Hey guys. I just found this weird “review” of Franzen’s Freedom in my unpublished drafts. It’s pretty funny. I didn’t edit it at all, which probably explains why the 3rd paragraph makes little to no sense. Great! I must’ve written it just as I finished, which was sometime in the Fall of 2010. And I have, by the way, read Strong Motion since this, which might have changed my feelings a little bit but ANYWAY.
Ok. Jonathan Franzen. Get outta town. I was criminally addicted to Freedom. I started ignoring my basic needs so that I could keep with this book. What I like about Jonathan Franzen’s novels (i.e., Freedom and The Corrections… Strong Motion is my next book on deck after I finish The Broom of the System, but I digress) is that they almost read like gossip rags. He has a very delicate way of addressing mundane stuff— the things we all feel and experience— but it manages to be so totally captivating. As a writer, Franzen gives me hope that people still want to read about things that are not always whimsical and poetic. Or whimsical and poetic at all. As a reader (and like many readers, or human beings in general, I think), I am so positively trashy that I lurch towards parts of the book wherein base things are discussed. Such as phone-sex fantasies of pooping in someone’s mouth. Franzen, you dog! But seriously, we are Americans, and we love to look at car crashes and porn, so he is totally nailing it.
The other thing that’s so winning about Franzen is the way his books make you feel. Every time I put down the book I felt like I needed two gin and tonics, a new tattoo, and a self-help book about how to not feel disaffected. This mood created by Freedom really seeds itself within you. You find yourself (er, I find myself) reading along totally absorbed with the emotional underpinnings of the characters; suddenly and immediately (though not so often that it was distracting), the book would provoke these cumbersome self-actualizations where I went, “Ugh, this is uncomfortable to read because it hits unbearably close to home and I feel really psychologically burdened right alongside this character.”
Franzen doesn’t prey on your emotions in the overt and facile way that books like, say, The Lovely Bones do. His emotional manipulation is sort of clever. You register a little squirmy feeling that grows as you turn pages, until you feel at once exhausted and empathetic. What I’m trying to say here is that the magic lies in the fact that the “dramatic” content is overt, hanging all out, but the weight of the content is so, so, so not obvious. And you carry it with you.
Plus! Jonathan Franzen is so totally hip enough to toss in a dollop of pop culture and current events. You feel like a part of the novel’s world when he mentions Tina Fey and NPR and population control and having a roommate in a college dorm. Because yes! Those tidbits are a part of my life, too! Franzen, you are writing about my world, and with grace. Props, dude.
Grew up in Southern California, can’t help but be really into this.
A behind-the-scenes look at pirate animatronic figure-finishing.
Reblogged from imagineeringdisney with 27 notes
"…if she persevered, she might do something special — and part of persevering meant getting past moments like this one, when people made you feel small, unlovable, and took away your confidence."
The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides, p. 104
I can’t explain what appeals to me about this video, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with Lana Del Rey’s nose.
