books Archive

I’ve read most of Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection “How to Be Alone” over the course of the past week, and one of the overarching themes of the book, aside from the rather obvious “reading teaches you how to be alone, dummy,” is a certain earnest sadness about the decline of the novel. It’s a sadness I share, even if my reading patterns have very much skewed nonfiction for the past decade. Franzen laments that when we haven’t turned to movies, teevees, iPhones, and Internet porn in place of the novel, we’ve turned to memoirs and personal essays. The “serious” novel — whose publication is seen as cultural event — is doomed. There won’t be another “Catch-22,” or another “Old Man and the Sea.” When an exception pops up (Franzen’s own, more recent “Freedom,” e.g.), it only cements the point: “serious” novels have been turned into novelties.

I work for a company that sells donated books on the Internet. I sift through book donations on the regular. I’ve seen and dealt with tens of thousands of books. Probably hundreds of thousands. No. Definitely hundreds of thousands. In that time, I’ve seen David Foster Wallace books precisely twice, and I brought them home both times (perk of the job). I’ve seen “Freedom” enough that I was able to get two different copies of its first printing and keep the nicer one for myself, while giving the lesser to my probable-future-brother-in-law (sorry, PFBIL!) for Christmas. Where was I going with this again?

Oh right. People don’t read “serious” novels anymore, says Franzen. They read James Patterson and Danielle Steel. And memoirs. Aside from the occasional breakout hit like “The Shipping News,” it’s memoirs and mass markets all the way down. Our collective imagination — the manifestation of our cultural capacity to be alone — is suffering as a result. Or so it’s argued, broadly speaking. Franzen wants us to learn to be alone again, and the key is to read more “serious” literature. “Of course he does,” you say, “He hawks ‘serious’ fiction. What novelist wouldn’t want a coordinated ICBM nuclear strike on Comcast and Verizon and DirecTV, and whoever else out there happens to be in the cable business?” (The writer speaker admits to not having cable, and therefore being better than you.) “What novelist wouldn’t want the memoir to be banned? THEY’D SELL MORE FUCKING BOOKS THAT WAY! Bonanza! Domino, motherfucker!”

(I should be clear that I’m probably misremembering this rueful emphasis on the memoir replacing the “serious” novel and that I’m too lazy to look it up right now. I don’t think it’s as bad as I make it out to be, though. I kept reading the essays, anyway. They’re pretty good. [And yes, that was me covering my ass in case Jonathan Franzen's wife, following in the footsteps of Marjorie Walsh's Creeper Husband, has a Google News alert set up for her spouse, and is going to come into my comment section to defend her better half, guns blazing.])

At any rate.

Though I personally would blame Frank McCourt (or, hell, even Jack Kerouac) for the current preference for memoir over fiction in American literary sensibilities, there’s a really great essay over at The American Scholar that suggests that the real villain is our boy F. Scott Fitzgerald. Consider:

The publication of the “Crack-Up” essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the “omniscience” afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.

Whitman had set American poetry on this road a few generations earlier: the voice of “Song of Myself” belongs to a lyric essayist, contending with himself and his time, using the personal self as the representative of the national type, fusing the individual to history. And the presence of faux memoirists as narrators in American fiction—including Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s own Nick Adams, and before that the narrators of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick—also betrays a preference for the first-person voice.

The “Crack-Up” essays are a similar poetic project. Fitzgerald’s strangled cry in them makes clear that a lyric impulse links the personal essay with poetry, even though essays are a prose form and seem to pose a chronic scourge (or companion) to their apparent kin—narrative fiction. In fact, the essay inhabits an intermediate territory between story and poem. That may be its fundamental appeal. Tell a story and then think about it—all in the same work.

And this is what I think Franzen fails to understand about the appeal of memoir. It’s strange that he wouldn’t: he creates characters for a living, and memoir is simply creating a believable character who also happens to be the narrator. Fundamentally, memoirs are fiction with a whiff of truth. Fundamentally, that is, they’re stories. The goal of a story is to speak to people truthfully, not to tell them the straight dope. I don’t care if James Frey pulled “A Million Little Pieces” out of thin air and then pretended it was true. I don’t feel violated, cheated, or dishonored when a writer elides over uncomfortable facts, or makes up entirely new ones, in the service of a story. A story that doesn’t lie is boring, a laundry list, the minutes of your meeting. Outside of journalism, when I read I want the reality to be tangible; I don’t care a bit about whether it’s verifiable.

Which is a long way of saying that “serious” literature, whether “based on a true story” or entirely fabricated, should probably be judged by a uniform standard, and we ought not worry so much about facts, when the matter at hand is truth.

Anyhow, go read this.