jonathan franzen

[Monte Davis]

O gods of fair use, protect me. Here's a passage that I admire (and that
rings many Pynchon bells, for GR as well as M&D) from Franzen's _Strong
Motion_. It's a rant by one Bob Holland, a surly professor in
Massachusetts. Sorry for the length, but it's needed for the cumulative
effect:

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      By the late eighteenth century, a person traveling the 240 miles from
Boston to New York passed through no more than twenty miles of wooded
country. Visitors from Europe commented on how scarce and stunted the trees
in America were. They thought the soil must be sterile. They marveled at
how the Americans wasted wood for the sake of short-term profit or
convenience. At sawmills only the tallest and
most perfectly formed trees were milled into lumber; all the less perfect
trees had been torched or left to rot. Families built large, poorly
insulated houses of wood or of wood-fired brick (the kind of houses, Bob
said, that even now charmed visitors to Ipswich) and from October through
April they kept fires roaring in every room. 
      As soon as a white American acquired land from the Indians, he tried
to profit from it quickly, cutting the trees for timber or burning them for
ashes if local ash demand was great enough. Otherwise he could save labor
by simply killing the trees and letting decay bring them down. Crops
planted on formerly forested land grew well for a few years, but without
trees to capture nutrients, and with a farmer's endeavors confined within
immutable property lines, the
soil soon became useless. It was a myth, Bob said, that the Indians had
fertilized exhausted land with fish. The way to make a garden last ten
thousand years is to rotate crops from field to field. It was the white
Americans who sowed alewives with their seeds, and whose fields stank so
much that travelers would vomit by the roadside.
      Barred from roaming freely, cattle grazed the land more closely than
wild animals had. They trampled the soil, squeezing the air out,
diminishing water retention. Cape Cod had had no sand dunes when the
Europeans came. The dunes developed after cows killed the native grasses
and the topsoil blew away.
      Lowlands, kept dry for millennia by trees that evaporated rain from
their leaves, turned into bogs as soon as they were cleared; mosquitoes.
malaria, and thorns moved in. On higher ground, without the shade of trees,
a blanket of snow melted quickly and the ground froze deeper, retaining
less water when the spring rains came. Flooding became common. Unchecked by
tree roots and fallen leaves, the rain stripped the land of nutrients.
Raging streams dumped topsoil
into bays and harbors. Spawning fish ran into dams and mud-choked water.
But in summer and fall, without forests to regulate the flow of water, all
the streams became dry gullies, and the naked land baked in the sun.
      So it happened that the country whose abundance had sustained the
Indians and astonished the Europeans had in less than 150 years become a
land of evil-smelling swamps, of howling  winds, of failing farms and
treeless vistas, of hot summers and bitterly cold winters, of eroded plains
and choked harbors. A time-lapse movie of New England would have shown the
wealth of the land melting away, the
forests shriveling up, the bare soil spreading, the whole fabric of life
rotting and unraveling, and you might have concluded that all that wealth
had simply vanished -- had gone up in smoke or out in sewage or across the
sea in ships.
      If you'd looked very closely, though, you would have seen that the
wealth had merely been transformed and concentrated. All the beavers that
had ever drawn breath in Franklin County, Massachusetts, had been
transmuted into one solid-silver tea service in a parlor on Myrtle Street
in Boston. The towering white pines from ten thousand
square miles of Commonwealth had together built one block of brick town
houses on Beacon Hill, with high windows and a fleet of carriages,
chandeliers from Paris and settees upholstered in Chinese silk, all of it
occupying less than an acre. A plot of land that had once supported five
Indians in comfort was condensed into a gold ring on the finger of Isaiah
Dennis, the great-uncle of Melanie Holland's grandfather.
      And when New England had been fully drained -- when its
original abundance had shrunk into a handful of  neighborhoods so compact
that a god could have hidden them from sight with his fingertips -- then
the poor English farmers who had become poor American farmers flocked to
the cities and became poor workers in the foundries and cotton mills that
the holders of concentrated wealth
were building to increase their income. Now a time-lapse movie would have
shown an exfoliation of red brick, the damming of new streams, the
disemboweling of the barren land for the clay and iron ore within it. the
blackening of the air, the confluence of freighters from Charleston
carrying cotton, the spread of worker housing, the spread of iron, the
tides of excrement and urine, the slaughter of the last wild birds that
anyone would dream of eating, the smoke of trains
bringing meat from Chicago to feed the workers, the weeding over of
farmland, the final death of barns and farmhouses at the hands of the newly
opened Middle West, but most of all: a general increase in wealth.
Melanie's great-grandfather Samuel Dennis and his industrialist and banker
accomplices
had teamed to burn not just the trees of their own age but the trees of the
Carboniferous as well, now available as coal. They'd learned to exploit the
wealth not only of their own home soil but of the cottonland of Mississippi
and the cornland of Illinois.
	"Because after all," Bob said, "any wealth gained by a person beyond what
he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or
at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car,
our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could
the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one
billionth of the country's renewable resources have produced all this? It
takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories
to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you're not
rich, you're living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and
Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a
room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you've withdrawn
oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the
hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own
personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water,
indebted by proxy to Japanese and
German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who'll be paying
for your conveniences when you're dead: who'll be living six to a room,
contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don't, how long it
takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you're living in the
black."