1.
The baby toys will be the first to go — no use in packing them up; by the time they are unearthed again she’ll find them infantile anyway, pieces of plastic she’ll toss out of the bin to get to the better stuff, her head buried in the search. I’ll put them in the corner of the room next to the boxes of winter coats and try not to worry about where they’ll go next. Probably into the garbage barrels in the courtyard next to the bicycles, although a more organized person would have found a friend with a younger baby or at least a charity that would happily take them, but my Internet research skills are still poor in German, and all our friends with younger babies have already moved.
Holding onto people here, so far from where we came from, is like trying to make time stand still; the second you settle into some semblance of routine — dinner, Friday, as usual, our place or yours? We’ll bring a salad and that chocolate cake I froze earlier this week? — you get together for coffee and there it is: We’re moving.
Well, fuck you, too.
How many times had this happened in three years? The slow unveiling, a few bottles in, all of us relaxed around the dinner table after the push to get everyone sat and fed. Reclining while the kids played across the apartment for a few minutes without intervention, plates wiped clean, rice and wine drops splattered across placemats, puddles of food under the kids’ chairs, all to be cleaned up later or in the morning, or days on when someone slipped on a browning mash of avocado. I’d look around and think, this is okay, this is really a fine life, we really have managed, and that’s when it would come up.
So. The couple looking at each other across the wreckage. So.
Soon we will be those people: too busy to get together for goodbye picnics and spontaneous trips to the Spielplatz because all our time is spent sorting through bags of baby clothes — onesies I stuffed into a drawer when the snaps refused to close — or researching daycares, buying plane tickets, combing Craig’s List for affordable apartments. A life of half-packed bags and endless regenerating lists and piles of mismatched crap you think you’ll sort through but will eventually end up in the trash with the rest; a life of pulling your heart slowly out of a place before knowing exactly where you’ll set it down next.
I thought leaving this apartment, at least, would be easy — we’ve spent much of the last two years cursing it, dreaming about moving: its tiny kitchen for one, the too-thin wall that separates our room from the baby’s — she’ll be so close, it’ll be cozy, our stupidly childless selves thought — the total lack of sunlight in the living room, the many flights of stairs the baby all too often refuses to climb (“Mama, carry you!”). We fell in love with it when we first saw it: the impossibly high ceilings, the neighborhood that could trick you into thinking you were in Berlin or Brooklyn. The spare furniture: enough to keep us from eating off paper plates on the floor but not too overwhelming to have stepped into someone else’s taste. It was a place — our first — that we could really make our own.
Now neither of us knows why we fell so hard — most of the flat is dark and the furniture looks, if this is possible, both ancient and like it’s from the ’80s, heavy wooden cabinets equipped with rusted keys, consoles with diagonal designs and rounded edges and shiny gold knobs. The gauzy white curtains are splattered with yellow flowers. My husband didn’t want to risk our deposit by making holes in the plaster, so the walls are still mostly white and bare, save an 8×10 sketch of a tree that wasn’t offensive enough to take down. (Save, too, the inadvertent crayon murals in the kid’s room.)
“This isn’t our stuff!” is the first thing I say to anyone who walks in. This isn’t us! has been my perpetual refrain. One day, somewhere, I’ll show you what is.
But leaving this place also means leaving those last weeks of pregnancy, when we’d take nightly walks from our old sublet over to the new place, my husband lugging a few bags of clothing over his shoulder, or pushing the pram loaded up with toiletries and paperbacks with one arm, our fingers locked together in the hand of the other, our future always just a few blocks off. I’d come by in the afternoons to check on something — did the kitchen house a Cafeteria, a salad spinner, a good sharp knife? — and inadvertently take a nap on the bare mattress, wake up not knowing where I was, tiny legs kicking at my insides.
It means leaving the first home our daughter ever knew: where, in the throes of early mobility, she bounded off the couch and onto her head on the wood with a smack, both of us screaming; where I gathered her up so that our hearts were pressed together, beating wildly. Where she shoved her shoes onto the wrong feet and yelled, “Noa do it, allein!” when either of us tried to help. Where, when she was a very small baby, I spent hours worrying I might tilt the massive window open a little too widely, just enough to tip myself out.
2.
To be an expat is to always feel slightly on the fringe of things. It is to perpetually be a little lost, to live with the nagging feeling that your life — your real life, the one in which you can speak to the grocer, the pharmacist, or on the phone, the one in which you have your choice of jobs, of friends, of pantry-staples — is happening elsewhere. It is to no longer really belong anywhere; to lose the ability to say, with total assuredness, This is my home.
Three years ago, my husband and I moved to Vienna, Austria. I came from Brooklyn, where I had lived for a dozen years; he moved from Munich, Germany, where he had been for two. Next summer, right after our daughter — our born and bred Wienerkind — turns three, we will relocate our small family to the other edge of the western world, to Los Angeles, a place that is almost as foreign to me as Vienna once was. As the wife of an academic on the tenure-track prowl, I’ve spent three years wondering where and when we’d go, perpetually holding my breath; trying to forge roots — always knowing I’d eventually have to pull them loose.
My husband and I were married within a year of meeting, a year during which my idea of home was flipped, in an instant, on its head. I lucked into a rent-stabilized apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, at 23 and held onto it — furnishing it with second-hand wares from Housing Works, inherited dishware from my older sister, and then slowly upgrading one bedspread and rug at a time — for 11 years. During that time, there was much upheaval in my life — an overhaul in careers, one particular boyfriend coming and going, short stints away in Boulder and Harlem and Montreal — but the apartment, a rickety, sunny one-bedroom on a tree-lined side street, always took me back it. It is the place where I learned to live alone, where I recovered from surgery and heartbreak and the myriad joys and indignities of life as a single girl in New York. It provided a sense of stability where there was otherwise very little.
When my husband — then a stranger — swept in from afar, in the form of an email from Germany, everything changed.
Come live with me in Munich, he asked, after our first two-week long date. (He’d flown in for it after months of emails and Skype calls.) It’ll only be for four months, until my fellowship is over. We can try it out. I had just finished graduate school, my teaching job was only one-semester long, and I had no plans but to finish my thesis. At the end of the experiment, we’d go back to Brooklyn. (I never imagined leaving New York for good.)
Two months into our stint in Munich, he was offered a six-year fellowship in Vienna — a place, like Munich, that I had never thought twice about. The decision to go with him to Germany had been relatively easy, if impulsive — it was time-limited, an almost preposterously romantic way to test out our burgeoning love. I wouldn’t need to find a job or friends or a place to live. Vienna, of course, would be different.
But so was I: In New York, my life had been made up of a web of close girlfriends, women I saw many days a week for dinner, for drinks, for yoga, with whom I shared every detail of my existence. But all through the long winter in Munich, this new man and I lived a cocoon-like existence, spending time with no one but each other. Europe was in the midst of a deep freeze and it snowed all through February and March. Every night ended under mounds of blankets, our bodies intertwined. We lived in a studio apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, and I’d sit in our only Ikea chair and write, watching flakes sweep by and land on our small balcony, which, once summer came, we dubbed “the other room.” We ate Weisswurst with mustard and pretzels with butter, drank beer and gluhwein and bottle upon bottle of cheap red wine — together, always together. I had a decade’s worth of stuff piled into my Carroll Gardens apartment — shelves of books, framed photos of family along every wall, dresses and coats taking on the shape of the coat hangers in the closet — but had packed only one big suitcase, half a dozen memoirs for inspiration. It was all I needed. I had never been so happy, so unencumbered, in so many ways. By the time we decided to take the leap, to move to Vienna, to hitch our wagons to each other for good, he had become my home.
3.
When we got the news that we’d be moving to L.A., I hid in our bedroom and cried — not because I didn’t want to go (I did, there are so many reasons I did, I do), but because I realized — despite how difficult it had been to settle in, despite my almost unending resistance to fully assimilate to Austrian life — how many roots I had actually managed to put down here. How many would, in the end, be yanked out.
If Munich was a time for us to become two, Vienna has been a time for us to become three, a family. But because this is so difficult — so surprisingly unintuitive, so frustrating at times, especially without the net of old friends or family nearby, of any previous existence in this place, of a sturdy decades-long marriage to hold us steady — it has been a time for me to erect scaffolding around us, as I once did in Brooklyn: the strong support beams that friendship provides. These friends — women, mostly, with small children and roots elsewhere — have become my means of survival, a way of finding my rightful place in a strange land. It has been a time to say, Come by tonight. We’ll serve you dinner on borrowed plates, on borrowed time. To say: Please, let’s not forget how close our girls became. Come visit us when we get there.
Now, for the first time in our relationship, we are moving to a place where we will presumably stay for good, or at least for a real chunk of time: Where we can unpack boxes of wedding gifts that have collected dust in my mother-in-law’s guest room and unroll carpets from Carroll Gardens that have be sitting in my parents’ basement and place them just so; where we can buy that long wooden table we’ve been longing for. Where we can make holes in the walls, hang our lives up for our guests to see: This is us! I’ll be able to say. This is us! See? This is who we really are! We’re finally home!
But I’ll know, deep down: That was us, too — the ugly curtains and the ancient consoles. The shiny leather sofa, the pastel blue mugs, the Austrian pillows that made us wake with aches in our necks. Of course it was. That new couple struggling to become a family in a foreign place where everything in our possession was on loan from other expats or belonged to our landlord; where very little made sense, and we were forever trying to find our footing, forever wondering where we’d be next, forever ready to pack up shop, to unload for good: That was us, too. We were home.
I just didn’t know it then.
Photo courtesy of the author.
Last month, a group of women between the ages of 25 and 35 got together in Los Angeles to talk about Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom. I was one of these women. I loved the idea of getting together to discuss a big book, one that people across the nation were also buying, and reading, and meeting to talk about. It felt like we were participating in a cultural moment–it was like getting a Cabbage Patch Kid in the 1980s. Plus, there would be snacks.
Patty! I’m with you on the Autobiography. (Mistakes Were Made? Was Patty a twenty-something blogger?) Less with you on believable–when I read Freedom (which I loved), I thought a lot about why I was so riveted by a book whose main character seemed so… unlikely.
With the exception of Melissa the coed, the women in The Corrections felt more plausible to me.
By the way, it comforts me to know that there was extended confab about what Patty actually looked like. Franzen was not forthcoming on this subject, except about height and toned arms. I need visuals!
I kept thinking about his portrayal about the interior life of a depressed woman. I thought he got Richard’s depression in a way that he never got Patty’s. He described her actions as the actions of a depressed woman (namely, drinking too much) but we never really got to see her disillusionment in a way that felt real to me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the book, and I loved the autobiography, but it was a woman as described by a man, for sure.
I think Franzen is not terribly good at women. Patty’s great. But the others? What inner life is Hallberg talking about? I wrote about it on my blog so I won’t go into detail here (it’s at http://chelseyhotel.blogspot.com/2010/10/writerly-spectacles.html), but overall I think the characterizations are reductive and thin.
The book group is in LA and you didn’t relay the requisite closing question: who would be cast as each character? Careful, that omission could get you thrown out of tinsel town. In the midst of my multi-hour LA based discussion, I asked whether a men’s book group would focus so much on Patty or would they see more in Walter and Richard, who we found a bit stereotypical and flat. SPOILER ALERT: I found the ending unrealistic and that caused a flurry of discussion until I asked “would you get back together with your ex-husband?” At which point every divorced woman in the room (whether she wanted the divorce or not) looked horrified.
As a writer, I’d say that when it comes to the inner lives of women, Franzen can’t hold a candle to Trollope.
Just to stir up the pot, a few obvious questions:
1. Apart from Franzen, are there any living male writers who write well about women?
2. If there are, what makes them different from men who don’t write well about women?
3. Joyce Carol Oates and Pauline Kael both said that the greatest writers are neither particularly male nor particularly female in their viewpoint. Any thoughts on this? Is it just the rationalization of an older generation of women who were trying to get the male literary establishment to take them seriously, or is there something worthwhile to their opinion?
4. Is Franzen being scapegoated for larger issues — the sexism of society in general and of the literary establishment in particular? Or are there good reasons to hold him particularly accountable as a symbol of these issues?
Thanks for all your comments. Chelsey, I really enjoyed your blog post–very well said! We talked a lot about Connie in the group. Some of us found her to be a cipher, and only a cipher. Others found her cipher quality to be incredibly complicated and fascinating. We all wanted more Jessica, and we wondered at her absence of perspective.
Lydia, I agree that The Corrections had better female characters overall. I still think of Denise when I’m cooking…
Kim, our club actually talked a lot about Walter and Richard’s relationship, and we did wonder how male readers reacted to their conflict and connection. Someone wondered if Franzen had considered a particular gender for his reader. That is, is this a book written for men? Or was that not a question in his mind? He certainly had his misgivings about going on Oprah (the first time) because he’d had the hope of getting men to read fiction.
Great questions, Bill! Everyone in my group thought men could write about women, and women could write about men. If not, then we would have very little faith in fiction. But what one woman finds believable, accurate and complex about a male-created female character might strike another female reader as unbelievable, inaccurate, simplistic, and so on. I mean, one’s consciousness isn’t wholly defined by gender, and not all women think the same, nor do all men think the same. So it’s murky territory.
I think Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn is a great example of a believable and nuanced female character. I think Tom Drury’s female characters are great too, and Dan Chaon’s, Charles Baxter’s, William Styron’s. These are just from the bookcase next to me! It’s harder to pinpoint why some writers can’t write characters–it has less to do with gender, in my mind, and more about a failure of imagination and deeply inhabiting that character’s consciousness. It’s as if the writer can’t truly get into that character’s experience of the world, can only see it through a veil of assumptions, stereotypes, etc. Perhaps, a male writer who writes a female character poorly cannot see beyond her body and what he perceives as her feelings for men–she is wholly created by the men around her. Of course, women writers could also be guilty of this. And, some women might actually be like this.
Your third question is really making me think. I hope someone else weighs in on it!
I certainly think Franzen’s been blamed for a whole lot that has nothing to do with him and the book. It’s not his fault who does and doesn’t get reviewed in the NY Times, for instance.
My response to Franzen’s work is that Sartre was right: hell is other people.
like totally?
this article reads like a tell-all about justin beiber
worth mentioning.
Totes. I wish Franzen Fever sounded as good as Beiber Fever.
And just, fyi, this post is meant to entertain and amuse.
OMG ROFLMAO
Franzin? Maybe this isn’t altogether to the purpose, but I am concerned about those brave Millions readers who fret over Franzin’s Freedom, a book that, if I have it correctly, is THE searing written record of the present day, a living chronicle of the times, yet still manage to misspell the surname of the times’ biggest star, lamentable and incredible though that stardom might be. Probably there are greater things to worry about in this world than the spelling of “Justin Bieber.” Of course there are. Sure there are those for whom the AMA’s can’t quite match up to the NBA’s, and Twitter might be just a platform for Kanye and kids with smartphones and a field of free time to play in. But the mistake, if it was one, made me feel weird. The fact that it was made twice made me feel even weirder. If the move was intentional, I withdraw the comment. If not, I join in ROFLMAO.
Edan at al: First, I loved “Mistakes Were Made” and found those sections the most compelling and insightful of the entire book. I am eager, though, to get a female perspective on those chapters, so thanks very much for the post.
You say that you “did not buy the conceit of her autobiography” and asked “Why present these words as Patty’s, when they are really the author’s, barely concealing himself?” Since I loved the autobiography, I thought the idea of Patty writing objectively about herself (at the request of her therapist, she indicates) in the third person made a ton of sense as a conceit. I would feel much more comfortable, were I to try and write a memoir, making myself a character in the narrative of my own life. I can imagine, therefore, that Patty would feel similarly — especially in regard to those episodes in her life she is ashamed of, or embarrassed to recount.
Further, is “Mistakes Were Made” all that different, in terms of form, than writing from a limited 3rd person perspective? The rest of the book, when narrated in the 3rd person, still seems to come from the perspective of one of the characters — for instance, we feel inside the head of Joey, even though he’s not actually narrating his own sections, whereas we never get inside the minds of Connie or Jenna. Is “Mistakes Were Made” so different? I appreciated the break from a true (limited) 3rd person perspective to get a more questionable blend of 1st and 3rd person narration in the form of the autobiography. The perspective is not terribly different from the rest of the book, but you feel closer to Patty’s understanding of herself. Structurally, I also appreciated the change of pace offered by the autobiography sections.
In terms of the writing itself, I never feel strongly that the narrative/writing styles of different characters need to be wildly different. (Maybe that’s intellectually lazy on my part.) I’m aware at all times that Franzen is at the wheel, while appreciating that he switches lanes, so the readers (passengers in his car) can get different perspectives from different characters. I really don’t need each section to be written in utterly different vernacular or idiom; I get what the Actual Author is doing and simply appreciate the different perspectives without concerning myself so much with form or word choice. It’s like an author telling me that a character is southern. I can hear that character just fine without needing the text itself to be full of “y’all”s and “dang”s.
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your thoughts! For me, the ‘conceit’ of Patty’s autobiography, in theory, is great–I like the idea of a first person writing in the third person, for the sake of self understanding and whatnot. It’s how Franzen executed it that I had trouble with. He didn’t really commit to the conceit, in my opinion. If Patty were truly writing this part, in the third person, about herself, it would be pretty different than the other sections in the book–if Franzen wanted this section to be similar in voice/style as the other sections, then why introduce the conceit?
I had no trouble with the other sections of the book, narratively speaking, or with their veracity of voice/character. The more elevated third person sections at the opening and ending were well-handled, and the close third person sections, with Joey, Walter and Richard, read smoothly as well. In these, yes, you get a sense that Franzen is narrating, while also channeling the character’s consciousness. A classic example of James Wood’s Free Indirect third person perspective. (I think that’s what Wood calls it….)
But with Patty’s section, I wanted more, because it was presented as a first person character writing it, in the third person. In that case, I don’t want to feel Jonathan Franzen there–I want to truly believe that Patty is writing this, that she is attempting self-presentation. But aside from a few early attempts–the random capitalization of words being the most apparent–it didn’t seem like Franzen was really invested in Patty’s consciousness, to make it believable. Perhaps he didn’t want to sacrifice the wit and skill of his prose; that’s fine, but why the conceit then? In the end, I kept feeling Franzen hijacking her voice and style, and I wondered why he didn’t just do the free indirect style, if that’s what the narrative seemed to want to do, perspective-wise.
How do you submit a book for review?
Charlotte, that info is very easy to find on the site. (Hint: click on “About”)…
Am on page 165, but from the off have been struggling to get over this whole autobiographical thing.
Seems as though every 20 pages or so, Franzen’ll throw in the occasional ‘according to the autobiographer’ line just to remind us who’s writing.
But given the amount of dialogue contained are we meant to overlook that fact?
Disappointingly not doing it for me based on that simple conundrum.
Must surely be missing something.