Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

THE HOUSE INWebster Groves looked tired. My parents were suddenly old. I had the sense that Bob and his wife were secretly appalled by them and planning a revolt. I couldn’t understand why Tom, who’d introduced me to the Talking Heads song “Stay Hungry,” which had been my personal anthem in Germany, kept talking about all the great food he’d been eating. My father sat by the fireplace and read the story and the poem of mine I’d printed in the literary magazine (new name: Small Craft Warnings ) and said to me, “Where is the story in these? Where are the word pictures? This is all ideas.” My mother was a wreck. Twice, since September, she’d been in the hospital for knee operations, and now she was suffering with ulcerative colitis. Tom had brought home an unprecedentedly suitable new girlfriend in October, he’d given up filmmaking and was finding work as a building contractor, and the girlfriend seemed willing to overlook his lack of health insurance and conventional employment. But then my mother found out that the girlfriend wasn’t suitable at all. She was, it turned out, cohabiting with Tom, and my mother could not be reconciled to this. It chewed away inside her. So did the imminence of my father’s retirement, which she was dreading. She kept telling anyone who would listen that retirement was wrong for “able, vital people who can still contribute to society.” Her phrasing was always the same.

For the first time in my life, I was starting to see the people in my family as actual people, not merely as relations, because I’d been reading German literature and was becoming a person myself. Aber diesmal wird es geschrieben werden, [17] But this time, it will be written. I wrote in my notebook on my first evening in St. Louis. I meant that this holiday with my family, unlike all the holidays in the past, would be recorded and analyzed in writing. I thought I was quoting from Malte . But Rilke’s actual line is much crazier: Aber diesmal werde ich geschrieben werden. [18] But this time, I will be written. Malte is envisioning a moment when, instead of being the maker of the writing (“I write”), he will be its product (“I am written”): instead of a performance, a transmission; instead of a focus on the self, a shining through the world. And yet I must not have been reading Rilke all that badly, because one of the family members I could now see more clearly as a person was the youngest son, the warm puppy who amused the others with the cute things he said and then excused himself from the table and wrote cute sentences in his notebook; and I was running out of patience with this performer.

That night, after multiple dreams about the French major, each of which ended with her reproaching me for not wanting to have sex with her, I had a nightmare about the Averys’ sweet-tempered German shepherd, Ina. In the dream, as I was sitting on the floor of the Averys’ living room, the dog walked up to me and began to insult me. She said I was a frivolous, cynical, attention-seeking “fag” whose entire life had been phony. I answered her frivolously and cynically and chucked her under the chin. She grinned at me with malice, as if to make clear that she understood me to the core. Then she sank her teeth into my arm. As I fell over backward, she went for my throat.

I woke up and wrote: So, eines morgens wurde er verhaftet . [19] So, one morning he was arrested.

My mother took me aside and said viciously, regarding Tom’s visit with his girlfriend in October, “They deceived me.”

She looked up from a note she was writing at the dining-room table and asked me, “How do you spell ‘emptiness’? Like, ‘a feeling of emptiness’?”

All through Christmas dinner, she apologized for the absence of the traditional cranberry sorbet, which she’d been too tired to make this year. Each time she apologized, we assured her that we didn’t miss the sorbet at all, the regular homemade cranberry sauce was all the cranberries any of us needed. A few minutes later, like a mechanical toy, she said she was sorry she hadn’t made the traditional cranberry sorbet this year, but she was just too tired. After dinner, I went upstairs and took out my notebook, as I had many times before; but this time I was written.

FROM A POST-HOLIDAYletter of my mother’s:

Dad feels your schedule is so light he’s fearing he isn’t getting his “money’s worth” or something. Actually, sweetie, he is disappointed (perhaps I shouldn’t tell you though I suspect you sense it) that you aren’t graduating with a “saleable skill” as you promised — you’ve done what you loved, granted, but the real world is something else—& it has been extremely costly. I know, of course, you want to “write” but so do tens of thousands of other also talented young people & even I wonder how realistic you are at times. Well, keep us informed as to any encouraging or interesting developments — even a degree from Swarthmore is no guarantee of success, automatically. I hate being pessimistic (I’ve usually been a positive person) but I’ve seen how Tom has wasted his talents & I hope there won’t be repetition.

From my letter in reply:

Perhaps I should make clear a few things that I had considered knowledge common to the three of us.

1. I am in the HONORS PROGRAM. In the honors program we take seminars that require large amounts of independent reading; each one is therefore considered the equivalent of two 4 or 5-hour courses…

2. Just when did I promise to graduate with what you continue to call a “saleable” major? What was this promise tied to? Your continued support of my education? All of this seems to have slipped my memory, you’re right.

3. I know that by now you are reminding me weekly of how “ extremely costly” Swarthmore is less for information’s sake than for rhetoric’s. Yet I think you should know that there is a point where such repetition begins to have an effect directly opposite to the one you seek.

From my father’s reply to my reply:

I feel that your letter needs a rebuttal as it contains so many critical — and some bitter — comments. It is a little difficult to reply without the letter from your mother but as background you should recognize by now that she is not always rational or tactful — and also consider that she has not felt well since last September…Even her knee is bothering again. She takes four different pills several times a day which I don’t think is good for her. My analysis is that she has mental concerns that throw her out of balance physically. But I can’t figure out what worries her. Her health is our only concern and that becomes a catch-22 situation.

And from my mother’s reply to my reply:

How can I undo the damage I’ve done, hurting you as I did and feeling so down & so guilty ever since when, because of my love and respect for you (not only as my son but as one of the most special of all people in my life), I am depressed over the poor judgment & unreasonableness of the letter I wrote you when I was in an unfortunate mood. All I can say is, I’m sorry, I’m miserable over it, I trust you completely and I love you dearly——I beg your forgiveness and speak from my heart.

THE LAST OFthe novels I’d read in German in the fall, and the one I’d resisted most staunchly, was The Magic Mountain . I’d resisted it because I understood it so much better than the other novels. Its young hero, Hans Castorp, is a bourgeois from the flatlands who goes for a three-week visit to a mountain sanatorium, gets sucked into the hermetic strangeness of the place, and ends up staying for seven years. Castorp is an innocent of the sort who might position himself at the Brain end of a Heart/Brain continuum, and Thomas Mann treats him with a loving irony and monstrous omniscience that together drove me crazy. Mann, as Avery helped us to see, has every symbol worked out perfectly: the bourgeois lowlands are the place of physical and moral health, the bohemian heights are the site of genius and disease, and what draws Castorp from the former up into the latter is the power of love — specifically, his attraction to his fellow patient Clawdia Chauchat. Clawdia really is the “hot cat” that her name in French denotes. She and Castorp exchange glances seven times in the sanatorium dining room, and he’s staying in room 34 (3 + 4 = 7!) and she’s in room 7, and their flirtation finally comes to a head on Walpurgis Night, exactly seven months after his arrival, when he approaches her on the pretext of borrowing a pencil, thereby repeating and fulfilling his bold borrowing of a pencil from a Clawdia-like boy he had a crush on long ago, a boy who warned him not to “break” the pencil, and he has sex with Clawdia once and only once, and never with anyone else, etc. etc. etc. And then, because so much formal perfection can be chilling, Mann throws in a tour de force chapter, “Snow,” about the lethal chilliness of formal perfection, and proceeds to take the novel in a less hermetic direction, which is itself the formally perfect move to make.