What’s the German for a writer who resurrects a writer who would have hated him? Until a word is coined, I’m going to go with ‘Franzen’ — after the most famous American novelist of the moment, whose commercial and critical success has brought him, if his public statements are any indication, nothing but misery. His new book, The Kraus Project, returns him to the early 1980s, before he wrote The Corrections and Freedom – two internationally bestselling epics of middle-class white America struggling with marriage, parenthood, illness and climate change – and his two earlier, somewhat disavowed systems novels. Thirty years ago he was just a Swarthmore student abroad in what was still West Berlin, exploring his vices and discovering, and tentatively translating, the great Viennese ‘anti-journalist’ Karl Kraus….But I’m prepared to forgive him all this, as readers have to forgive Franzen everything, only because no one can ever hate him as much as he already hates himself. Franzen must know that he will never receive any review as cruel as the ones that, with each book and media appearance, he gives himself. It’s his awareness of all this, and his inability to restrain himself from betraying that awareness, that puts America’s foremost novelist in contention to become the world’s foremost Jewish novelist tout court – the inheritor of the crown of feathers. If only he were funnier, or cared a bit more about sex.
At the heart of these incredulous statements about the poor decisions poor people make is a belief that we would never be like them. We would know better. We would know to save our money, eschew status symbols, cut coupons, practice puritanical sacrifice to amass a million dollars. There is a regular news story of a lunch lady who, unbeknownst to all who knew her, died rich and leaves it all to a cat or a charity or some such. Books about the modest lives of the rich like to tell us how they drive Buicks instead of BMWs. What we forget, if we ever know, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are, i.e. not poor. If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.
Book writing is the worst, and thus best, example of the agonies of writing. I’ve written four books and a short e-book, contributed signed and ghosted chapters and edited a few dozen books by other writers. This has resulted in headaches, nightmares, depression, weight gain, back spasms, a tweaked neck and so much more awful.
Well, here we go again.
Everything that professional writers say about the anxieties of trying to make a living I cannot question. I have never been there. I imagine that it really is enormously stressful.
But when they talk about the actual act of writing in this way, I just cannot understand why they keep doing it. As for me, I have published a dozen books, hundreds of articles, thousands of blog posts – and I like it. I like it a lot. I keep reasonable hours, I try to avoid uncomfortable positions, I work hard to stay on schedule so that I don’t find deadlines looming above me. If I found the actual act of writing that horrifcally miserable, I would either change the way I went about the task or I would find a different job. These people make writing sound more physically challenging than being an itinerant farm laborer or a steel-mill worker. I just don’t get it.
[gallery] 50watts:
“Une danse macabre,” 1919, from a portfolio by Edmond Bille. Tip from my pal Richard Sica.
We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching… . Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
Social psychologists have demonstrated that rich people are likelier than poorer ones to lie, cheat, and disregard traffic rules and, more recently, that they are likelier to believe that social status is a matter of merit. (A study published in August in the Personality and Social Psychology bulletin showed that the wealthier a person is, the more he or she will agree with the following statement: “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than other people.”) So while all parents may ruthlessly put their children ahead of others, the children of affluent parents may be likelier to believe that ends justify means. A Harvard grad who was implicated in the university’s 2012 cheating scandal (in which scores of students submitted similar or verbatim answers on a take-home final) complained to Businessweek about the inconvenience of having to cooperate with the university’s ongoing investigation. “Dragging us into this … now, when we have financial obligations and jobs, seems very unfair.”
When Silicon Valley executives start borrowing metaphors from “The Godfather” maybe we should start to pay closer attention. On Oct. 19, while laying out his vision for the techno-utopian future, Balaji Srinivasan, the co-founder of a genomics company that does DNA testing, compared Silicon Valley’s impact on the established power centers and industries of the United States to that infamous scene in which the Mafia convinces an L.A. studio boss to give a coveted movie role to a friend of la famiglia.“By accident, we put a horse head in their bed,” said Srinivasan, with a slight smile.
Think about that, for a second. Srinivasan, in the course of explaining why he thinks the technological elite could and should opt out of American politics, cited the murder of a horse by ruthless mobsters as a definition of Silicon Valley disruption. It’s hard to read that message as anything else but, do what we say, or else.
Srinivasan didn’t stop there. Silicon Valley’s “hit list,” he argued, had already knocked off newspapers and the music industry. Next up: “We’re going after advertising, television, book publishing.” Higher education “is next in the gunsights.” That’s three lethal metaphors, brought to you by a man arguing that Silicon Valley should secede from the United States.
In one sense, this dramatic effect of the encounter is not inappropriate to the sort of customer Jacob was. The shady supplanter — the trickster of the birthing place, the manipulator of a blind father in the dark intimacies of private life, is now publicly flawed. He lamed others in the private, family domain; now God has lamed him in the public one. But however we look at it, the result of the struggle with God is a dis-eased life, a dis-abled walk, a pronounced hobbling. It’s notable, of course, that in the New Testament story Christ went out of His way to heal the lame. Cripples, hobblers, the disabled, leapt to their feet and walked away without a limp. And such en-abling has been happily siezed on by Christians — whether they’re determined triumphalists or just those who crave an uneventful, unhindered serene kind of walk with God.And in certain moods and moments that’s what Charles Wesley would celebrate with tremendous power: ‘My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed thee’. In other moods, though, Charles Wesley felt, and properly so, both for and with Jacob — alone, in the dark, struggling, questioning, in 'self-despair’, as our hymn has it, confronting an enigmatic deity who is, for the moment, holding back the 'secret’ of his love. And both sets of typologies for the religious life — the liberated, confident walk, and the struggle in the dark that results in a new name, but also a laming — are central to the Jacob experience, and thus also to the Christian story. It would clearly be distortive to place greater emphasis on the one side or the other, to be excessively partial to either as it were, the enticements of religious triumphahsm and the counter-attractions of religious despair or discomfort. But since, nowadays, we are continually incited to triumphalism rather than despair, it seems worth stressing that not only would it be untrue to much Christian experience if we denied the dark side of the God-experience, the darker nights of the soul, the wilderness episodes, the commonly felt sense of God’s having averted for the moment His gaze from His people, it would certainly be untrue to the exemplary Jacob story: transformed by God by renaming and a dramatic empowering; but also transformed by laming, a dramatic disabling and deforming.
There is a tacit contempt for those whose experience and beliefs don’t fit in to the modern world as neatly as they ought to. And that includes not just people of the past, but people of other cultures who haven’t embraced western modernity, either because of material privation or because of cultural resistance.It is an odd belief, that somehow we know more about reality and that therefore we realise there is no spiritual dimension to reality – because, what? Because we have functioning capitalist societies that are only occasionally on the verge of complete collapse? Or because we understand the molecular architecture of cells better?