Freedom

What is the difference between Jonathan Franzen and Noah Baumbach? The question is relevant to the long readers of Public Musings who know my long standing one-sided feud with Baumbach. Here we have a novel that superficially explores the exact themes Baumbach explores in his films: the overriding anxiety and cruelness of self hating privileged coastal liberals who are mostly white and usually some Jew. Why is it that Baumbach sucks and Franzen just wrote the best book I've read in a long time. What makes it different?

Maybe it is just depth, I don't know. It is as if Baumbach explores only the external, ie petty and cruel and self-hating behavior, whereas Franzen connects it internally to psychology and competitiveness and family and political leanings and history. Maybe it is the privilege of the novelist to go inside and the disability of the filmmaker to be suck outside. Could it be that simple? Or is it something else? Is Franzen a greater explorer of the human experience, understanding and making connections between family and "freedom" and behavior and goodness, whereas Baumbach is only a superficial chronicler of tastes and behavior of a particularly odious set of privileged self-hating liberal arts graduates?

Franzen digs in. He goes damn deep and finds ugliness and some very difficult truths. I hesitate to say I love his new book, although I picked it up Christmas morning and finished it's nearly 600 pages in 4 days. I bought and paid for the book happily. I would recommend it to all my reading friends. I would say it is better than any movie I've seen this year. And yet there is something missing. Call me old fashioned and silly, but if I'm on a desert island and I have to choose from the best McMurtry or Steinbeck or James Jones vs. Franzen, I think I'm going to pick the former. Cause I'm still a sap and believe in human greatness. I don't think we'll all just these weak, petty, and ultimately small people. Sure, my life experience is much closer to the characters in a Franzen book than those in a McMurtry book or a Steinbeck book, but I still want to believe in human greatness and heroism and stupid old aspirational myths. The other road leads to a self-loathing beyond imagination. A wholly weak and unredemptive end. A cultural and economic suicide. It is right there in Walter's discussion of overpopulation. His admiration for the Chinese old-child rule. His insistence that human beings and our imprint is going to ruin the planet and other species. That this is the ultimate issue to Franzen and Walter. Franzen, I think, has the balls to admit he isn't being satirical here. He means it. Or at least his character does and I know it isn't the same. Because, yes, I'm talking about Franzen the work since I know nothing of Franzen the person.

That's enough for now. The book is great. Sophisticated and admirable in the drawing of connections between past and family and behavior and choices and trying to provide a little guide of the core question of the novel: how does one live? I don't suppose a novel can aspire to much more these days.