Jonathan Franzen - Purity

What got him in trouble was a cycle of word puzzles that he worked on when his brain was too tired to do math. The soothing thing about the sort of poetry he wrote was that it limited his choice of words. It was as if, after the chaos of a childhood with his mother, he craved the discipline of rhyme schemes and other formal constraints. At another cattle-call literary event, where he was given only seven minutes at the podium, he read his puzzle poems because they were short and didn’t betray their secrets to a listener, only to a reader. After the reading, an editor from Weimarer Beiträge complimented him on the poems and said she could fit a few of them into the issue she was closing. And why did he say yes? Maybe there really was something suicidal in him. Or maybe it was the looming of his military service, which it was already a small scandal that he’d deferred, given his father’s lofty position. Even if, as was likely, he served in an elite intelligence or communications corps, he couldn’t imagine himself surviving the military. (Poetic discipline was one thing, army discipline another.) Or maybe it was just that the magazine editor was about the same age as his mother and reminded him of her: somebody too blinded by self-regard and privilege to recognize what a total tool she was. She must have fancied herself a sensitive advocate of youthful subjectivity, a woman who really understood young people today, and it must have been inconceivable to her and her supervisors that a young man even more privileged than they were could wish to embarrass them, because none of them noticed what everyone else did within twenty-four hours of the magazine’s distribution:

Muttersprache / Mother Tongue

I

Ich

connected

her

danke

es

with

deiner

inappropriate

immensen

desire,

Courage,

made

allabendlich.

every

Träume

ermächtigen.

enthusiastically

Träume

unnatural

hüten

response

eines

entirely

mine.

Muttersöhnchens

ohnmächtigen

She

Schlaf.

observed

Träumend

zealously,

if

gelingt

a

Liebe

little

ohne

irritably;

Reue:

she

In

made

Oedipus’

up

Unterwelt

such

singt

droll

ein

excuses;

jauchzender,

nobody

aberwitziger

Chor

had

uns

ever

Lügen

really

aus

relished

Träumen

lying

ins

if

Ohr.

correct

Nur

hypocrisies

sufficed

tags

to

offenbaren

evade

negativity.

Yokastes

Obsession

und

She

Rasen

allowed

me

sich,

everything;

ordnungshalber,

not

charakterlich.

every

Ich

radically

aber

grotesque

liege

upbringing

im

so

Schlaf,

succeeds.

Mutter.

The hullabaloo that followed was delicious. The magazine was yanked from every shelf and trucked away for pulping, the editor was fired, her boss demoted, and Andreas speedily expelled from the university. He left the office of his department chair wearing a grin so wide it made his neck hurt. From the way the heads of strangers swiveled toward him, from the way the students who knew him turned their backs at his approach, he could tell that the entire university had already heard the news of what he’d done. Of course it had — talking was pretty much the only thing that anyone in the Republic, except maybe his father, had to fill their days with.

When he went out onto Unter den Linden, he noticed a black Lada double-parked across from the main university entrance. Two men were in the car, watching him, and he gave them a wave that they didn’t return. He didn’t really see how he could be arrested, given who his parents were, but he also didn’t mind the thought of it. If anything, he’d relish the opportunity to not recant his poems. After all, didn’t he adore sex? Didn’t he dearly love coming? And so, if you took him at his literal word, what more heartfelt tribute to socialism could he offer than to dedicate his MoST gLoRIOUs orgasm to it? Even his wayward dick rose to attention and saluted it!

The Lada tailed him all the way to Alexanderplatz, and when he emerged from the U-Bahn at Strausbergerplatz, a different car, also black, was waiting for him on the Allee. For the previous two nights he’d been hiding out at the Müggelsee, but now that his expulsion was official there was no point in avoiding his parents. It was February, and the day was unusually warm and sunny, the coal pollution mild and almost pleasant, not throat-burning, and Andreas was in such sunny spirits that he felt like approaching the black car and explaining to its occupants, in a lighthearted tone, that he was more important than they could ever hope to be. He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string. He hoped he might never in his life be serious again.

The car tailed him to the Karl Marx Buchhandlung, where he went inside and asked a bad-smelling clerk if they had the latest issue of Weimarer Beiträge . The clerk, who knew his face but not his name, briskly replied that the issue wasn’t in yet.

“Really?” Andreas said. “I thought it was supposed to be in last Friday.”

“There was a problem with the content. It’s being reissued.”

“What problem? What content?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“Why, no, I didn’t.”

The clerk evidently considered this so unlikely as to be suspicious. He narrowed his eyes. “You’ll have to ask someone else.”

“I always seem to be the last person to find out…”

“A stupid adolescent vandal caused a lot of trouble and cost a lot of money.”

What was it about bookstore clerks and their powerful body odor?

“They ought to hang the guy,” Andreas said.

“Maybe,” the clerk said. “What I don’t like is that he got innocent people in trouble. To me, that’s selfish. Sociopathic.”

The word landed in Andreas’s gut like a punch. He left the store in a state of deflation and doubt. Was that what he was — a sociopath? Was that what his mother and motherland had made him? If so, he couldn’t help it. And yet he had a horror of diagnostic labels that suggested there was something wrong with him. As he headed up the Allee toward his parents’ building, under a sun that now seemed wan, he mentally scurried to rationalize what he’d done to the magazine editor — tried to tell himself that she’d gotten only what every apparatchik deserved, that she was being punished for her own stupidity in failing to notice the obvious acrostics, and that, in any case, he was suffering consequences easily as dire as hers — but he couldn’t get around the fact that he hadn’t thought once, let alone twice, about what he might be doing to her by giving her his poems. It was as if he’d chosen to commit vehicular suicide by swerving at high speed into a car filled with children.

He racked his memory for an example of his having treated another human being as anything but an instrumentality. He couldn’t count his parents — his whole childhood was a sense-defying brainfuck. But what about Dr. Gnel? Hadn’t he felt compassion for the psychologist and tried to take care of him? Alas, the label sociopath reduced the example of Gnel to shit. Seducing the shrink who was investigating his sociopathy? His motives there were suspect, to say the least. He thought of the women he’d slept with on his poetry-sponsored spree and how grateful he’d felt to each of them — surely his gratitude counted as evidence in his favor? Maybe. But he couldn’t even remember half their names now, and the work he’d done to give them pleasure seemed in hindsight merely a device to heighten his own. He was dismayed to find no evidence at all of having cared about them as people.