FYI or die

So I’m currently pulling apart an old Franzen novel for a project I’m working on, and it’s kind of breathtaking how well it’s holding up to the most brutal of analysis.  Even when it’s beaten down to verbs, nouns and adjectives it reads like water out of a tap.  It is almost enough to make me want to never write again.

But then I read this article in the Paris Review about his life work.  And it turns out that it’s not easy trying to write like Jonathon Franzen, even if you are Jonathon Franzen.  I can’t decide whether this makes me feel better or worse.

Either way, it’s an amazing read.  Definitely worth the cover price.  I especially like his discussion about his relationships and how they affected his writing.

I started writing Pynchonian letters to my then-fiancee, and I think it’s significant that she hated those letters and made her hatred of them known, and that I steered away from that voice-because of our relationship, because of an intense relationship with a woman.  Which now seems to me emblematic: You could either play with the boys like that, and relegate women to minor and substantially objectified characters on the margin, or you could try and have a full-fledged relationship with a woman, in which case that kind of boy writing, however brilliant and masterful, was necessarily subordinate.  It’s worth noting that at this point in my life, I feel much more indebted to various female writers- Alice Munro, Christina Stead, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Smiley, Paula Fox, to name a few - than I do to Pynchon.

It is impossible for me to read something about Jonathon Franzen without thinking about this article.  Written by his ex-girlfriend, writer Kathryn Chetkovich, Envy, is an uncomfortably honest account of how it feels to be a writer dating another writer who becomes exceedingly successful while you are still struggling to get short stories published in local journals (tip: not all that flash.)  Published in Meanjin, the full essay now remains under their oh-so-tight paid content section.  I will quote from their sparse but free blog commentary:

On reading early drafts of the novel she remembers feeling the proverbial ‘stabs of dread familiar to all writers’, because ‘here were sentences, paragraphs, whole pages I not only admired but wished I had written’. After publication, things only became worse: ‘When the man was merely gifted but not particularly rewarded, I was comfortable; we were in it together, comrades in a world that didn’t care what we had to tell it. But now, what did his success prove if not that when the gift is prodigious enough, the world does need us, it will pay?’

The essay is one of my favourite things ever written about creativity human nature.  It was republished in The Best American Essays of 2004 and even Franzen heaped praise on it. 

On that note, I really can’t wait for the new Franzen.  This book nerd anticipation reminds me of how I used to feel as a ten-year-old waiting for John Marsden to release the next installment of the “Tomorrow When the War Began” series in the summer.  Excitement abounds.