LEWIS LAPHAM: STEVE FORBES'S GIFT TO THE NATION
HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ APRIL 1996 $3.95
PERCHANCE TO DREAM
In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels
By Jonathan Franzen
------------ + ------------
OUR NEXT RACE QUESTION
The Uneasiness Between Blacks and Latinos
A
colloquy with Cornel West, Jorge Klor de Alva, and Earl Shorris
NO CANADA?
After the Referendum, a Chill Descends on Montreal
By Guy Lawson
THE SWEET SMELL OF SUBSIDIES
A
sky--high look at farm policy by Richard Manning Also:
L e
Thi Diem Thuy, Bob Arnot, Jamaica Kincaid
-----------+ -----------
F 0 L 0
IN THE AGE OF IMAGES,A REASON TO WRITE NOVELS
-"""=3~:~ee-=--
By
Jonathan Franzen
M
ydespair about the American novelbegan in the winter of 1991, when Ifled to Yaddo, the artists colony in up-state New York, towrite the last twochapters of my second book.I had been leading a life of self-enforced solitude in NewYork City-long daysof writ-ing in a small white room,evening walks on streetswhere Hindi, Russian, Kore-an, and Colombian Spanishwere spoken in equal mea-sure. Even deep in myQueens neighborhood, how-ever, ugly news had reachedme through the twin portalsof my TV set and my
New
York
Times subscription. Thecountry was preparing for warecstatically, whipped on byWilliam Safire (for whomSaddam Hussein was "thisgeneration's Hitler") and George Bush ("Vitalissuesof principle are at stake"), whose approvalrating stood at 89 percent. In the righteousnessof the nation's hatred of a man who until re-cently had been our close petropolitical ally, asin the near-total absence of public skepticismabout the war, the UnitedStates seemed to me as ter-minally out of touch with re-ality as Austria had been in1916, when it managed tocelebrate the romantic"heroism" of mechanizedslaughter in the trenches. Isaw a country dreaming of infinite oil for its hour-longcommutes, of glory in themassacre of faceless Iraqis, of eternal exemption from therules of history. But in myown way I, too, was dreamingof escape, and when I real-ized that Yaddo was nohaven-the Times camethere daily, and the talk atevery meal was of Patriotmissilesand yellow ribbons-I began to think that the most reasonable thingfor a citizen to do might be to enter a monasteryand pray for humanity.
Jonathan Franzen is the author of two novels,
The Twenty-Seventh City
and
Strong Motion,
and is writing a third.
ILLUSTRATIO'iS BY
STEPHEN
ALCOR
FOLIO 35
Such was my state when I discovered, in themodest Yaddo library, Paula Fox's classic shortnovel
Desperate Characters.
"She was going toget away with everything!" is the hope thatseizesSophie Bentwood, a woman who possiblyhas rabies, in
Desperate Characters.
Sophie is aliterate, childless Brooklynite, unhappily mar-ried to a conservative lawyer named Otto. Sheused to translate French novels; now she's toodepressed to do more than intermittently readthem. Against Otto's advice, she has given milk to a homeless cat, and the cat has repaid thekindne s by biting her hand. Sophie immediate-lyfeels "vitally wounded"-she's been bitten for"no reason," just as Josef K. is arrested for "nothis house,and those portents that lit up the dark at the edgeofherownexistence.
Desperate Characters,
which was first pub-lished in 1970, ends with an act of propheticviolence. Breaking under the strain of his col-lapsing marriage, Otto Bentwood grabs a bottleof ink from Sophie's escritoire and smashes itagainst their bedroom wall. The ink in whichhis law books and Sophie's translations havebeen printed now forms an unreadable blot-asymbolic precursor of the blood that, a genera-tion later, more literal-minded books andmovies will freely splash. But the black lines onthe wall aren't simply a mark of doom. Theypoint as well toward an extraordinaryrelief, the end to a fevered isolation.By daring to equate a crumbling mar-riage with a crumbling social order,Fox goes to the heart of an ambiguitythat even now I experience almostdaily: does the distress I feel derivefrom some internal sickness of thesoul, or is it imposed on me by thesickness of society? That someone be-sides me had suffered from this ambi-guity and had seen light on its farside-that a book like
Desperate Char-acters
had been published and pre-served; that I could find company andconsolation and hope in a novelpulled almost at random from a book-shelf-felt akin to an instance of reli-gious grace. I don't think there's amore pure gratitude than the one Ifelt toward a stranger who twentyyears earlier had cared enough aboutherself and about her art to producesuch a perfectly realized book.Yet even while I was feeling savedas a reader by
Desperate Characters
I was suc-cumbing, as a novelist, to despair about thepossibility of connecting the personal and thesocial. The reader who happens on
DesperateCharacters
in a library today will be as struck bythe foreignness of the Benrwoods' world as byits familiarity. A quarter century has onlybroadened and confirmed the sense of culturalcrisis that Fox was registering. But what nowfeels like the locus of that crisis-the banal as-cendancy of television, the electronic fragmen-tation of public discourse-is nowhere to beseen in the novel. Communication, for theBentwoods, meant books, a telephone, and let-ters. Portents didn't stream uninterruptedlythrough a cable converter or a modem; theywere glimpsed only dimly, on the margins of existence. An ink bottle, which now seems im-possibly quaint, was still imaginable as a sym-bol in 1970.reason" in Kafka's
The
Trial-but when theswelling in her hand subsides, she becomes gid-dy with the hope of being spared rabies shots.The "everything" Sophie wants to get awaywith, however, is more than her liberal self-in-dulgence with the cat. She wants to get awaywith reading Goncourt novels and eating
omelettes aux fines herbes
on a street where dere-licts lie sprawled in their own vomit and in acountry that's fighting a dirty war in Vietnam.She wants to be spared the pain of confrontinga future beyond her life with Otto. She wants.to keep dreaming. But the novel's logic won'tlet her. She's compelled, instead, to this equa-tion of the personal and the social:
"God,
i f
I
am rabid
I
am equal
to
what
is
outside,"
she saidout loud,and felt an extraordinaryrelief as though, at last, she'd discovered what it wasthat could create a balance between the quiet,rather vacant progressionof the daysshe spent in
36 HARPER'S MAGAZI E
I
APRIL 1996
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