Waiting for the Barbarians (47 page)

And offer it he did, in those coruscating flashes; but beyond that, there is a curious lack of engagement with the larger world, the world that was more than sensibility and beauty.
The Grand Surprise
is a document that begins in 1939 and ends in 1993, and yet as you read it you cannot help but be struck by the fact that there is virtually no mention (let alone discussion) of World War II, of the Holocaust, of McCarthyism, of the Stonewall Riots, of Watergate, of the Reagan years—apart from a complaint, apropos of Mrs. Reagan, that “everything save her shoes [was] wrong”—which is to say, most of the history that Lerman lived through. (A significant exception is a brief and touching account of his attending, with Gray Foy, a 1971 protest in Washington against the Vietnam War, which is otherwise unmentioned.) This seeming indifference to the world outside of the glistening
bubble he inhabited is noteworthy because it suggests a failure to appreciate the deeper “content” of things—a failure that, in turn, might account for that lack of a certain profounder “content” in Lerman himself, as he himself understood.

That content, in the end, is what art, as opposed to decoration, derives from. It may well be significant that a passage in Proust that Lerman delightedly singles out for praise is one in which the Duchesse de Guermantes talks about decor. But of course, what Proust is also about is decay—the deep, rotted mechanics of the society that had such perfect taste in decor. Of this Lerman, too, was aware; but out of that awareness, he would or could not create anything—not least because he himself (as he also well knew) was part of the mechanism of superficiality, of what he calls “the false, generated gaiety,” of the ephemeral, “the mighty for a moment.”

It’s hard not to wonder whether Lerman’s melancholy self-consciousness about his lack of deep content, together with his tormented awareness of his complicity with what he himself saw as an inconsequential industry, was responsible for his lifelong case of writer’s block—a block that didn’t altogether prevent him from writing, as we well know, but did stop him from committing to a project that he had the vision to understand was serious, but not the nature to undertake. What he couldn’t do, finally, was absent himself from the worlds, haute or otherwise, that he’d worked so hard to be part of—to leave the theater or the party and to be alone in the way that writers must, at some point, be alone, to “giv[e] up just existing, just riding on the tide from moment to moment” and “shoulder a burden,” as he put it in one anguished 1950 entry. Ten years later, he goes into a depression when, after an Israeli author asks if Lerman is a writer, Gray Foy responds, “Not for some time”:

What gives
The Grand Surprise
an undercurrent that is, in the end, almost melancholy is Lerman’s understanding that the substance of a real writer’s life—“just [to] write it and then rewrite it until it’s good”—was something he was temperamentally unsuited for. “What a difficult life that is,” he wrote mournfully; it was more pleasant to be loved and admired. In this respect it’s worth noting some of the many serious midcentury writers and thinkers who do not appear on Lerman’s guest lists: Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Meyer Schapiro, Philip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt.

You could say, of course, that
The Grand Surprise
itself is the great work that Lerman wanted to produce; but I’m not sure that Lerman, with his rigorous insistence on self-knowledge, would agree. He knew well what character he had and what choices he had made. He may have warned himself, as he did in 1954 leaving a party at Nathan Milstein’s, that it wasn’t “important” to “enter that world,” but enter it he did, as we know; he may have complained, that same year, that Marlene Dietrich’s late-night phone calls were “consuming my reading and writing time,” but a person whose ambition was to be a writer, rather than a persona, would have hung up the phone long ago. Lerman’s tragedy, if it may be called that, one that makes itself felt throughout this remarkable volume, was that he kept private, or never was able to bring off, the work that ought to have been
public, while devoting his working life, his public life, his enormous talents to the glossy worlds—parties, magazines—that he knew enough to disdain.

The irony is that today’s culture of superficial glitter, of knowingness without any real knowledge, is sustained by the very magazines to which Lerman, however lofty his tastes and talents, devoted his working life. And when you lie down with dogs, even greyhounds and Lhasa apsos, you may well get up with fleas. As I savored every page of his remarkable private writings, I couldn’t help noting that nearly every historical, literary, artistic, or biographical allusion had to be footnoted or explained, from Saint-Simon to Sainte-Beuve, from Gustave Moreau to William Hogarth, from Aubrey Beardsley to Ned Rorem—the intimates of Lerman’s fervent inner life, now apparently presumed to be wholly unrecognizable to readers at large. These, it’s perhaps worth noting, are the very readers on whose behalf the reviewer of Lerman’s book, in
The New York Times Book Review
, felt compelled to ask rhetorically, in her own introductory flourish, “Who is Leo Lerman?” Poignantly, Lerman himself anticipated this question. “The mortality of the fashion world,” he lamented in 1970. “Who will think of me? No one.” Here, as often, he knew how to spot a trend.

—The New York Review of Books
, August 16, 2007

IT’S LIKELY THAT
the writer Jonathan Franzen is no less famous today for the really good novel he published in 2001 than for the really bad mistake he made a couple of weeks later. What the ensuing half decade—and, now,
The Discomfort Zone
, a collection of autobiographical essays—have subsequently made clear is that the high qualities that made his literary achievement so worthy are inextricable from the flaws that made his real-life behavior so puzzling.

Precisely a week before the World Trade Center fell (a chronology he has drawn attention to), Franzen published his sweeping novel of middle-American decline,
The Corrections
, a critically lauded best seller that went on to win the National Book Award. As is now well known, fairly early on in the critical and public embrace of Franzen’s magnum opus the book was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club: a media apotheosis that, whatever else it means to a writer’s career—and just what it does mean was the subject of the ensuing flap between Franzen and Winfrey—is commonly believed to guarantee that nearly a million copies of the writer’s book will be sold. (Franzen’s
publisher was reported to have increased its order from 90,000 to nearly 800,000 copies on learning of the selection; half a million of these, according to Franzen’s publicist, were directly attributable to the Oprah Book Club selection.)

So much for the literary achievement. For, as we also know, Franzen—bizarrely, it seemed to most people; self-destructively, to many—turned Oprah down. For one thing, he didn’t like the little Oprah Book Club sticker that would henceforth appear on his novel. (“I see this as my book, my creation, and I didn’t want that logo of corporate ownership on it,” he said.) For another, he was made nervous by the fact that Oprah’s audience was largely female. (“I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience.”) And then there was the whole high-low thing. Franzen had “cringe[d]” on learning of the selection, he later said, since among Oprah’s selections in the past there had been some titles that he characterized as “schmaltzy”; and Franzen, as he himself acknowledged, represented the “high-art literary tradition.”

Unsurprisingly, Oprah coolly disinvited Franzen soon after these and similar comments were widely reported in the press. The quiet graciousness of the notice posted on her website stood in devastating contrast to the grandiose self-importance of Franzen’s public pronouncements about literature and his place in it. “Jonathan Franzen will not be on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection,” the notice read. “It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict.”

Making people uncomfortable—and describing people who are uncomfortable in their own skin—are what Franzen has always been good at doing in his writing: discomfort, conflict, and a hopeless awkwardness have been his great subjects. That they are now the focus of his new collection raises interesting questions—questions
very much on readers’ minds these days, when the divide between truth and fiction seems increasingly to be blurred—about the relationship between a writer’s real life and his fictional work.

Until now, Franzen’s preoccupation with “discomfort” was best showcased in
The Corrections
, a ruthless but not unfeeling dissection of one midwestern family falling apart as its stodgy values were put to the test by the go-go avidity of American culture in the 1990s. (A serviceable summary of the book and its themes, in fact, was the one that appeared on the Oprah website: “
The Corrections
is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century—a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.”) From the start, it was not hard to see where the novel’s appeal lay. Ostensibly the drama of one family, the Lamberts, that lives in a St. Louislike city called (with a knowing sourness typical of Franzen) “St. Jude,” it seemed nonetheless to be about something larger—about the failure of something in the culture as a whole at the turn of the millennium, about the awkward fit between American dreams and American life. From the flat, rather desperate opening sentence (“The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through”), the sense of imminent crisis and disintegration seemed to be global as well as local, cultural as well as familial.

And indeed, around his story of the decay of this family’s values—a process symbolized first by the physical and then by the mental collapse of the paterfamilias, Alfred, a bitter, emotionally crabbed engineer who starts out with Parkinson’s disease and ends with Alzheimer’s—the author twined motifs and story lines intended to remind readers that the Lamberts’ problems were mirrored on a much larger cultural scale. Hence, for instance, the various characters’ attempts to “correct” (the word is used repeatedly, and pointedly, throughout the book) their wayward lives was ironically reflected in
one ongoing story line about the popularity of a new, mood-altering wonder drug called Correcktall (the most obvious of the book’s “easy fixes”); another leitmotif was a widespread if inchoate anxiety on the part of many characters about an imminent “correction” in the financial markets. It was this entwining, by means of suggestive symbols and artful details, of the broadly social and the narrowly personal themes, the family drama and the drama of national anxiety, that gave
The Corrections
the largeness that made it seem so worthy to critics. It was a big American novel about big American themes.

The intensity and raw emotionality of Franzen’s account of these hapless people, awkwardly fumbling with their failure to catch up to the larger culture, is clearly what won over readers (male and female)—and was, just as clearly, what elevated it above his previous fictions. His first novel,
The Twenty-Seventh City
, published in 1988, was a nightmare fantasia on American themes. Its fanciful plot was about—well, a plot: a secret plan by an Indian woman and her henchman to take over the city of St. Louis, where she has, rather bizarrely, managed to get herself appointed chief of police. The conflict between these rather over-the-top aliens—these “others”—and the stolid, solid midwestern businessman who resists the Indians’ seductions, and who eventually thwarts the plot, indicates the presence early on of Franzen’s preoccupation with Americanness under siege, with the uneasy encounter between traditional values and a world that had gone unrecognizably awry. But the overelaborate and (you kept feeling) overly clever donnée kept getting in the way of a profound engagement with his subject. With its intricate plotting (in every sense) and its curdled, paranoid vision of America in crisis at every level, the novel betrayed its author’s debt—one owed by many novelists of his generation—to the work of Don DeLillo, who, as Franzen made clear in an essay he published in
Harper’s
in 1996, is something of a hero to him.

Even more DeLilloesque was his second novel,
Strong Motion
, a paranoid fantasy (again) about a young man, awkward, geeky, midwestern, named Louis Holland, who stumbles on, and subsequently attempts to expose, a vast and sinister corporate plot to cover up illegal oil drilling in, of all places, Massachusetts. The drilling has destabilized the area’s tectonic plates, which in turn has led to a number of earthquakes. The latter are what the title, in part, refers to; but there are other “strong motions” that the book wants to treat. The corrosive relationship, for instance, between the young hero and his awful mother (horrible, intrusive, overbearing mothers run through Franzen’s fiction) and his ineffective, post-hippie father; and the budding romance between him and a prickly, sexually avid young female seismologist, whose allure, it must be said, is difficult for the reader to grasp. (Franzen doesn’t seem to like younger women much, either: in both of his first two novels, the younger, sexually active female leads get shot.)

But as you went through
Strong Motion
, it occurred to you that what really preoccupied this clever author was the clever bits: the factoids about seismology, the stuff you don’t need other human beings to do. The subplots about relationships come off as an afterthought, as if the author realized (or someone—an editor, say—told him) that the novel needed some emotional interest to succeed. Although
Strong Motion
ends with the awkward Louis—who starts out emotionally frozen, traumatized by his bad parenting—ostensibly understanding what love is all about, you suspect that his creator didn’t really think there was anything terribly wrong with him to begin with.