Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

After Gregg has run to my car to get a release form for the mother to sign, I am summoned to stroll down the street while Chris, shooting, backs away from me. Gregg asks me to say a few words about Webster Woods, and I deliver a short paean to the place, my happiness in growing up here, my affection for the public schools and the Congregational Church.

Gregg is frowning. “Something more specifically about this neighborhood.”

“Well, obviously, it’s a suburban neighborhood.”

“Something about what kind of people live here.”

My feeling about the people who live here now is that they’re not the people who used to live here, and that I hate them for this. My feeling is that I would die of rage if I had to live on this street where I once lived so happily. My feeling is that this street, my memory of it, is mine; and yet I patently own none of it, not even the footage being shot in my name.

So I deliver, for the camera, a brief sociology lecture on how the neighborhood has changed, how the homes have been expanded, how much more money the new families have. The truth content of this lecture is probably near zero. Irene Patton has come out of her house and waves to me from her front yard. I wave back as to a stranger.

“Are you sure we can’t shoot you in front of your house?” Gregg says. “Just in front of it, not inside it?”

“I’m really sorry,” I say, “but I don’t want to.” And then, because I don’t understand what it is that I’m protecting, I have a spasm of regret for being so difficult. I tell Gregg that I’ll give him a picture of the house in the winter with snow on it. “You can show the picture,” I say Gregg tosses his hair back. “And you’ll definitely give us that.”

“Definitely”

But Gregg still seems unhappy with me, and so I find myself offering him the tree. I explain to him about the tree, I tell the story, but the effect isn’t what I hoped for. He seems only mildly interested as I lead the crew back to the triangle and point out the marble marker. Irene Patton is still in her yard, but I don’t even look at her now.

For another half-hour we shoot me and the tree from many angles and distances. I walk slowly toward the tree, I stand in front of the tree contemplatively, I pretend to contemplate the inscription at the base of the tree. The itching on my torso reminds me of the scene in Alien where the newly hatched alien erupts through the space traveler’s chest.

Apparently I’m failing to emote.

“You’re looking up at the tree,” Gregg coaches. “You’re thinking about your father.”

My father is dead, and I, too, am feeling dead. I remember and then make myself forget that some of my mother’s ashes were scattered here as well. While Chris zooms and pans, I am mainly registering the configuration of oak twigs on my retina, trying to remember the size of the tree when we planted it, trying to calculate its annual growth rate; but part of me is also watching me. Part of me is imagining how this will play on TV: as schmaltz. Rendering emotion is what I do as a writer, and this tree is my material, and now I’m helping to ruin it. I know I’m ruining it because Gregg is frowning at me the way I might frown at a faulty ballpoint pen. That my belly and back are itching so insanely is almost a relief, because it distracts me from the shame of failing to do justice to my father and his tree. How I wish I hadn’t offered Gregg this tree! But how could I not have offered something}

I am failing as an Oprah author, and the team and I are finishing up some final strolling footage, well into our third hour in Webster Woods, when I complete the failure. Five words come bursting from my chest like a hideous juvenile alien. I say: “This is so fundamentally bogus!”

Chris, to my surprise, raises his face from his eyepiece and laughs and nods vigorously. “You’re right!” His voice is loud with merriment and something close to anger. “You’re right, it is totally bogus!”

Gregg, stone-faced, merely looks at his watch. Time is short, and the author is being difficult.

FROM WEBSTER WOODS we drive out through the western reaches of the county to the Museum of Transportation, a glorified track siding to which railroads have delivered obsolete rolling stock, perhaps taking charitable tax deductions for their trouble. I have no particular fascination with trains and I’ve never been to the museum, but a transportation museum makes a cameo in The Corrections , and one of the novel’s main characters is a railroad man. So my job is to stand or walk near trains and look contemplative. I do this for an hour.

When it’s time for me to leave for the bookstore where I’m reading and signing tonight, I shake Gregg’s hand and say I hope he got some footage he can use. In the gloom of his reply I recognize a fellow perfectionist and worrier, whose retakes are the equivalent of my rewrites.

“I guess I’ll find some way to make it work,” he says. Borders Bookstore in Brentwood is crowded when I arrive. One of my publisher’s publicists, a St. Louis native named Pete Miller, has flown in and has brought to the reading his sister, his girlfriend, and a bottle of single-malt Scotch for me to drink on my tour. Seeing him now, after a day with strangers, I feel among family again. It’s not simply that I’ve worked with the same smallish publisher for fourteen years, or that Pete and his colleagues feel more like friends than like business associates. It’s that Pete and his girlfriend have just come from New York and New York is the city, of all the cities in the world, that feels to me like the home I grew up in. My parents had me late in life, and my most typical experience as a child was to be left to my own devices while adults went to work and had parties. That’s what my New York is.

Homesick, I nearly throw my arms around Pete. Only after I’ve given my reading does the full scope of my connection to this other home, this St. Louis, become apparent. In the signing line are scores of acquaintances — former classmates, parents of my friends, friends of my parents, Sunday school teachers, fellow actors in school plays, teachers from high school, coworkers of my father’s, bridge partners of my mother’s, people from church, near and distant old neighbors from Webster Woods. The new owner of my family’s house, the man I’ve been hating all day, has driven over to greet me and to give me a relic from the house: a brass door knocker with my family’s name on it. I take the knocker and shake his hand. I shake everybody’s hand and drink the Scotch that Pete has poured me. I soak up the good will of people who demand nothing from me, who’ve simply stopped by to say hello, maybe get a book signed, for old times’ sake.

From the bookstore I head straight for the airport. I’m due to take the evening’s last flight to Chicago, where, in the morning, Alice and I will tape ninety minutes of interview for Oprah . Earlier today, while I was doing my best to look contemplative for the camera, Winfrey publicly announced her selection of my book and praised it in terms that would have made me blush if I’d been lucky enough to hear them. One of my friends will report that Winfrey said the author had poured so much into the book that “he must not have a thought left in his head.” This will prove to be an oddly apt description. Beginning the next night, in Chicago, I’ll encounter two kinds of readers in signing lines and in interviews. One kind will say to me, “I like your book and I think it’s wonderful that Oprah picked it”; the other kind will say, “I like your book and I’m so sorry that Oprah picked it.” And because I’m a person who instantly acquires a Texas accent in Texas, I’ll respond in kind to each kind of reader. When I talk to admirers of Winfrey, I’ll experience a glow of gratitude and good will and agree that it’s wonderful to see television expanding the audience for books. When I talk to detractors of Winfrey, I’ll experience the bodily discomfort I felt when we were turning my father’s oak tree into schmaltz, and I’ll complain about the Book Club logo. I’ll get in trouble for this. I’ll achieve unexpected sympathy for Dan Quayle when, in a moment of exhaustion in Oregon, I conflate “high modern” and “art fiction” and use the term “high art” to describe the importance of Proust and Kafka and Faulkner to my writing. I’ll get in trouble for this, too. Winfrey will disinvite me from her show because I seem “conflicted.” I’ll be reviled from coast to coast by outraged populists. I’ll be called a “motherfucker” by an anonymous source in New York magazine, a “pompous prick” in Newsweek , an “ego-blinded snob” in the Boston Globe , and a “spoiled, whiny little brat” in the Chicago Tribune . I’ll consider the possibility, and to some extent believe, that I am all of these things. I’ll repent and explain and qualify, to little avail. My rash will fade as mysteriously as it blossomed; my sense of dividedness will only deepen.