ATD, GR , Freedom Why the differences?

[Joseph Tracy]

I liked Freedom. Franzen makes very credible characters and action that is subliminally loaded with meaning and complexity. It has a happy ending of sorts. The man and woman reunited. Their individual happiness bugs me only because it acts like a promise of a bigger resolution to the issues. But Franzen is too honest to offer hope on those global issues. The direction of the nation  is what it really is( pretty fucking awful)  and the resistance is what it really is( spirited but insufficient to the problems).  Despite its narrative vividness while reading, in the end the whole experience fades from my memory like a  sad and well written essay on mountaintop removal, without much to add to my picture of the world.  It tells me having money is more comfortable than not having it, that personal freedom  is a mixed choice. and having someone to love is hard but  life sustaining, so even if you want to raise a symbolic flag of resistance, be sure to have a comfortable home and someone to love.  It's beautifully crafted, but that is all you are ever going to get from Franzen. 

I would say Pynchon is anti-sentimentalist and far more ambitious  than Franzen in trying to invade, subvert, satirize,analyze and expand our inherited cultural map of the world. GR is a peak masterpiece of that ambition. And it is particularly loaded for the post WW2 generation because it challenges the comfortable sentimental mythic casting of that war with such irreverence, depth, and intensity. He mocks many a sacred cow but retains the weight and horror of his subject. 

Still an artist must move on and seek new ground . 

 In M&D he covers much the same ground as Franzen in Freedom, but what a difference. Even the friendship story of the main characters still carries emotional weight in my memory, and the core tragedy of that survey line goes as deep as any consideration of science/reason/imperial/ imperial ambition versus wilderness/nature/ human communities  I have ever read. We  also look deep into the historic origins and presumptions of corporate enterprises and how they are tangled with the ideals of the American revolution. It's also crazy as all get-out. You either get off on the love life of Vaucanson's Duck or not so much. 

There are some weaknesses in GR that Pynchon addresses in later work.  One of those is the repeated connection between homosexuality and a kind of twistedness, weakness, cruelty,  aggression and self destructive obsession.  By the time he writes ATD, that homophobic quality is gone and sex in general is more clearly removed from its Catholic/Protestant associations of degradation and sin. 
There is something else about GR that Is more subtly questionable, but could have been considered in Pynchon's mind as a weakness that demanded  attention.  Slothrop seems too much the accidental hero. He resists being a kind of test tube cultural experiment and that resistance is very credible and human, but Slothrop goes further and  seeking freedom from his assigned role becomes the spiritual core of a kind of heroic counterforce, identifying and united with a larger resistance. Who is this person in the real world? My own sense is that he is a bit too much the imaginary everyman creation of the artist as dissenting voice. There is something about this everyman that I can only live with for so long before realizing actual change requires that people engage in the mechanics of organization, persuasion, action, work,  risk. The fucked up deal is that people can't entertain their way into a better world, even though art  is a vital part of social transformation. In ATD and Vineland he takes on that historic difficulty of resistance to the plutes and resistance to authoritarian religion from the POV of a more mature writer. Both ATD and GR  push fiction into realms that reshape what is possible in my reading experience, and continue to provide food for thought. 

Maybe it has a lot  to do with how many times you read it.  I feel that some of the dismissal of ATD is a function of Pynchon overload.    Understandable.  So many books, so much to do.



>> 
>> Hmm, perhaps the basic reason why AtD doesn't work for me is that I find
>> it lackadaisical. It's as if it tries to actualize "weak interaction" or
>> some such in both its story-telling and characterizations, and it may well
>> succeed in that. I, nostalgic, miss GR's intersubjective magnetisms and
>> gravities. And besides gravity, GR has gravity-fighting lightness that in
>> my view is not to be confused with AtD's overall feebleness. These
>> qualities I see in GR also make its narrative and characterizations work
>> for me much better than those of AtD. But maybe I really should reread AtD.
>> 
>> 
>> Heikki
>> 
> "Feebleness" might to a good way to describe AtD's connection to the reader. It just doesn't satisfy some of us in ways we would like.
> 
> Some pass off a complaint like this as demonstrating a lack of understanding as to what fiction currently aspires to. For example, to the objection that the ending of AtD doesn't resolve anything, the answer given might be that perhaps that's very the point.
> 
> To my way of thinking that isn't very reader-friendly. The reader may not be primarily interested is what the point is. (He probably already knows). If he's like me anyway, he wants to know the end of the story. An ending that satisfies. (like a good cigar)
> 
> I don't know if Jonathan Franzen had the above in mind a year or so ago when he formulated his first commandment for writers. It was that the reader is your friend.
> 
> I hope the trend in high end literary writing is in that direction.
> 
> P
>