Franzen, Wallace, and realism

Jon Baskin dissects the relationship between the work of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. On Franzen's recent novel, Freedom:

If Freedom is remembered, it will be for the spirit of despair it captures and projects—a despair especially acute among Franzen’s reading public, whose nostalgia for the days of Updike and Mailer (and bookstores and printed magazines) is but one aspect of a broader conviction of a decline. Freedom is Franzen’s darkest novel, chronicling what are, for these readers, America’s darkest moments. Its pessimism and misanthropy reflect precisely the mood of the Bush years, during which most literate liberals threatened to move to Canada. If they turned out to have been exaggerating, Freedom may be taken as an investigation of the impotence and shame that motivated the exaggeration, and have survived it. Franzen’s characters reject American society for the same reasons his readers reject it: because it is stupid, thwarts their plans, and makes a mockery of their politics. But they hold no values other than social values, so they are doomed to return to what they reject, and to suffer from it. Thus the melancholy vision at the center of Franzen’s oeuvre, of a man unable to rid himself of the desire to live in a more just world than the facts allow him to anticipate.

Such a man, Franzen’s fiction demonstrates, eventually risks losing his idealism about what America might be to his contempt for what it is. The danger is not alien to Franzen’s own project, in which valid social criticism can curdle into a seemingly endless directory of complaints. Indeed the author’s bitterness and disgust about what has happened to America may speak, inadvertently, to the limits of his tragic or corrective realism, itself so sanguine about the acceptance of limitation. If Franzen knows something his characters have to learn—namely, that our “dreams” are no match for society—then why is he so angry at society? Why doesn’t he correct his own unrealistic expectations, and move on? Freedom has been aptly described as communicating the “agony” of being a liberal in our time, but what is most vexing about the book is that Franzen never considers in this one case what he considers always in others: that his brand of New York Times-sponsored liberalism is a dream like any other; to end the agony it would only be necessary to wake from it. One may not want to. Fine. But this is to admit that some dreams are preferable to the facts: neither in need of the world’s correction, nor susceptible to it.