No Boys Allowed: A Book Club to Discuss Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

In Person
November 23, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 18 4 min read

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coverLast 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.

Since the novel is 562 pages, we decided to discuss the book over two meetings–crazy, I know.  Because I actually get paid to facilitate a different book club (can you believe that?), I held back from planning questions and discussion points for this new one.  I would not let this group become a job. I would not bring a highlighter.  However, I did bring one quote, from Garth Risk Hallberg’s review on this very site.  To start the meeting off, I read the quote aloud to the others:

It is surely worth mentioning that Franzen writes more persuasively and attentively about the inner life of women than any male American novelist since Henry James.

“Who wrote that?”  someone asked.
“What? You don’t think a man can write from a woman’s perspective?”
“Was the reviewer a man or a woman?”
“How does he know?”
“The question isn’t whether a man can write a woman’s perspective, but if Franzen can. Was he successful?”

The responses were mixed to this question.  All of us felt Patty Berglund, midway through the novel at least, was a complicated and believable character, but a few of us–myself included–did not buy the conceit of her autobiography.  It did not feel as if she had written it; arbitrarily capitalizing words does not render a perspective true!  To me it felt half-assed, almost offensive. Why present these words as Patty’s, when they are really the author’s, barely concealing himself?  It didn’t seem like a true investigation of a character’s world or her use of language to describe that world.

But I digress.  We talked a whole lot about Patty.

“Why did Richard keep saying she was tall?  She’s only like 5′ 9″!” (So said our tallest member.)
“Did anyone really imagine her as attractive?”
“When I think female basketball player, I’m unable to imagine a good looking woman.”

What’s interesting to me about an unguided book club is how quickly it dives into content, with only brief exchanges about form.  There is analysis, but it’s about the characters.  Why did Patty marry Walter?   What is the nature of the love between Richard and Walter?  What the hell was up with the dirty talk between Joey and Connie?  (“That was my favorite part!”)  The great fun of these meetings–and perhaps why they’re not particular productive–is that you get to talk about the characters as if they’re real.  People describe emotional reactions to the events in the book.  They make value judgments.  They psychoanalyze the characters–and this inevitably pulls the discussion away from the text.  I recall one moment, as we were debating the potential selfishness of the characters, when someone said, “Well, first, we need to define selfishness.”  This led us down a thorny but fascinating path, which had little to do with the Berglunds and their problems.  In a book club about Freedom, it’s easy to go from a discussion of Walter’s environmentalism to a discussion of overpopulation to a discussion of having babies to a discussion of orgasms to, “What do you think Jonathan Franzen’s lovemaking style is?”  No wonder Franzen hemmed and hawed his way to a dis-invitation from Oprah nearly ten years ago!  He understood how dangerous a group of women can be.

It turned out, after our first meeting (four hours long, no joke), we were all talked out.  Our second meeting was shorter and more subdued.  We discussed the ending, and the relative happiness of Patty and Walter.  Had anyone changed?  Could anyone really change?  We discussed the structural and narrative similarities of the first and final sections–was that return to the elevated perspective beautiful, or a cop-out?  (My answer?  Both.)  We talked about whether or not the sections about mountain top removal were sort of interesting or incredibly boring, and how we reacted to real-life details in fiction.

“You think Jonathan Franzen listens to Bright Eyes?”
“Is there a real life version of Richard Katz?  I never believed he was actually famous.”
“What the fuck is up with the band name Walnut Surprise?”
“It was so silly!”
“Should have been Walnut Hotel or something.”
“Walnut Surprise sounds sexual, and scatological–like a Joey and Connie thing.  Franzen is obsessed with poop.”

In both meetings, we came back to this question of whether or not Freedom is a masterpiece.  Why was Jonathan Franzen, out of the many talented and important authors, the anointed one?  We all agreed it was pretty great to see a writer on the cover of TIME, but was he truly “the great American novelist”?   He is both commercially successful and critically acclaimed, and few can claim that mysterious combination these days.   We were saddened, or sobered, by the fact that a woman, at least in the present day, would not be given that title.  Everyone agreed with that.

Of course, we spent the last twenty minutes discussing the most important question: “What should we read next?”

is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.

Essays In Person

Confessions of a Literary Jingoist

Essays In Person
May 15, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 8 6 min read

Recently, I watched an Iranian, an Italo-Palestinian, and an American Jew take the stage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, backed by a string quartet. There’s a punch line in there somewhere. (A reporter for the Village Voice quipped, “Even Rush Limbaugh couldn’t make up a funnier parody of what Upper East Side Manhattanites do on a Tuesday night.”) “Exit Strategies” was one of the first events of this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, and its participants, Marjane Satrapi, Rula Jabreal, and Tony Kushner, would repeatedly and somewhat apologetically call it an “experiment.” The Kronos Quartet — never a group to back down from an experiment — was meant to play pretty much nonstop, as the writers spoke with (or over) them. Kushner had the most success, reading a poem about grief and working with the cadences of the music. Satrapi talked about the moment the world’s view of Iran shifted from princes and flying carpets to riots and religious extremists; she was improvising warmly but apprehensively, which left her occasionally shouting past the quartet. But Jabreal barely acknowledged the musicians at all, determined to deliver a cavalcade of political talking points: the wars, corruption in Washington, the health-care crisis, and the Republican primary field, all dredged up for a clearly liberal audience that probably never wanted to hear about Michele Bachmann again.

It was a strange night. The Village Voice reporter likened the Kronos Quartet to the band on the sinking Titanic, but it wasn’t as bad as all that — and he admitted as much, too. It was definitely an experiment, interesting at times, nerve-wracking at others, but the thing that struck me was the conversational clash that followed, like when Jabreal asked Satrapi what she thought the 2012 election looked like outside the United States, as the quartet plowed on in the background, and a clearly frustrated Satrapi said that she was elated by the music — and really wasn’t interested in talking about Mitt Romney. The declaration earned her the biggest applause of the night.

They both had fair points: the event was ostensibly about music; the program didn’t promise a dissection of American politics. But it was an opportunity for two Middle Eastern women to talk about their vantages from abroad, specifically from such cosseted places as Iran and Palestine — views that are a fair bit harder to find than most in the American literary landscape. This was the seventh annual PEN World Voices Festival, which brings together writers from around the world to, according to this year’s introduction, “celebrate the power of the written word in action.” It purports the values of PEN itself, whose charter states that: “Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.”

PEN World Voices is one of the foremost international literary events in New York City, a place that, as the center of American publishing and home to a basically alarming number of writers, looks inward — celebrates the local, perhaps — more often than not. I’m as guilty as any of literary jingoism: I attend maybe one reading per week in Brooklyn or Manhattan, and it may be partly my own fault, but the writers I encounter nearly always hail from the Anglophone world, whether they’re native-born or have emigrated here or to the UK. Most of the authors I read fall into the same category. The topics I’m interested in, the regions in which I’d like to see a story set — all of these fall within the confines of English-speaking lands. And I think this is probably a personal failing. Maybe I don’t need to know how Mitt Romney comes off in Iran. But so little writing from the vast majority of the world penetrates the American literary scene, and my own personal literary scene. It’s an age-old complaint, but things don’t really seem to be changing. You can seek out literature from just about anywhere — and now it’s easier than any previous point in history — but it’s a hell of a lot harder to bring it into the conversation.

There’s that famous and damning statistic: translated works make up just three percent of the American book market (and, in contrast, sixty percent of all the translated literature in the world comes from English). The University of Rochester, who named their translated literature site, Three Percent, after the fact, suggests that when narrowed down to literary fiction and poetry, the number drops to a paltry 0.7 percent. There contemporary notable exceptions, from genre (Stieg Larsson and the European crime-novelist wave that has sprung up in his stead) to mega-bestsellers (Paulo Coelho, Umberto Eco) to the literary masters (Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk, José Saramago, and a handful of others) that have become permanent fixtures in our canon. And of course there are the hippest of the modern-day literary heavyweights, Haruki Murakami and Roberto Bolaño. But the majority of translated literature remains largely obscure, lauded in niches within the publishing and reading worlds but failing to impact the broader public.

The translation question is an old and thorny one. Foreign books, anecdotal wisdom suggests, are a big gamble: “There’s a general perception in the trade that these books can be difficult to sell,” one publisher told the Guardian. “As long as that persists it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Reading in translation is often a tricky prospect: the conflict between readability and remaining faithful to the original language lies at the heart of the ethics of translation. Look at the line-by-line differences between Murakami’s translators, Jay Rubin, Alfred Birnbaum, and Phillip Gabriel. Some passages are wildly different, clunky with too-literal translations, or, on the other end of the spectrum, full of Western idioms and surprisingly liberal interpretations of Murakami’s words. It leaves the reader in translation feeling a little distrustful, and inadequate. I can’t imagine learning Japanese — I only got past high-school level French!

And perhaps part of the trouble is that translation means more than replacing a word with its foreign equivalent: there’s a broader cultural undercurrent at work when we talk about Americans and international literature, a question of how a book will read on this side of the Atlantic. Take, for example, Tim Parks’ diatribe against Jonathan Franzen and Freedom, from the New York Review of Books about a year ago. He begins with an absurd press release from the American publisher of Thomas Pletzinger, a German novelist: “Pletzinger is German, but you wouldn’t know it from his debut, which is both wise and worldly.” Parks is incredulous:

What a wonderful insight this careless moment of blurb-talk gives us into the contemporary American mindset! We want something worldly, but if it seems too German, or perhaps just too foreign, we become wary. As my mailbag indicates, the literary community is very much an international phenomenon, but not, it would seem, a level playing field. To make it in America Pletzinger must shed his German-ness as if he were an immigrant with an embarrassing accent.

Parks quickly moves on to Franzen, whom he accuses of aggressive, list-heavy American-ness: he takes fault with the European fascination with Freedom, saying that there are no Italian words for half of Franzen’s lists, from foosball table to “mechanized recliner.” The Italian translator chimed in, indignant, in the comments, giving exact translations for foosball and La-Z-Boy and insisting that, despite Parks’ claim, the Italian for “mechanized recliner” is just as ugly as the English. But I think that the broader point still stands. Reading The Corrections last year — that’s a solid decade after everyone else read it, which I quickly learned when I tried to discuss it with people — I couldn’t help but feel like all those cultural references were incredibly dated, a lot of otherwise engaging prose weighed down by Y2K-era jargon. Cultural references are tricky, whether they’re traveling across geographical or temporal borders. But is something substantial lost with their removal?

Three Percent is trying to revive May as “World in Translation Month,” and it’s an obviously laudable goal. But it remains to be seen how they — or anyone — can effectively market an entire world of literature that’s still failed to catch on amongst the majority of the American reading public. I’ve seen the attempts: articles, blogs, word-of-mouth from friends or booksellers, offering up blind recommendations, the author’s name, title, and original language, and I don’t know how to parse it. I’m guilty myself: just the other day, halfway through Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure, the first book in translation I’ve read in a long while, I found myself trying to talk about it with a few friends. “He’s Senegalese,” I said. They looked at me expectantly, waiting for something more helpful than nationality. “It’s about colonialism.” They nodded. “It was translated by the woman who did The Little Prince,” I tossed in. “Ah!” one said. A relief: a cultural frame of reference. I give most books a hard sell, but I had so few tools at my disposal, reading a Senegalese book translated from French half a century ago, and fault here lies with me, not with Kane, whose book is extraordinary and subtle and philosophical and unlike anything else I’ve read about the colonial experience, which, coming from a person who essentially majored in postcolonialism, is saying something.

Ambiguous Adventure is part of a Melville House series called the Neversink Library, which “champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored.” I’m taking that last designation to heart. There’s a danger in become too prescriptive with foreign literature: we should be reading it, that it’s good for us, that it’s our duty as citizens of the world to read books from every corner of it. The Neversink project seems to offer an antidote to that: titles carefully chosen and offered up with the simple explanation that these books are so good they never should have slipped past or from the public consciousness. All good books transcend the place and time in which they were written: the whole point is to write something specific that becomes universal, after all. So perhaps the best way to transcend the barriers of international literature is to no longer market it as such. A good book is a good book. We need to read more in translation — and we simply need to read more. Maybe dropping all of these labels is a good place to start.

Essays In Person
| 1 book mentioned 8 6 min read
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In Person

An Evening with Douglas Coupland

In Person
January 13, 2005 | 1 book mentioned 3 min read

Last night I went to a reading given by Douglas Coupland during which he read passages from his new novel, Eleanor Rigby, and also previewed a lengthy passage from a work-in-progress. Flying on codeine (Coupland, not me), he shot off on various random tangents that, in the end, were twice as entertaining as the readings themselves.Instructed in piano at a young age, Coupland recently decided to give himself a refresher so that he could impress and astound his family with a note-perfect rendition of that Charlie Brown Christmas Piano Thing (which probably has a simpler title than that). Unfortunately the task proved to be more physically traumatic than expected and his left hand went into painful spasms. Hence the codeine, which incidentally Coupland now swears by and highly recommends for recreational use.I should mention up front that I’m not actually an ardent Coupland reader. In fact, I’ve only read one of his novels (Miss Wyoming). I recall enjoying it thoroughly, but I must also confess that I don’t remember a thing about it. Other than the pleasurable experience of reading it. Otherwise, sorry – complete mental block. However I will say that he’s a tremendously engaging speaker – quick-witted, completely engaged with his audience, and with a dry, understated, almost deadpan delivery.Eleanor Rigby is indeed the story of one of the lonely people – Liz Dunn. Coupland spoke of the manner in which he describes his characters and his settings. How, in some works, he deliberately avoids over-describing things, leaving the reader to project his own image of a certain protagonist, or of a certain room. Other times, as Liz Dunn herself states, there should be no confusion as to the detail. So, here, the facts are laid out: her age, her overweight awkwardness. These details are necessary in setting the character. They affect her frame of mind. They affect her loneliness.As for Coupland’s work-in-progress, it will be a sequel to Microserfs entitled jPod. Allusions to the ubiquitous iPod aside, jPod is actually the name of a corner of an office housing 6 employees whose last names begin with a J. Coupland says that this novel will essentially be about “corporate intrusion into private memory.” Heady stuff. But the passage he read came off a bit light-weight and a bit forced. It was a scene in which the 6 employees discuss McDonald’s, and in particular Ronald McDonald, and in particular Ronald McDonald’s sex-life. They decide that they should each compose and read to the group a “love letter” to Ronald. Then we hear the letters, and they were amusing to a point, and I suppose they do reveal a bit about the individual characters, and the passage seemed to go off well with the audience. But the whole thing came off a bit jokey. And once the whole unusual premise was set, even a bit obvious.His random tangents, however, were truly memorable, as much for their delivery as for their content. How, for instance he suffers from what he calls “executive dysfunction” rendering him inexplicably yet completely incapable of performing such simple tasks as opening an envelope. Until, that is, a doctor-friend suggested doing these impossible tasks at half-speed. Which apparently works. And also how he and his 78-year old father, with whom he has nothing in common, have recently and surprisingly bonded over their mutual affinity for a reality show called The Swan.Whether or not I pick up the new or the next Douglas Coupland book remains a bit of a question mark. What is certain is that if he does another reading in town, codeine or no codeine, I’ll be there. And I’ll be the one listening intently for the random tangents.

In Person
| 1 book mentioned 3 min read
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In Person

Electricity Junkies: On Life in the Blackout Zone

In Person
November 19, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 1 3 min read

On Saturday, the night the lights came on, I turned mine off, rode the elevator to the ground floor of my building in Chelsea, and walked into the dark of the West Village.

I had stayed in my apartment through Sandy and her aftermath, so for five days, downtown Manhattan’s standard storm week inconveniences were mine: no power, heat, or water. I counted myself lucky. My building didn’t flood. No children, old people, or dogs depended on my care. I had blankets, candles, flashlight; a bathtub full of water to keep the toilet working fine; money for cabs and food; and legs that didn’t mind the daily stairwell roundtrips to and from my 15th floor place. Having just finished a work project that consumed the previous weekends, I gave myself time off.

I woke at dawn, ate supper when the sun set, and slept straight through the nights. My rest gorged on dark and quiet as if sleep were celebration, free from horns and big rigs, sirens, sidewalk screams and glare — the gang that, most evenings, steals into my room and snaps my dreams in pieces. (From my windows, as far as I could see, the only Chelsea buildings where bulbs burned were Google headquarters and one floodlit chapel at the General Theological Seminary.) In daylight, I walked right up the middle of deserted streets, stopped to read plaques posted on historic buildings, my eyes slowly scanning back and forth from texts to bricks. I learned names of things — corbels, lintels, eyebrow lintels — that I had always, apparently, been too busy to see.

Each day when I ventured uptown to shower at a gym, I saw life rush on as usual, and each day that experience raised an unsettling question in my mind. Which part of town was actually in the blackout? Electricity felt almost like a drug, every one of us a junkie. Jumpy people hurried in and out of brilliantly lit stores, buying things as if it were a birthright. All of us, it seemed, walked four feet off the ground, eyes focused on infinity, in the single-occupancy tunnels of perception that New Yorkers learn to build around ourselves, because we have to, so we can get where we want to go.

I was as relieved as anyone when power was restored, but to my surprise, my bedside lamp triggered an immediate craving to go back down into the blackout zone, to see what powerless Manhattan looked like while it was still there to be seen. Near the top of the Village, on Greenwich Avenue, I walked southeast, drawn by a generator’s grinding buzz. A bar had set up a movie projector; Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown played on the broad side of the white semi-trailer parked across the street. Then I veered southwest into the warren of townhouse brownstones, where for whole blocks, every building looked empty, but what light there was, was warm. Here and there, two or three were gathered in front rooms of parlor floors, drinking wine, smoking, smiling. Further west, a tiny handful of restaurants stood open. Lit by candles, tables glowed with the soft surprise of Easter eggs. I tried taking pictures with my iPhone: black rectangle after black rectangle, specked with firefly flecks of light.

Eventually, getting cold, I tacked back north. Cops directed traffic at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue, a makeshift gateway between have and have-not. At the edges of the crosswalk, red flares hissed on low tripods at foot level. Pausing there, I overheard a skinny young guy in sideways baseball cap and drop-crotch jeans talk on his cell phone — “I don’t know where to go” — and as I picked up my pace to pass him, a fat, limping woman, leaning on a stainless steel cane, stopped me to ask, “Where is Fourth Street?” She wore glasses, a purple flowered dress, and no coat. Even in the half-dark I could see she had bad teeth.

I pointed back to where I’d come from and started to explain, when the young guy put his phone away and interrupted us. “I’m headed that way,” he told the woman. “I can show you.”

Walking up Eighth Avenue, I turned for a moment to watch the skinny man take the fat lady where she needed to go. Then, with horn-blaring cars racing by, I built a tunnel around myself to get me home, and I wondered if this bright light on everything around me really always was so harsh.

Photo courtesy of the author.

In Person
| 1 book mentioned 1 3 min read
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In Person

My Bread Loaf

In Person
August 8, 2011 | 1 book mentioned 13 7 min read

The author (in the center in the blue shirt) with the 1973 Bread Loaf kitchen crew.

“The kitchen crew is the armpit of Bread Loaf, you know,” an assistant cook said to several of us who were working with him one morning in the kitchen on the campus where the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is held. I can’t recall what led him to bring up the subject. Maybe he had heard the story about our two dishwashers who had crashed a gathering of women Conference members one evening. “Oh, we’re not writers!” the dishwashers gleefully responded to a question directed to them. “We’re on the kitchen crew!” Later, they raced back to the warren of rooms at the back of the Bread Loaf Inn where the female staff slept, gathered us together, and described how the authors seated around them had sat clutching their glasses of sherry or cups of tea, gaping soundlessly. The writers may have finally gone on to discuss something literary, but that part of the story would have been anti-climactic as far as we were concerned.

Whatever the cook’s reason for offering his armpit observation, it was pretty much lost on us. We would have had to have cared what someone else thought of us for the analogy to mean anything, and we didn’t. We were far too busy having a good time.

The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which meets at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus in Ripton, Vermont, will be starting a new session on August 10th. Over the past eighty-six years, thousands of aspiring writers have taken part in what many describe as the country’s premier writers’ gathering. Articles about Bread Loaf usually dwell on the intensity of the experience. Many applicants don’t make the cut in the first place. Those who do get to spend a chunk of their vacation time attending a full schedule of workshops, lectures, and readings while they compete for the attention of faculty members and pretend that they love having their best writing critiqued.

It sounded like a rough way to spend two weeks to those of us working in the Bread Loaf kitchen in the summers of 1973,’74, and ’75.

When describing their time at Bread Loaf, writers often dwell on the beauty of the site, so I guess some of them must get outside or maybe look out a window at least. However, by the time I finished my sophomore year at the University of Vermont and started my temp job as the Bread Loaf pastry girl, I was pretty jaded about the wonders of nature. I grew up in Vermont on what might kindly be referred to as a very small hill farm, and my school bus traveled rural mountain roads every day. For me the magic of the Bread Loaf campus wasn’t the view, but the way the landscape had been domesticated. The array of late nineteenth/early twentieth century buildings that dotted the enormous, carefully maintained meadow didn’t scream wilderness by a long shot. They were more like some very wealthy child’s discarded playhouses, and that’s how my friends on the kitchen crew and I treated them. During our free time, we explored every floor and wing of the Inn and all the dormitories, taking advantage of any opportunity to peer into the paneled or papered bedrooms and the bathrooms filled with primitive plumbing. The Library, the Theater, the Barn that held a lounge and a snack bar, and the pond at the back of the campus were all our territory.
We branched out to the Middlebury College Snow Bowl and the Green Mountain State Forest, both close enough so we could hike their ski trails and old roads between our breakfast, lunch, and dinner shifts. Sex and drugs were available for our more adventurous co-workers, but the rest of us had a little Peter Pan thing going on, one in which we ran wild over the Bread Loaf campus and beyond. The place seemed like the summer camps I’d only read about in books, but for grown-ups. Whenever we had enough, we would catch a ride with someone down to Middlebury for shopping and ice cream at Calvi’s during our afternoon breaks.

It was good to be us.

The writers we fed were just our excuse to be at Bread Loaf. The waiters and waitresses coming in and out of our kitchen three times a day were all Conference participants working off some of their tuition and fees. They cared about the literary guests who showed up in the dining room, but no one who really worked in the kitchen was impressed by writers. The professional cooks at the top of our hierarchy may have set the tone for the rest of us. They were permanent Middlebury College food service employees who would go back to the main campus to work in the fall. They knew way too much about the carryings on of academics to feel any awe of some more book people. The baker, my personal supervisor, remembered Robert Frost from back in the day when he’d been associated with Bread Loaf. She made it clear that he was no big deal. The year before I started in the kitchen, a science fiction writer on the faculty did all his laundry and then sun bathed nude on the lawn while he waited for it to go through the wash and dry cycles. This did not go over well with the long-term kitchen staff. I heard about it several times.
Many of the younger, temporary members of the kitchen crew were college students, some from prestigious private schools. Everyone was looking forward to a career, even if in many cases those careers were somewhat vaguely defined. We didn’t see ourselves as being that different from the average Writers’ Conference participants who were also looking forward to careers. We also weren’t much younger than some of them. Our ability to pass among the writers unnoticed made it possible for us to pick up odds and ends of information, and our sense of parity with them led us to feel qualified to comment upon what we heard. The man who had published an article in Playboy…Just one? The young woman who was so happy and hopeful because of the response she’d received to her writing from her assigned faculty member…That was nice, but did it mean any of that work would ever be published? When the rumor came back to the kitchen that a writer had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown, we felt badly, but, hey, writing isn’t an easy field to break into.

At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, even the kitchen crew knew that.

We younger members of the kitchen staff would probably have been more taken with the writers the years I was at Bread Loaf if they had been more like the naked guy I had heard so much about. The same year he had been at the Conference I was told that another writer had attended a dance in the Barn where his gyrations had been “obscenity in motion.” Stories like those led me to have expectations. The writers were very tame while I was there, though. Disappointingly so. I went to some kind of cocktail party once and hung around the fringes of a women-in-literature meeting. Everyone kept their clothes on. No one got up and danced.
I did see John Gardner from my bedroom window once, though. I knelt on my bed and watched him walk up a path toward the Inn’s back door. He was easy to recognize from his photographs because of his long, gray hair, and he was wearing a pullover shirt with full sleeves gathered at the wrists. There was a man who knew how to look like a writer.

I also went to hear Lore Segal speak in the Theater one evening. How that came about is a total mystery to me, because while she is a highly regarded novelist, short story writer, essayist, and teacher, I had never heard of her then. My only recollection of the event is that Segal had dark hair. What makes the incident notable to me is what happened years later. After I started publishing children’s fiction in the 1980s, I learned that Lore Segal is also a children’s writer. Was that what she was talking about that night? If I were listening to her speak now, I would probably be taking notes.

I appear to have been remarkably uninformed about contemporary writers when I was young, especially considering that I was an English major. But I’ve no doubt that that obliviousness contributed to my enjoyment of my time at Bread Loaf.

One day at dinner, the waiters and waitresses returned to the kitchen after their first foray into the dining room with news.

“Anne Sexton is here!”

“Anne Sexton is here!”

“Have you heard? Anne Sexton is here!”

They were truly thrilled, like kids who had caught a glimpse of Santa. It was fun to see how eager they were to pass on their information to someone, anyone they could get close to. While the meal was being served, the story came out. Maxine Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet I had never heard of, was at Bread Loaf that summer. Anne Sexton, also a Pulitzer Prize winner I knew nothing about, had come to visit her.

“And she’s going to do a reading. Tonight!”

That evening, while Anne Sexton was giving her reading to what I am sure was a standing room only crowd, my friends and I went swimming. We had a good time. I’m glad I didn’t miss it.

I’ve been to a few writers’ conferences, myself, over the years. Not many, though, because I don’t enjoy them very much. What I really prefer are salon-like gatherings that last maybe three hours or so. Coincidentally, that’s about how long my work shifts were in the Bread Loaf kitchen. My longest bout at a conference was a three-day event at which I served on the faculty. It was held in a woodsy, though somewhat flat for my tastes, venue in Rhode Island. I brought some walking shoes and a camera, expecting to get out on the trails at least once. I managed to sneak out for a little while during lunch on Saturday, but otherwise it was all presentations and panel discussions and critique groups all the time. It was like…work.

That’s writers for you.

For many years after I left Bread Loaf for good, I would have these frustrating dreams of returning to the Inn that dominates that campus. In them I was never looking for a second chance to hear Anne Sexton read. I was always trying to return to the back of the old building, to the kitchen with its network of high-ceilinged rooms — the pantry where I washed fruit for dessert, the bakery with its blackened bread and muffin pans, the narrow chamber with the long table where my friends and I ate our meals together.

The dreams suddenly stopped around the time I began to publish regularly. My dreams are almost always easy to interpret, but how do you work out the meaning of a dream’s absence? In this case, it was easy, too. The old subconscious recognized that the moment I signed that first book contract a door slammed shut. There would be no going back to the Bread Loaf I had known, because, unless they were carrying trays, writers were never allowed in the kitchen.

Image credit: Gail Gauthier (author)

In Person
| 1 book mentioned 13 7 min read

18 comments:

  1. 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!

  2. 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.

  4. 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.

  6. 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?

  7. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. Pingback: Interview: Edan Lepucki | Full-Stop.net

  17. Charlotte, that info is very easy to find on the site. (Hint: click on “About”)…

  18. 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.

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