Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“I hear they were very fine.”

“Everything became a competition. I stopped trying to get to concerts because it seemed like I was only trying to build credentials as a concertgoer. Which wasn’t working anyway. I ran into people who went to clubs every weekend. People who’d seen the Clash before I had. People who were friends with Tina Weymouth’s siblings. People who hung around at CBGB and could invest so much more time in being cool. Maybe it was just self-protection, but I started despising these people, and the way they all had to constantly be scrambling to discover something new. I decided this was just pathetic. But I was still afraid of these people. I was afraid they’d find out how much I loved the music I’d grown up with. It seemed like the only way to compete with all their originality, the only way to keep my love safe, was to hate music. Which wasn’t a particularly original solution either, but at least I was protected. And it really is pretty easy to hate rock and roll.”

“Less so jazz and classical.”

“No problem, for me. I just think about the personalities of the people who play it for brunch, and even worse the people who really love it. How good it makes them feel about themselves to know who played drums for Charlie Parker in nineteen-whatever, and how the songs in The Magic Flute go. I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes, and be known and defined by them. If you’re not artistic, which I’m not, at all, and you still have to make these aesthetic decisions. That’s why punk was so good for me. It was this style I picked up before I got too selfconscious about style. I didn’t have to apologize, in my own mind. But then I got older, and suddenly it started to define me anyway, in a very pathetic way. Plus suddenly everybody under the age of forty had a leather jacket and fifties sunglasses and punky clothes, and they all felt really cool. At which point jazz might have been a good thing to turn to, except it was art, and as soon as something becomes art, you get experts, and do I want to be one of these experts who’re all trying to be more knowledgeable than each other? But if you don’t become an expert, you might play something and like it and then find out it’s considered sentimental or unoriginal or something. And I know from experience that people are so insecure that they never hesitate to let you know that what they like is more original and better than what you like, or that they liked what you like years before you liked it. I don’t even have time . And it’s the same with African music, and Latin music. I’m terrified of being implicated by all the smarmy experts. Either that or finding out my tastes aren’t good, or aren’t original. Radio would be the perfect solution, except so much of what they play is bad.”

I’m running wild with the one I love

I see no evil —

I’m running wild with the one-eyed ones

I see no evil —

Pull down the future with the one you love

Louis turned off the tape player. “Let’s go get some stuff from my apartment.”

“Can you drive?”

“Spoken like a true punk.”

On the stairs Renée said, “The time to be a punk was fifteen years ago. It’s just utterly embarrassing to try to be one now.”

“Anarchy’s a very old idea,” he said, breathing through his mouth in the dog zone.

Outside, on Pleasant Avenue, it was no longer a holiday but a dead Thursday night. The night was cool, with a foretaste of dew in the air. Louis drove as fast as he dared and in his drunkenness caught only about one out of every three or four seconds as they passed. Distant, ghostly sirens in the night formed a cushion of noise on which the tires seemed to glide and bounce like water skis. Just east of Davis Square, the Civic plunged into a tunnel of powerlessness, deep inside which was visible the turning of blue flashers. Two figures lit only by glowing urban clouds were straining to hustle what appeared to be cartons of liquor up a side street.

“Looters! Were those looters? They were looters!”

Lights were burning in his apartment. The biggest pieces of furniture hadn’t budged, but the vase made of Mount St. Helens ash had fallen from the wall unit and broken in two, and some of the dining-room chairs had edged away from the table. Behind the closed door of Toby’s room a dot-matrix printer gulped and stridulated. Renée flopped in a U-shape on Louis’s futon. He had to set down the beer and gin and tapes he’d collected and pull her to her feet.

When they returned to her apartment she opened beer bottles briskly. “What’s your favorite kind of music?” she said.

“I don’t believe in favorites. I don’t have any. This is my favorite, just a second here.” He turned the machine up loud.

I love the sound of breaking glass.

Especially when I’m lonely.

I need the noises of destruction.

When there’s nothing new.

“This is good. Who is it?”

“This? My God. The great Nick Lowe? It’s a classic.”

“How old?”

“Bronze Age. Here.” Louis interrupted the song. “We’ll put in something almost as old as me. Everybody likes this record. It’s a classic. It never gets old. Isn’t that what a classic is?”

“I can’t think of anything more pathetic than radio stations that play ‘classic rock’. ”

“Is this pathetic?”

It was Exile on Main Street .

“No,” Renée said. “But I don’t think you understand me.”

“I could play you stuff from now until next Thursday that’s old but not pathetic.”

“That’s right. Because you’re one of those people. I mean, you’re in radio. It’s your business.”

“So don’t complain. I’ll take care of your music for you. Do I feel like an old fart when I listen to this? This is not James Taylor here. It’s sloppy, it’s basic, it’s good.”

“Good for you, maybe. For me it’s just retro. Which feels very sweet right now, but it won’t last. None of these feelings last.”

She continued to match him beer for beer. It was a little before three when “Soul Survivor” played and the tape finally ended. They drank gin and passed a mouthful back and forth until Louis lost it down his neck. A raccoon came to the window and pressed its rubber nose against the screen and stuck a paw through a hole in the screen. “My raccoon!” Renée exclaimed, stumbling towards the window. “It’s my raccoon, that comes and visits me. It comes. sometimes. Oh!” She cried out tragically. “It’s hurt! Look, it’s hurt. I’m saying look. It’s hurt. You can see, it cut its face. It comes up a drainpipe and comes to the window. It likes potatoes but I don’t have any. And it’s cute, but oh boy am I spinning.”

For five minutes Louis had been sitting at the table with his mouth open and his brow furrowed.

“It’s not my raccoon but it comes. frequently. It must live around here. I have an apple,” she told the animal, which had grabbed the top of the screen and was gingerly putting a hind foot through the hole in the mesh, its head wandering and sniffing, daunted by the sheemess of the wall above the window. “I’m coming with the apple,” Renée said, surging over with two quarters of a golden delicious on a saucer and raising the screen an inch. “It’s gone!” she said. “It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s. ”

Her face was gray. She threw herself against the sink and emptied her stomach into it and dropped to her knees, hands still hanging on the rim. Louis was similarly occupied in the bathroom. Sometime after this she was lying on the kitchen table and he was chasing an unrolling roll of paper towels towards a corner of the bedroom where he’d thrown up again. Sometime after this he was sleeping in the hallway, pillowing his head on the mud rug, and she was under her desk with her face against the wall and her legs sticking out. The reflector strips on her sneakers shone in the light from bulbs burning in the bathroom and kitchen. The toilet was motionless. The sink was motionless. The walls were motionless. The refrigerator fell silent, and the sphere of ambient sound swelled enormously, encompassing expressways from which a few low-frequency waves managed just barely to reach Pleasant Avenue before expiring, a stretch of train track in some northern suburb made to clack by passing tank cars, and the tiny aural remnant of a hot rod’s buzz in far eastern Somerville, on the McGrath Highway, heading out of Boston. The stove ticked, once. The lights dimmed by forty lumens, once. East wall stared at west wall and north at south, unblinking in the light. One manila folder had slipped down between paper bags and the others yawned; there was not a breath to stir the photocopies or the blade of the fan where it lay by the window. The table stood on the floor. A wineglass had shattered on the countertop. All the pieces still lay exactly where they’d first come to rest, as if the glass were still whole and could be seen whole again if only the break in time could be repaired. Books were scattered on the floor of the extra room. Two beer bottles nestled in the armchair. The armchair motionless. The motionless bookshelves silently bearing their load. The walls bearing the load of the ceiling. The ceiling motionless. Eleven beer bottles on the kitchen windowsill, green in the unsegmented incandescent light. Eleven bottles jiggling, clinking. They tumbled off the windowsill in a green shiny wave, some landing on the fan, some breaking. Thuds in the cabinets, the table rocking, a door turning on its hinge. A tower of cassettes collapsed. Crumbs danced behind the stove. Water in the toilet sloshed, panes buzzed.