Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“I have nothing more to say now.”

“You walk away. Mom walks away. Eileen walks away. What else am I supposed to think except that I’m the one with the problem? — That I’m always so fucking right? Is that it?” He was speaking to an empty doorway. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. What am I doing wrong? ”

He listened to the creak of wooden stairs. “ AREN’T YOU GLAD I CAME HOME? ”

Bob Holland had come from a small town north of Eugene, Oregon. In the East, at Harvard, he’d written his doctoral dissertation on the origins of land speculation in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and met Melanie, whom he began to stalk relentlessly but didn’t succeed in capturing until he’d returned to Boston from a two-year post-doctoral stint in England, at the University of Sheffield. The young Hollands came to Evanston in the early sixties and conceived Eileen the same month Bob was offered tenure. For a few years he was the history department’s shining star, teaching hugely popular courses on Colonial America and nineteenth-century industrialization, giving exams with questions like Describe what might have been or Was it progress? , and bestowing A’s and B’s on all comers. He grew marijuana in planters on the roof, turned his lawn into a jungle, rode buses to Washington. Student activists caucused in his basement. He was teargassed and spent a night in jail, once.

However, as everybody knows, the spirit of those days soon wasted itself in violence, licentiousness, self-indulgence, commercial co-optation, and despair. Each autumn’s fresh crop of students contained more well-groomed and unplayful weeds than the crop before it. Bob managed to cultivate militancy in a few of them, but history and numbers were against him, and his mind was a little too scrambled by disappointment and hallucinogens for him to be able to thrive in the increasingly hostile environment. As early as 1980 he found himself classed by students and faculty alike as just another Old Marxist Drone.

The Drones were an exclusively male bunch. They sat in their own corner at faculty meetings, well apart from the newly emboldened conservatives in their bow ties and the recently hired minority faculty in their assertively ethnic costumes and all the kiddies, leftist and otherwise, in their tight short skirts and herringbone blazers. The Drones had red faces and tousled hair. They wore flannel shirts and down vests. Among themselves they traded the too-obvious smiles of people who are publicly intoxicated and think it’s funny. They saw fascism everywhere — in the administration, in the cafeterias, in the bookstore — and said so on the record. They proposed Jerry Garcia and Oliver North as commencement speakers. They raised their hands during earnest policy discussions and tried to have humorous remarks about psychedelic drugs inserted in the record. They were all terribly nostalgic about psychedelic drugs.

Lacking public support for an assault on society at large, the Drones subverted the only authority they knew, which was the university. They never missed an open party or reception. They clustered around whatever food and alcohol the university had paid for, and grimly, but winking now and then like the conspirators they felt themselves to be, consumed many dollars’ worth. They were gleeful in abusing privileges, borrowing stacks of library books never to return them, working departmental copy machines to death, and insisting on their share of funds to bring in guest speakers — ex-Yippies or minor functionaries from Romania or Angola — to whose lectures only the Drones themselves came, with their keen appetite for refreshments. Challenged by their peers, they fell back on a hoary argument: Society is corrupt, this university is a product of society, therefore this university is corrupt.

There were Drones in Bob’s own department who hadn’t seen an article into print since Kent State. When the subject of publications arose, these men regarded their truncated careers with the proud, resigned faces of amputees. Drones taught Rocks for Jocks, seminars on Popular Culture, and courses in Russian History for which the syllabi hadn’t changed in three decades.

Bob himself, atypically, was a good scholar. Even during the darkest Reagan years, when he was getting stoned five afternoons a week, he immersed himself in primary and secondary sources and came up with many marvelous, marvelous historical facts and insights which, shorn of their cannabidiolic aura by the sober glow of his computer, still retained enough mettle to form the bases for a book called Filling the Earth: God, Wilderness, and the Massachusetts Bay Company and for two articles on wampum, beaver pelts, and inflationary spirals, all written in fluid prose and published very respectably.

It was mainly Melanie who kept Bob in line. For all that he enjoyed teasing her and baiting her, he lived in fear of losing her respect. She probably hadn’t set foot on campus a dozen times in twenty-five years, so he was free to make a fool of himself there, but elsewhere he was careful to preserve his dignity. For Melanie he would slick back his hair and put on one of his ancient suits and ride with her downtown to the symphony or opera and nap in his seat until it was time to go home. He endured countless dinners with her college friends, all of whose husbands seemed to be past or current members of the Stock Exchange and still could get nothing better than a laugh out of him when the conversation turned to politics. For months at a time, when Melanie was in rehearsal or performance at the Theatrical Society, Bob cooked dinners for Louis and Eileen. Melanie shouted at him and shouted at the children; he covered his ears with his hands and smiled as if she were onstage and doing very well; she shouted all the louder, and he went upstairs and she followed, shouting; but the next time she saw the children she was flustered and sometimes blushed. The children never consciously recognized the obvious fact, which was that the man in their house was wildly in love with the woman and the woman less than perfectly immune to the man, but undoubtedly they got the basic idea. Eileen felt pity and affection for their father. Louis felt morbid embarrassment.

Dusk was falling on Monday by the time Louis returned to Wesley Avenue from an all-day walk to Lake Forest. He’d located the bland, wide house that Renée had grown up in. He’d eaten two large orders of french fries along the way. Now the wind and the light had died, and Wesley Avenue was so deserted — the whole neighborhood so obviously empty of watchful human beings — that it seemed the day might as well have never happened, or at best should have gone in the record books with an asterisk. In the sky above Dewey School, alma mater of the Holland kids, the orange trail of a bottle rocket faded and there was a white flash. Humidity fattened the report.

Louis entered the stuffy house and drank two glasses of iced tea. He peeled off his T-shirt, wrung it out, and put a fresh one on. With each step he took up the stairs to the third floor, the temperature rose by a degree and the smell of old timber and warm plaster intensified. Bob’s door, ajar, let out just enough light to illuminate the yellowed quotation that was taped to it:

For I ask, What would a Man value Ten Thousand or a Hundred Thousand Acres of excellent Land , ready cultivated, and well stocked too with Cattle, in the middle of the in-land Parts of America , where he had no hopes of Commerce with other Parts of the World, to draw Money to him by the Sale of the Product? It would not be worth the inclosing, and we should see him give up again to the wild Common of Nature, whatever was more than would supply the Conveniences of Life to be had there for him and his Family.