December 20, 2011
So I finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad tonight, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Literature winner. I am still processing it, and I can’t help but read it against two other much feted 2011 books, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffery Eugenides The Marriage Plot. Like the latter two, Egan’s book charts the last thirty odd years of American life. Where Franzen uses the environmental movement and Eugenides employs university life, Egan couches here narrative in the music industry, specifically punk rock. It is billed as a story about two people, Sasha and Bennie, but really, it is about the ‘Goon’- Father Time. The book, to me, is about the passage of time and how generations understand that passage. Each chapter could be a short story in it’s own, and a good one. This is both a strength and a weakness of Egan’s novel. At it’s best, the picaresque narrative that shifts rapidly between time, place, and perspective facilitates a cyclical view of the same basic event: Bennie/Sasha growing up. And yet the very independence of each unit militates against their wholistic function. If Egan’s basic conceit is that everything is connected, then the separability of each chapter suggests an autonomy opposed to her basic premise. Egan’s debt to other novelists, specifically DFW- on whose journalism the Jules Jones chapter may be predicated- is apparent, but her own status as a short story writer par excellance prevents her from tying the book up in the way I want a novel to tie-up. I don’t expect every novel to resolve every issue it raises, but I do hope they bring the characters to some conclusion. I felt like Goon Squad just ended, and perhaps a little tritely with Alex and Bennie ‘growing up.’ Let’s face it, a lot of sh*t goes down to the characters, the type of sh*t one does not just grow out of by walking past the apartment of an old flame. The cyclical narrative structure does begin to close, to link lives, but it halts too abruptly for me and, I think, a bit unrealistically. That said, it was a good book, I was glad I read it, and I may- after further consideration- revise my view on it. As it’s merits with regard to the Pulitzer, who knows. Did I think it was better than Freedom or The Marriage Plot? I don’t know. It had a bit of Eugenides fun mixed with Franzen’s technical force and was probably a more significant novel than either, what ever that means (and neither were even finalists FYI), but really, only time tells on the prizes. Like the Oscars, the list of not-Pulitzer prize winners is pretty impressive in hindsight. 

So I finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad tonight, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Literature winner. I am still processing it, and I can’t help but read it against two other much feted 2011 books, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffery Eugenides The Marriage Plot. Like the latter two, Egan’s book charts the last thirty odd years of American life. Where Franzen uses the environmental movement and Eugenides employs university life, Egan couches here narrative in the music industry, specifically punk rock. It is billed as a story about two people, Sasha and Bennie, but really, it is about the ‘Goon’- Father Time. The book, to me, is about the passage of time and how generations understand that passage. Each chapter could be a short story in it’s own, and a good one. This is both a strength and a weakness of Egan’s novel. At it’s best, the picaresque narrative that shifts rapidly between time, place, and perspective facilitates a cyclical view of the same basic event: Bennie/Sasha growing up. And yet the very independence of each unit militates against their wholistic function. If Egan’s basic conceit is that everything is connected, then the separability of each chapter suggests an autonomy opposed to her basic premise. Egan’s debt to other novelists, specifically DFW- on whose journalism the Jules Jones chapter may be predicated- is apparent, but her own status as a short story writer par excellance prevents her from tying the book up in the way I want a novel to tie-up. I don’t expect every novel to resolve every issue it raises, but I do hope they bring the characters to some conclusion. I felt like Goon Squad just ended, and perhaps a little tritely with Alex and Bennie ‘growing up.’ Let’s face it, a lot of sh*t goes down to the characters, the type of sh*t one does not just grow out of by walking past the apartment of an old flame. The cyclical narrative structure does begin to close, to link lives, but it halts too abruptly for me and, I think, a bit unrealistically. That said, it was a good book, I was glad I read it, and I may- after further consideration- revise my view on it. As it’s merits with regard to the Pulitzer, who knows. Did I think it was better than Freedom or The Marriage Plot? I don’t know. It had a bit of Eugenides fun mixed with Franzen’s technical force and was probably a more significant novel than either, what ever that means (and neither were even finalists FYI), but really, only time tells on the prizes. Like the Oscars, the list of not-Pulitzer prize winners is pretty impressive in hindsight. 

11:56pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZmxX6yDYIFVu
(Notes: 7)
  
Filed under: 2011 A Visit From the Goon Squad Awards Book Review Books English Jennifer Egan Literacy Literary Literature Novel Pulitzer Prize Punk Reading Rock book review bookreview 
October 14, 2011

So I recently read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom back to back. It was interesting to say the least. Both were superior novels, but only one was truely ‘great,’ I think. Freedom is near perfect. I liken reading it to watching Justin Verlander pitch for most of this year. Not only was Verlander good, he anhilated the competition and he knew it. You could see it in his eyes, he knew he was three steps ahead of anyone.

In Freedom Franzen knows he is blowing up from page one. He knows this is a damn good book. His bag of tricks, in technical terms, is limitless, and his ability to compress the last decade of American life into a living room is freakish. He sprinkles his narrative with allusions in just the right way. They never oncedetract from the story, be they to Shakespeare or U2.  And yet in the end Freedom falls flat. It is a virtuoso intellectual tour-de-force and a good yarn. It reflects us as we are but it is not what we need. It does nothing to move us from where we are towards something better.

This, I believe, is the point of fiction. Perhaps articulated best by John Gardener in On Moral Fiction or David Foster Wallace in This is Water.  As Wallace says in that latter work: ‘fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.’  Wallace’s rejection of irony is what we need. Franzen relies on ironic distance from his characters and a refusal to judge their actions where as Wallace predicates his fiction on ‘passionant morality’ and a blistering sincerity. Franzen’s characters are lonely but Wallace explores what it does to someone to be alone, what it does to a nation for eveyone to be alone. 

Maybe Franzen is Mozart and Wallace is Beethovan. But really, what we- as individuals and collectively- need right now is truth. Not truthiness or political spin or irony. We need truth. As Wallace says in Infinte Jest, ‘the truth will set you free. But not before it is finished with you.’ I’m not saying Freedom is bad, or not worth reading, it is probably the best book of the year, and the last few years too. I guess I am simply saying the Infinite Jest is that rarest type of books, the type that makes us more better by making us more human.


9:25am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZmxX6yAfJNJJ
(Notes: 11)
  
Filed under: David Foster Wallace Freedom Infinite Jest Jonathan Franzen books literature review book review 
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