Tears of a bitter clown
Franzen’s angry, grumpy routine against the young is getting old
Jonathan Franzen is the punchline to an ongoing joke.
Franzen, with his noted selfseriousness, his ambivalence about modernity, his anger at the world, stands in for a character type — one frequently dismissed on Twitter with the ironic (but dead serious) nouning of “old.”
Franzen, at 56, is an Old. He is chagrined and scandalized by kids today, with their student debt and their start-ups, their selfies and their Snapchat.
Franzen is all too happy to publicly mourn for some other, more golden time. One where literary culture was held dear, when Susan Sontag or Gore Vidal were publicly positioned as the celebrated artists we’d look to for perspectives on the big issues of the day, instead of, say, Caitlyn Jenner or that one kid with the haircut from the British boy band that recently announced a hiatus.
Franzen has been beating this particular horse for nearly 20 years now, most famously in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay where he wrote, after publishing his first novel in 1988, he “had already realized the money, the hype, the limo ride to a Vogue shoot weren’t simply the fringe benefits. They were the main prize, the consolation for no longer mattering to the culture.”
Courting celebrity by granting interviews, including a recent video interview where he admitted to the Guardian newspaper that he often worries his face looks fat, he is perpetually at the ready to rail against its evils, but nonetheless happy to perform the grumpy dog- and-pony trick by giving self-serious, very tweetable, cantankerous quotes.
Maybe it’s best to explain the joke by way of another joke. You know the one about the doctor and the depressed patient? The patient is sad, the doctor prescribes going to see a performance by a certain famous clown, and the patient reveals, in fact, he is that very clown!
Franzen, you see, is the clown, except one of the reasons this clown is sad is that he feels like the appreciation for the art of clowning is on the decline, and the cynical doctor has known he’s been treating the famous clown all along. It’s a punchline you could, theoretically, laugh at — especially if the aggrieved clown plays it straight.
Franzen’s objections with contemporary life, especially his rage at the emoji-fluent generation, are overtly addressed in Purity, his most recent novel.
His central character, a kind of blank slate upon which the novel is written, is a millennial named Pip Tyler. The stage for intergenerational drama is set on the very first page, which depicts Pip on the phone, indulging in an iteration of one of the yearslong arguments she has with her mother. Nearly every subsequently introduced character is framed, at least in part by their relationship with their parents.
Formally, Purity comprises seven interconnected novellas, the first of which takes place in Oakland, circa 2012. After graduating from college, young Pip finds herself living in a semi-derelict house with a bunch of political misfits — a married couple of Christian Marxists-cum-Occupy organizers, a schizophrenic genius who fails to understand common courtesy and a neuroatypical man with the cognitive abilities (and sweet demeanour) of a preteen child.
Saddled with a crummy job making cold calls to sell communities on a complicated tax-crediting scheme, Pip, whose nickname is a short form for Purity, has failed to yet meet her own great expectations. Franzen uses literary allusion throughout the novel to various effects. Among them there’s Pip herself, named after the Dickens character who, like Franzen’s millennial protagonist, is, as Dickens wrote, “quite an unlearned genius.”
That Franzen would stuff Purity full of the literary past is no surprise. His well-chronicled anxiety about the cultural importance of literature is an ongoing motif across his projects.
Further, Purity works like a set of those Russian matryoshka nesting dolls, finding its central theme in the relationships between children and parents. So dropping references to what Franzen would hope is his work’s literary paternity is a nice riff on that motif.
And it pairs nicely with another of Purity’s themes — a not-so-novelistic notion of truth that Franzen is happy to bludgeon his reader with over the course of nearly 600 pages.
Celebrity, Franzen says, is damaging, digital moralism is damaging, personal branding in lieu of personal accountability is damaging, mistaking a grainy iPhone photo circulated around the world for the totality of the truth is damaging — but we appreciate it. It is his power as a novelist to make his readers feel his truth, to compel us. And yet. Through Pip, Franzen angrily projects these concerns. She is not angry enough for her author’s taste. At one point a maternal figure literally tells her she should be mad. Similarly, in the Guardian, he said: “I thought (young) people were supposed to be idealistic and angry. And they seemed kind of cynical and not very angry. At least not in any way that was accessible to me.”
It’s here, in his inability to humanely imagine what it might be like to occupy the consciousness of a person under the age of 40, where the novel falls down. Instead of portraying characters with fully realized consciousnesses of their own, he uses them as too-often artless ciphers for the rage he wishes younger people would feel.
In Purity, it would seem Franzen’s will has been blinded entirely by his anger, and it taints every page. The book, like the author, is a punchline you could theoretically laugh at.
Franzen, an apoplectic clown, is very much in on the joke, yes. It’s a shame his laughter is too bitter to share in.