinking its teeth in her hand.  The incident is the undercurrent of the entire novel as the reader is left wondering whether her decision to not immediately seek medical attention will have serious consequences.  In this regard it is a novel of suspense.  Otto advises that she do so, although, interestingly, he is not absolutely insistent. 

Otto is breaking up with his law partner, Charlie Russel, who has his own marriage difficulties. However these partners, friends from college have gone their separate ways professionally.  But the plot is secondary to the lapidary writing, sentences, paragraphs you just find yourself dwelling over.

When the cat first appears, ramming its head against the glass door, Otto explains “’Ugly Bastard!’ The cat looked at him, then its eyes flicked away.  The house felt powerfully solid to him; the sense of that solidity was like a hand placed firmly in the small of his back.  Across the yard, past the cat’s agitated movements, he saw the rear windows of the houses on the slum street.  Some windows had rags tacked across them, other, sheets of transparent plastic.  From the sill of one, a blue blanket dangled.

When Otto is out of sight, Sophie defies him by feeding the cat, even petting the cat as she serves up some milk.  The cat’s back rose convulsively to press against her hand.  She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Otto’s presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire.

What struck me was that “friendly human touch” is absent from her marriage and that she suppressed her cry because of Otto being nearby.  Here is a marriage in crisis.

Fox is one of these rare writers who can capture the essence of a person in few words.  Here is her description of one of their friends, a psychiatrist, Myron Holstein who caters to writers and painters:  He didn’t know a thing about her, not even after ten years, but she loved the air of knowingness; the flattery that didn’t obligate her.  And she liked his somewhat battered face, the close-fitting English suits he bought from a London salesman who stopped at a mid-town hotel each year to take orders, the Italian shoes he said were part of his seducer’s costume.  He wasn’t a seducer.  He was remote.  He was like a man preceded into a room by acrobats.

That last sentence reminds me of Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns or George Barker’s poem To My Mother: “She is a procession no one can follow after / But be like a little dog following a brass band.”

It’s a stalemate relationship between Otto and Sophie.  He refuses to answer the telephone.  She asks, why? “Because I never hear anything on it that I want to hear any more.”  They were both standing rigidly, each half-consciously amassing evidence against the other, charges that would counterbalance the exasperation that neither could fathom.  Then he asked her directly why she was angry.  She said she wasn’t angry at all; it was just so tiresome of him to indulge himself about the telephone, to stand there so stupidly while it rang, to force her to do it.  How many of us have played the same tug of war with our spouses?

As a woman in her early 40’s, Sophie’s body is changing.  It comes somewhat as a shock to her:  Her body was not her own any more, but had taken off in some direction of its own.  In this last year she had discovered that its discomforts once interpreted, always meant the curtailment, or end, of some pleasure.  She could not eat and drink the way she once had.  Inexorably, she was being invaded by elements that were both gross and risible.  She had only realized that one was old for a long time.  Old for a long time, how familiar!  Brilliant writing!

As a student I once spent a long time in the emergency room waiting area of the Brooklyn Hospital.  Note how Fox’s sense of realism conjures up such a room in the late 1960s.  Her writing brings alive an experience I had more than 50 years ago: It was like a bus station, an abandoned lot, the aisles in the coaches of the old B & O trains, subway platforms, police stations. It combined the transient quality, the disheveled atmosphere of a public terminal with the immediately apprehended terror of a way station to disaster.  It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined three walls.  It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays.  On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef.  There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes – cleaning fluids embedded in fabric and blooming horridly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns – all the exudations of human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind.

Yet the heart of the novel is a philosophical question as “desperate characters” seek meaning in a hostile universe, a snapshot of New York City when it reached its nadir in the late 1960s.  As Franzen asks in his introduction: “What is the point of meaning – especially literary meaning – in a rabid modern world?  Why bother creating and preserving order if civilization is every bit as killing as the anarchy to which it’s opposed?”  Striving for the answer, Franzen has read and taught the novel many times.

John Williams’ Stoner has been called “the greatest American novel you’ve never heard of.” Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters is in the same league. 

Purity – Purely Dazzling

With Updike now gone, and Roth no longer writing, the baton of “Great American Novelist” has been passed to Jonathan Franzen.  After all, he was anointed as such by Time Magazine after the publication of his last novel, Freedom.  Sure, there are other important American novelists; John Irving, Anne Tyler, Richard Russo, Joyce Carol Oats, to name but a few.  But Franzen happens to stand out, although John Irving also merits such consideration.  Irving is the more prolific and they share a Dickensian perspective on character development and social commentary.  These are writers of substance and so when Franzen’s Purity was published, I made sure I was first on Amazon’s list to receive a copy – it was even delivered on a Sunday.

I wish I had had the time to simply sit down and read it through in a couple of days.  Instead, my usual routines encroached as well as my propensity to draw out the books I enjoy the most, lingering over certain passages.

Franzen, like Irving, is a writer’s writer, possessing a unique take on story development, the intersecting of characters, the timelessness of subjects he covers, as well as his observations of contemporary life.  Remember Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities – his social commentary on the themes of the 1980’s, greed, racism, politics and class separation?  Franzen addresses the “new” issues of the post millennium, power struggles between men and women, global warming, the changes wrought by the Internet – both in how we communicate and how it’s impacted interpersonal relationships – and the hanging Sword of Damocles which is nuclear catastrophe.  These are high wire themes, anxiety producing, and disturbing.

So one could say that social realism is Franzen’s strength, but his writing is more than that.  In reading this novel I had the sense that it was writing itself, it having an internal energy that flowed through, rather than by, the author.  I know that sounds otherworldly, but I felt as if I was witnessing something that is happening in the here and now, a story into which the reader gives himself over, with characters that are real.

I used to rely on Updike’s Rabbit novels, a new one published approximately every ten years for four decades, to capture this nation’s Zeitgeist, and I felt part of it.  Franzen is like Updike in this regard, not to mention matching Updike’s towering intellect. These are two very smart, robust writers.  Updike was elegantly fluent with language, whereas Franzen’s prose hits you like a sledgehammer, delving deeply into his characters’ inner lives.   Purity expands upon his last novel, Freedom which concludes with the first few years of the 21^st century.  The state of our hyper world is evolving faster than in Updike’s time and it is remarkable to see those changes so well documented in this novel.

At the heart of the story is a literal murder, but there are symbolic murders throughout, men and women in sexual power struggles, adult children and their parents who have their own special power struggles, identity crises in abundance. Through their actions, these characters bring about an existential disconnection that seems to epitomize this second decade of the 21^st century.  There is a healthy dose of misanthropic analysis to be pondered.

Structurally the novel consists of several intersecting stories, timelines sometimes out of order.  At the heart is “Pip” as Purity Tyler is known.  Pip’s nickname is Franzen’s hat tip to Dickens’ character in Great Expectations.  Like Dickens’ Pip, Purity is the thread that ties together many lives. First our Pip is on a quest to discover the identity of her father – and by so doing hoping to eradicate a student loan of six figures (“her student debt was functionally a vow of poverty”), and find out exactly who she is, intellectually, morally, socially.  She is adrift and works at a “shit job” (the implication being all loan-burdened graduates are subjugated to those kinds of jobs) as a cold call sales agent for “Renewable Solutions” -- selling home owners on using government renewable energy tax credits by investing in projects for their homes, the firm taking a big slice of the tax credit. 

The work is demeaning to her intellect.  Her boss is demeaning.  She retreats each night to a rented room in a home populated by a number of dissidents who have a Utopian vision – under the rubric of the “Occupy movement.”  Their theory was that the technology driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products.  Unemployed consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel social change.

She considers the name “Purity” the most shameful word in the English language because it was her given Name.  It made her ashamed of her own driver’s license, the Purity Tyler beside her sullen head shot, and made filling out any application a small torture.

There are two male figures dominating her life, Andreas Wolf, an East German ex-pat, and now a renegade charismatic leader of a Wiki-leaks kind of organization dubbed the “Sunshine Project,” and Tom Aberant, a brilliant on line journalist, founder of the Denver Independent with money left to him by his ex-wife’s father. 

Tom’s ex-wife, with whom he was madly in love, Anabel Laird, eschews money as the root of all her family’s sins, and during their eleven years of marriage leads Tom around like a trained animal.  Hilarious – getting him to pee sitting down as that’s the way women do it!  And she can only have sex during the three days around the full moon. Anabel impresses me as a nut job.

Nonetheless they endure a marriage mired in a “vow of poverty” which culminates in a power struggle sexual conquest.  In a departure from Franzen’s third person narrative, there is one chapter with a first person narrative from Tom’s perspective in which he describes their very strange relationship (in my day, you simply fell in love, got married, and had kids – not so simple any more).

Earlier, Tom had met Andreas, both as relatively young men, a chance meeting, like many of the crisscrossing incidents in the novel (a little like Hardy!), so they have a long standing connection.  Andreas Wolf is compared to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, although Wolf considers his “Sunlight Project” more “purpose driven.”  He becomes an Internet rock star and having come from a totalitarian regime in East Germany finds the Internet at first his savior and then his burden.  He is plainly a sociopath. 

While still in East Germany Andreas meets the beautiful but very young Annagret.  Although she is half his age, Annagret becomes Andreas’ first real love.  He is willing to do anything for her.  Ultimately Annagret becomes part of the Sunlight Project and she is the one who inveigles Pip to join and be an intern in Bolivia where Andreas’ operation becomes ensconced.  Pip becomes Andreas’ new love object as by that time Annagret is out of the picture.  He allows Pip access to some of his inner thoughts:  There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.  Pip to Andreas: But it's a pretty weird theory for a person who exposes people's secrets for a living.

Andreas remembers the Old Republic in light of today’s massive disintermediation by technology, an interesting passage which in effect describes a “new class” that is nonetheless as heartless as the class it replaced:  The privileges available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC. The real appeal of apparatchikism was the safety of belonging. Outside, the air smelled like brimstone, the food was bad, the economy moribund, the cynicism rampant, but inside, victory over the class enemy was assured…. Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete. Inside, decentralized ad hoc communities were rewriting the rules of creativity, the revolution rewarding the risk-taker who understood the power of networks. The New Regime even recycled the old Republic's buzz-words, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging. On this, apparatchiks of every stripe agreed. It never seemed to bother them that their ruling elites consisted of the grasping, brutal old species of humanity.

After Tom’s torturous relationship and parting with his wife, a professional journalist, Leila, enters Tom’s life.  Leila’s relationship with Tom is an unusual one as she continues to be married to an over-the-hill, and now partially paralyzed, novelist /professor, Charles, keeping two homes, one with Charles and the other with Tom.  One of the overarching themes of the novel – the “new” feminism is expressed in her relationship with Tom:  Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. ‘I get feminism on an equal-rights issue….What I don’t get is the theory.  Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.’  And he’d laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila had remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around:  conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them.  She’d felt attacked by Tom’s laughter, and the two of them had been careful never to discuss feminism again.

After Pip interns for Andreas on the Sunshine Project (naturally, Andreas falls for Pip but Pip keeps her distance with some regrets), she winds up as Leila’s protégé in Denver, learning the craft of journalism. (Long story about the “coincidence” that leads to that connection and a spoiler as well, so enough said.) But Leila is jealous of Pip’s good looks and youth.  

Leila – with Pip as her researcher, skills she learned from the Sunshine Project --is trying to scoop a story for Tom’s online Denver Independent before the Washington Post gets to it: the lack of controls of a nuclear arsenal in Amarillo.  Here Franzen gives a humorous hat tip to the famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie, Dr. Strangelove, with Maj. 'King' Kong played by Slim Pickens riding a thermonuclear bomb to its target. Two minor characters in the novel, Cody, who has stolen a replica of an A-Bomb, and his girlfriend, Phyllisha who thinks it is real (and it could have been because of the lack of controls) play out this scene:   He wanted her to feel the kind of power he had at his disposal.  He wanted her to take off all her clothes and put her arms around the bomb and stick her little tail up for him….She went ahead and did what he said….To be that close to so much potential death and devastation, to have her sweaty skin against the cool skin of a death-bomb, to imagine the whole city going up in a mushroom cloud when she orgasmed.  It was pretty great, she had to say.

It is through Tom and Leila that thermonuclear anxiety and a healthy dose of misanthropy emerges: Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. Leila neither liked this theory nor had a better one; her feeling about all doomsday scenarios was Please make me the first person killed; but she'd forced herself to read accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what it was like to have had your skin burned off entirely and still be staggering down a street, alive. Not just for Pip’s sake did she want the Amarillo story to be large. The world's fear of nuclear weapons was unaccountably unlike her fear of fighting and, vomiting: the longer the world lasted without ending in mushroom clouds, the less afraid people seemed to be….Climate change got more ink in a day than nuclear arsenals did in a year. To say nothing of the NFL, passing records that Peyton Manning had broken as a Denver Bronco.  Leila was afraid and felt like the only one who was.

Amen to that, Jonathan Franzen.

Speaking of Jonathans, Franzen knows how to engage in some self deprecating humor, Leila’s novelist husband, Charles, saying to Pip: So many Jonathans.  A plague of literary Jonathans.  If you read only New York Times Book Review, you’d think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness.  Ambition, vitality.

In Andreas’ life we have an overbearing mother, as we have a passive but doting mother in Pip’s life and Tom’s mother is omnipresent, warning Tom about Anabel.  There are story lines galore, many characters, multigenerational dysfunctionality, and then the real world of the 21^st century to channel.  Franzen captures all in this episodic novel.

[Pip] and her peers were well aware of what a terminally fucked-up world they were inheriting. Towards the end of the novel Pip was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power.  Secrets were power.  Money was power.  Being needed was power.  Power, power, power:  how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it? But those thoughts did not deter her from her quest for honesty and trust which underlies her entire journey. 

One can only have “great expectations” for Jonathan Franzen’s future work.