"But without reliably insightful book reviews, literature risks becoming 'an unweeded garden that grows to seed.'"

"We’re left depending only on the whisper network of our own clique, exchanging the same tuna casserole back and forth. I realize this wobbly jeremiad reeks of self-interest: After 30 years of summarizing the plots of literary novels, I can do literally nothing else. But if journalism is still, at least partially, a public service, then book reviews are one of its most eloquent contributions — one we should defend until the very last page."

Writes Ron Charles, in "The future of book reviews looks grim/The Associated Press will no longer produce book reviews, though it will pursue stories about the publishing industry" (WaPo).

Let's talk about the tuna salad and the unweeded garden. The unweeded garden is in quotes, but there is no attribution. We're talking about literature, and if you're one of the last remaining Americans who care about actual literature, you're presumably supposed to know "an unweeded garden that grows to seed." But we can all google and find the attribution. I know I did.

I've sat through "Hamlet" a few times in my life — and read it too — and the first soliloquy is familiar to me: "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!" I know some other lines: "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!" But I didn't recognize "Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed...."

And what of the tuna casserole? How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the tuna casseroles of this world! The tuna casseroles are those books your friends and internet contacts talk about. The comfort food, the genre novels. Bleeh. Makes Hamlet the Book Reviewer want to kill himself. "O... that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!"

That it should come to this! No book reviewers! If there are no book reviewers, there will be no literary fiction. Ron Charles spent 30 years "summarizing the plots of literary novels." Well, AI can summarize the plot of any novel. That can't be the function of a book review, at least not anymore. It must be that the reviewer is supplying some special discernment, choosing what to elevate to the high plane of literature and convincing us that we should aspire to be the kind of people who read things like that.

By the way, I find it hard to trust a writer who dresses up the word "nothing" with the dreadful intensifier "literally" and plunks the phrase a few words away from "literary": "After 30 years of summarizing the plots of literary novels, I can do literally nothing else." He's defending his own livelihood. That counts against his opinion. What am I to think of Ron Charles anyway? Here he is, 14 years ago, displaying himself as "totally hip," opining on an author who is, if nothing else, truly striving to produce literary fiction:

"Everybody loves their kitty cat and lets it run around outside. It’s just one cat—how many birds can it kill?"

"Well, every year in the U.S. one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats. It’s one of the leading causes of songbird decline in North America. But no one gives a shit because they love their own individual kitty cat."

Says a character in Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom" (commission earned).

Something to contemplate in the context of this week's foofaraw about non-native human beings snatching up kitty cats. True or false, I don't know.

But I want to examine the outrage. Why are the cats out where they can be caught? The cats are an invasive and predatory species, and the human beings — who style themselves victims when their cats go missing — are responsible for allowing them to invade the habitat of the native birds.

"How many American cats live largely or entirely outdoors? (More than a hundred million.) What proportion of them kill birds? (More than half.)"

"And how many birds does a bird-killing cat kill in one year? (Perhaps three dozen.) Each of these multipliers had a range of uncertainty, so the model needed to be run repeatedly. The number it generated most often was 2.4 billion birds a year. Outdoor-cat advocates were quick to dismiss the paper as 'junk science.'... But I, too, at first, being skeptical of models, had trouble believing that the numbers could be so vast.... The most dismal number in the Nature Communications paper was its median estimate for the birds killed annually by cats with owners: six hundred and eighty-four million. Unlike the death toll from unowned cats, this number could be zero, because tame cats can be kept indoors.... I... have friends who, if I suggest that they might not want to let their cats outside, respond not with rationales but with uneasiness. My guess is that, just as I will sometimes eat a tuna sandwich, despite knowing what I know about tuna fisheries, my friends are doing a small thing that they know isn’t right but is convenient. In a darker way, I wonder if one of the attractions of having cats as pets is precisely that, however affectionate they may be, they have a savage side as well, sharp of tooth and keen of claw...."

Writes Jonathan Franzen, in "How the 'No Kill' Movement Betrays Its Name/By keeping cats outdoors, trap-neuter-release policies have troubling consequences for city residents, local wildlife—and even the cats themselves" (The New Yorker).

Much more from Franzen — the great novelist and bird defender — at the link.

"... when I was younger I had the ambition to read [the Bible] cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories..."

"... and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable ('The Lord is my shepherd'), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside. Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer...."

Writes Jonathan Franzen in "The Problem of Nature Writing/To succeed—to get people to care about preserving the world—it can’t be only about nature" (The New Yorker).

"What [E. Jean] Carroll did not do that day in the lingerie department dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, where she says Mr. Trump pinned her against a wall..."

"... pulled down her tights and shoved his fingers and then his penis into her vagina, is scream. 'I’m not a screamer,' she testified in civil court last week, when asked by an attorney for Mr. Trump why she hadn’t cried out. 'I was too much in a panic to scream. I was fighting.'... Not screaming was the cause, in 2017, for a sexual assault case being tossed out in Italy. It was a backdrop to a widely publicized 2018 criminal rape trial involving two well-known rugby players in Belfast, Northern Ireland, who were acquitted. And while experts in trauma and sexual assault, such as the psychologist James Hopper, have repeatedly shown that not screaming or crying out — freezing, essentially — is a common brain response to danger, the screaming myth endures."

Writes Jessica Bennett in "Why Didn’t She Scream? And Other Questions Not to Ask a Rape Accuser" (NYT).

The reason to scream is for help. At Bergdorf's, there were, presumably, people within earshot who would have burst in and interrupted whatever was going on. Help was available. From the failure to summon help, you could infer that Carroll believed it was a situation best handled privately. She chose to do her own fighting, she testified, but she also says she was in a panic, perhaps unable to come up with the strategy of summoning help.

Jonathan Franzen is not going to try to disinvent Twitter.

From 2015:

I like the part where they're talking about the word "although." Franzen, who loves complicated sentences, says it's hard, on Twitter, to write a sentence with the word "although." Colbert, after blurting out a super-short sentence with the word "although," and getting minor resistance from Franzen, switches to the absurd and asserts that he's always thought the worst name for a clown would be Altho — Altho the Clown.

This unsettles me, because I've be aware for a long time that Altho is a simple, straightforward nickname for Althouse. Can I get people to use it? It's no use! (Get it?)

"Linus is annoying Lucy, wheedling and pleading with her to read him a story. To shut him up, she grabs a book, randomly opens it..."

"... and says, 'A man was born, he lived and he died. The End!' She tosses the book aside, and Linus picks it up reverently. 'What a fascinating account,' he says. 'It almost makes you wish you had known the fellow.'"

From "The Comfort Zone/Growing up with Charlie Brown" by Jonathan Franzen, published in The New Yorker on November 21, 2000. 

This material also appears in Franzen's "The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History," which I'm rereading because it also tells about his experience as a teenager in a church youth group that is very much like the youth group at the center of his new novel "Crossroads." 

Unhappy marriages, circa 1970.

1. "Crossroads" by Jonathan Franzen. This is a 2021 novel — 600 pages — that I just finished. It takes place mostly around Christmas 1971 and Easter 1972. The parents have an early-70s-style struggle with marriage, and one of their offspring — the troubled genius son — is named Perry. 

2. "Diary of a Mad Housewife" is a movie that came out in 1970. I watched it because I was reading "Crossroads," and I got the idea that it might have influenced Franzen and that the name Perry was intended as a clue. The director of the movie was Frank Perry, and the screenplay was by his wife Eleanor Perry. I'd never seen this movie before, even though I saw tons of movies in 1970. I think I avoided it because I didn't want to get bogged down in the problems of a subordinated housewife.

Anyway, I enjoyed both works of art, even though I didn't identify with either married couple. "Crossroads" had a younger generation that got caught up in events and ideas that affected me when I was young, and "Diary of a Mad Housewife" had little to do with the 1970s that I lived through. It was about awful people of a sort that I avoided. But what a spiffy work of art. 

I especially liked the 2 male actors — the husband played by Richard Benjamin and the lover played by Frank Langella. Benjamin was comically repellent and his odd looks intensified the effect. I said he looked like Pete Buttigieg, and Meade said take Pete Buttigieg and add Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson):

"I may be skeptical of the metaverse but I’m way more skeptical of the singularity. The singularity imagines a world in which our consciousness can transcend our bodies..."

"... where the virtual world of the metaverse would be the collective space our disembodied consciousness inhabits. Every few years, someone writes a book assuring us that the rate of technological change is so high that computers will increase beyond the complexity of the human brain and either we will be uploadable into the Matrix or machine intelligence will so outpace human intelligence that the machines will be where it’s at. I’m skeptical because human bodies are hard. I’ve been a Type 1 diabetic for more than 35 years. Get me a functional mechanical pancreas that can actually manage my chronic disease as well as I manage it with insulin shots and then maybe we can talk about uploading my consciousness into silicon."

Said Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, quoted in "Is Meta’s Facial Recognition Retreat Another Head Fake?" (NYT).

That reminds me... I've been reading Jonathan Franzen's new book, "Crossroads," and I encountered the word "metempsychosis." A 15-year-old boy — we've been told and shown that he's a genius — is watching his younger brother running in a heavy snowstorm:

This is, perhaps, the freakiest coincidence in all my years of blogging.

1. This morning, before going out for my sunrise run, where I planned to continue listening to the audiobook of Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Crossroads," I opened up the NYT review, "Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads,’ a Mellow, ’70s-Era Heartbreaker That Starts a Trilogy." I wanted to read a review, and I selected that one, just because it's in the NYT (and written by Dwight Garner, a reviewer I like).

2. After the sunrise, with that tab sitting open on my browser, I sat down for my usual morning blogging session, and what caught my eye and set the tone for the morning was Donald Trump's participation in the tomahawk chop at the World Series game in Atlanta last night.

3. As I wrote in the previous post, that "jogged my thinking about gestures and chants that mimic the real or imagined traditions of indigenous people and I thought, remember drum circles?" That led me into a 1991 WaPo article about the men's movement 30 years ago, which entailed drumming and other "Native American" inspired rituals, much of which came from the musings of the poet Robert Bly. 

4. I click various windows out of my way and uncover that "Crossroads" review. It begins:

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Crossroads,” is the first in a projected trilogy, which is reason to be wary. Good trilogies rarely announce themselves as such at the start. And the overarching title for the series, “A Key to All Mythologies,” may be a nod to “Middlemarch,” but it also sounds as if Franzen were channeling Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly, or Tolkien, or Yes.

5. And don't even get me started on Joseph Campbell. That was so last week.

"In 1972.... the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported that parents in his town were worried: high school kids in Webster Groves were spending too much time at church."

"The reason was Fellowship, a rapidly growing Christian youth group, and its edgy leader, Bob Mutton—a youth pastor with a 'tormented Jesus' look about him. Emulating his style, his followers grew their hair long, dressed in their most worn-out clothes, smoked cigarettes, and played guitar. They flocked to Sunday evening meetings, where they blindfolded one another and performed trust exercises, palpated one another’s faces with their fingers, and practiced radical honesty in drawn-out sessions of uncomfortable truth telling. A member for six years, [Jonathan] Franzen spent his adolescence immersed in the group. Though Fellowship was affiliated with the First Congregational Church, its members rarely prayed or consulted the Bible. They expressed their spirituality through their actions by cultivating 'authentic relationships' with one another and working with the poor.... He attended mainly for the social scene. And, anyway, he suspected that kids were faking openness through rote gestures and that they used demonstrations of honesty to impress one another and gain popularity."

From "Are the Kids All Right?/If Jonathan Franzen’s earlier books were steeped in ironic social observation, Crossroads is an experiment in sincerity" by Laura Marsh (NYRB).

"Does real goodness even exist, or is it always compromised by the dividends it pays to the do-gooder?"

"To ethicists, that is a question about whether right thinking matters more than right action—that is, whether we should judge people’s goodness based on what they are doing or on why they are doing it. Most of them agree that motives matter: in a perfect world, we would all do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do. But we don’t, and Franzen repeatedly exploits the gap between what we do and why we do it—which, in fiction, is the gap between plot and character."

From "The Church of Jonathan Franzen/In 'Crossroads,' bad decisions and bad faith weigh down the characters—and propel the novel to startling heights" by Kathryn Schulz (The New Yorker).

Here's the book, "Crossroads." Don't you read all of Jonathan Franzen's books?

"Franzen’s position is a common one among liberal intellectuals: He concedes the threat to free speech norms on the left is real, but..."

".... insists it is too insignificant to merit criticism....  Franzen’s position, a common one on the left, implicitly concedes that there could be a point at which the problem grows to a level that it does merit criticism... Franzen takes the clarifying step of making that level explicit: when 'people start being sent off to Lubyanka' — the headquarters of the Soviet secret police — 'for having said the wrong thing to the wrong person.' I would suggest that, once we have gotten to, or anywhere near, the point at which stray comments result in abduction, torture and execution, it will be a bit late to speak out. Yet that is apparently the point at which Franzen is willing to start complaining publicly... Franzen’s mind seems to have particular difficulty calibrating and ordering multiple problems; the same befuddlement once inspired him to argue that environmentalists should focus on saving birds because mitigating climate change is hopeless."

From "What Jonathan Franzen and the Left Get Wrong About Free Speech/Don’t wait for an emergency to criticize dangerous ideas by your allies" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

Franzen refused to sign a letter. I'm not going to accept Chait's characterization of why he refused, because I can see that Chait is misinterpreting the Lubyanka statement, which I'd read as hyperbole. People who say "It's not the end of the world" don't mean it's not worth worrying about if it's not the actual end of the world. 

And I suspect Franzen doesn't like signing his name to other people's writing. He seems to prefer to craft his own very particular statements. I've read a couple books of his essays, including one where he takes on the critics of his remarks about birds and climate change, and I don't think he would appreciate Chait's paraphrase — befuddlementization — of those remarks. 

I won't purport to paraphrase it myself, but here's what Franzen wrote in The New Yorker in 2019, "What If We Stopped Pretending?/The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it." It begins:

"Finally, a novel about the travails of a successful White guy! What could pull the heartstrings of our afflicted nation tighter than a story of brief, emotional setback suffered by a handsome movie star?"

The first 2 sentences of "Ethan Hawke turns his acting experience — and past infidelities — into brilliant fiction" (WaPo). 

The reviewer, Ron Charles, also seems to be a white male, so his sarcasm may reflect his own anguish at elite America's languishing interest in how white men think and feel. 

... Hawke is... known as the man who cheated on Uma Thurman and offered loutish excuses about the sexual needs of great men like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and him. 

Now, some 15 years after all that cosmic embarrassment, Hawke has published a novel called “A Bright Ray of Darkness.” It’s about a young movie star who got caught cheating on his stunningly gorgeous wife. This recycled gossip is tiresome, but what’s most irritating about “A Bright Ray of Darkness” is that it’s really good. If you can ignore the author’s motive for creating such a sensitive and endearing cad, you’ll find here a novel that explores the demands of acting and the delusions of manhood with tremendous verve and insight.

That title!  "A Bright Ray of Darkness" — seems like a teenager's idea of profundity, and yet this guy gets his novel published by Knopf and praised like mad in The Washington Post. Clicking to Amazon, I see he got a blurb from Patti Smith. She called it "riveting." Riveting! This towering achievement comes in spite of the burden of being a handsome, rich, white man in America today. 

Amazon does not allow us to look inside the book, so I have no opportunity to see what kind of writing is drawing this attention. I search the review for an example of the author's prose. Here: "My life as a performer is at the absolute core of my sense of self-worth. Inside the play it felt possible that I was not a person defined by his adultery, or his unloving parents, or his lies, his failure as a father." You tell me: Is this man held back or pushed ahead by his status as a handsome white male?

"A Bright Ray of Darkness" makes me think of that old song. We were listening to this yesterday: "Darkness, Darkness"...

 

You know me. If there's one topic I've been avoiding in crazy present-day America, it's the "My Pillow Guy." But jokes were made on hearing that first line: "Darkness, Darkness/Be my pillow...."

ADDED: Speaking of Ron Charles and highly praised white male novelists...

AND: In the comments, John Henry reminds me that Amazon lets you download the first 20 pages, so I did that and came up with this extract. I'll let you judge the possible brilliance for yourself. Is this Knopf-level fiction-writing?

"Weird Christianity is equal parts traditionalism and, well, punk: Christianity as transgressive alternative to contemporary secular capitalist culture."

"Like punk, Weird Christianity has its own, clearly defined aesthetic. Many Weird Christians across the denominational and political spectrum express fondness for older, more liturgically elaborate practices — like the Episcopal Rite I, a form of worship that draws on Elizabethan-era language, say, or the Latin Mass, or the wearing of veils to church.... One Weird Christian is Ben Crosby... a student at Yale Divinity School.... Raised Lutheran, he was unprepared for what he found as a first-year undergraduate at Yale in 2009 when he attended an Anglo-Catholic parish. 'I walked into a service and it’s a big, beautiful, 19th-century neo-Gothic nave, clouds of incense wafting up toward the ceiling, candles everywhere,' Mr. Crosby told me. 'It was like nothing I’d experienced before.' Likewise for Rod Dreher, a senior editor and blogger for The American Conservative magazine.... [W]hen he was 17, he told me, he visited Chartres Cathedral while on a group tour of France and he found himself moved by the majesty of the Gothic architecture. 'I think this is why a certain kind of person really is drawn to the older, ritualistic, aesthetic forms of Christian worship,' he said. 'It speaks to something deep inside us, and, I think, it is a kind of rebellion against the ugliness and barrenness of modernity.'... This sense of rebellion — of consciously being at variance with modernity — permeates Weird Christian politics no less than its aesthetics.... [F]or plenty of Weird Christians, their faith is a call to a far more progressive politics. Like their reactionary counterparts, they see Christianity as a bulwark against the worst of modernity, but they are more likely to associate modernity’s ills with the excesses of capitalism or with a transactional culture that reduces human beings to budget line items, or anonymous figures on a dating app.... Weird Christianity represents an alternative to 'both more liberal and conservative forms of American Christianity,' said Mr. Crosby.... In the age of lockdown, when so much of life exists in a nebulous digital space, a return to the Christianity of the Middle Ages — albeit one mediated through our screens — feels welcome.... Like the hipster obsession with 'authenticity' that marked the mid-2010s, the rise of Weird Christianity reflects America’s unfulfilled desire for, well, something real...."

From "Christianity Gets Weird/Modern life is ugly, brutal and barren. Maybe you should try a Latin Mass" by Tara Isabella Burton (NYT).

I'm not getting the use of the word "weird" here. Burton makes it sound like she's involved in coining (and promoting) the term: "Many of us call ourselves 'Weird Christians,' albeit partly in jest." But she seems to be calling Episcopalians weird. Maybe I'm a little too close to the experience, but to me, Episcopalian is the least weird religion. Yes, the aesthetics are good, and high-quality aesthetics are appealing. But what's weird? You could find all religion weird, but I don't think "the older, ritualistic, aesthetic forms of Christian worship" are particularly weird. In fact, the purported "weirdness" of the aesthetically appealing form of worship is a shield from the real weirdness in religion: true belief.

It's funny. I'm reading (rereading) a novel that has a character whose problems are initially revealed in terms of an inability to say that anything is "bad." She "would only say that this was very 'weird.'"

... Patty was incapable of going past “weird”... the worst she would say aloud... was that [something] was very weird....

The reliance on "weird" is a tell.

Here's the place in the post where I look up the key word in the Oxford English Dictionary. It's the older, ritualistic, aesthetic side of me. "Weird" originally meant:

Having the power to control the fate or destiny of human beings, etc.; later, claiming the supernatural power of dealing with fate or destiny.

Later, in the 1800s, there was:

Partaking of or suggestive of the supernatural; of a mysterious or unearthly character; unaccountably or uncomfortably strange; uncanny.

It seems that religion is inherently weird. It's weird to think you're saying something special by calling your little corner of religiosity weird. What is the motivation to call your religion "weird"... and then back off and say that's "partly in jest"? People who call themselves weird... what's up with them? Especially, when all they're doing is Episcopal Rite I. Are they doing it partly in jest? Is it "weird" because they fear it's only cushioning from "the ugliness and barrenness of modernity"? Or is it weird because they find they truly believe?

"To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all."

"The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves. The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality. We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime’s rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively. One ancient test for the canonical remains fiercely valid: unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify. The inevitable analogue is the erotic one. If you are Don Giovanni and Leporello keeps the list, one brief encounter will suffice."

From Harold Bloom, "The Western Canon" (which I'm reading on the occasion of Bloom's death).

Looking up the Amazon link for that, I came across "The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon" (publication date November 5, 2019). That's by Dana Schwartz (a female "arts and culture" writer). From the description:

From Shakespeare's greatest mystery (how could a working-class man without access to an MFA program be so prolific?) to the true meaning of Kafkaesque (you know you've made it when you have an adjective named for you), the pages herewith are at once profound and practical. Use my ingenious Venn diagram to test your knowledge of which Jonathan—Franzen, Lethem, or Safran Foer—hates Twitter and lives in Brooklyn. (Trick question: all 3!) Sneer at chick-lit and drink Mojitos like Hemingway (not like middle-aged divorcées!).

"If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping..."

"... that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope," writes the novelist Jonathan Franzen in a The New Yorker article that I've noticed and avoided, perhaps because the title is warding me off — "What If We Stopped Pretending?/The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it."

ADDED: I'm reading comments and seeing that a lot of you are reflexively blowing off Franzen as going along with the left. You need to read, "The controversy over Jonathan Franzen’s climate change opinions, explained/Scientists are pissed at the novelist — and at the New Yorker for publishing him" (Vox):

Immediately after the essay went live Sunday, people began to express their ire online. Climate scientists and activists were especially pissed — at the author, and also at the magazine that published him.... The critics’ anger seemed to coalesce around four main complaints, three of them empirical in nature: Franzen is wrong on the science, on the politics, and on the psychology of human behavior as it pertains to climate change.

THIS WAS IN THE ORIGINAL POST: An excerpt from Franzen:

Author overuses a word.

Let's just talk about books you like by authors you completely respect. Now... ever notice the overuse of a word? Some words are so strange that even once seems like too much. For example, the other day I ran across "marmoreally":

“OK, so stay awake, right?” he said, pressing as much of his surface as he could against her marmoreally cold skin.

I was listening to an audiobook, and I thought maybe the reader was garbling "mammalian"... or, I guess, "mammalianly." But no, it was "marmoreally." That means like marble, so "marble-like" would have been an easily comprehensible alternative. Or, no... it would need to be an adverb ("marble-likely"?). So, okay. I learned a word.

And what I want to talk about are more normal words, words you understand, but you have the feeling that they can't be used more than, say, once every 100 pages. The book I just read is Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," and the word somebody should have told him not to use so much is "reproach." He used "reproach" 19 times. It's a long book, but it's not 1,900 pages. It's not even 1,000.  It's 600. So 19 is too much. I know. I'm reproaching. But...

Connie, for her part, whenever it became clear that the boys were going off to be boys, knew enough to fall back and dematerialize without reproach or entreaty.... She was competing with her mom and sisters. She wanted her kids to be a reproach to them.... She’d never been a compromiser of him, never an insister on sidewalk hand-holding, never a clinger, a pouter, a reproacher.... Joey’s feeling of bereavement was giving way to irritation, because, no matter how much she denied that she was doing it, she couldn’t seem to help reproaching him. These moms and their reproaches, there was no end to it....The nature of his mother’s reproach wasn’t simple the way Carol Monaghan’s was. Carol, unlike her daughter, was not too bright. Connie had a wry, compact intelligence, a firm little clitoris of discernment and sensitivity to which she gave Joey access only behind closed doors....

And on and on. There are 13 more.

Have you ever noticed something like that?

"I think writers are basically very sociable introverts. And I think that's also a description of serious readers too."

"You like seeing people, but at a certain point, enough is enough — give me a book, let me shut the door. And what are you shutting the door and going into your room to do but to connect with the person who wrote the book — that is, to connect with people in a different place, but be very very much connected? So I think there's a very strong social urge in both the reader and the writer."

From a conversation with Jonathan Franzen.

I've been reading his novel "Freedom," just a few weeks after finishing his "Corrections." I decided to read his novels while I was in the middle of reading his newest book of essays, the third book of his essays I was reading. Why was I reading all this nonfiction — and only nonfiction — from a writer of reputedly great novels?

I'd gotten the idea of myself as a person who reads nonfiction, but in the past year or so, I've switched to mostly fiction. It all started here, strangely enough.

Anyway, I'm very interested in the idea of reading and writing — in solitude — as a way to have relationships with other people and something that really is sociable.

Invisible fruit that I've encountered in the last few days, reading 2 of my favorite writers.

This is from Jonathan Franzen's novel "The Corrections" (2001):

His body was what she’d always wanted. It was the rest of him that was the problem. She was unhappy before she went to visit him, unhappy while she sat beside him, and unhappy for hours afterward. He’d entered a phase of deep randomness. Enid might arrive and find him sunk deeply in a funk, his chin on his chest and a cookie-sized drool spot on his pants leg. Or he might be chatting amiably with a stroke victim or a potted plant. He might be unpeeling the invisible piece of fruit that occupied his attention hour after hour. He might be sleeping. Whatever he was doing, though, he wasn’t making sense.

This is from "Barn Burning" — published in 1992 in The New Yorker (and adapted in the current movie "Burning") — by Haruki Murakami:

Young women these days are all studying something or other. But she didn't seem the type who'd be serious about perfecting a skill.

Then she showed me the Tangerine Peeling.... On her left was a bowl piled high with tangerines, on her right, a bowl for the peels. At least that was the idea — actually there wasn't anything there at all. She'd take the imaginary tangerine in her hand, slowly peel it, put one section in her mouth, and spit out the seeds. When she finished one tangerine, she'd wrap up all the seeds in the peel and deposit it in the bowl to her right. She repeated these movements over and over again. When you try to put it in words, it doesn't sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or twenty minutes... gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you....

"It's easy. Has nothing to do with talent. What you do isn't make yourself believe there are tangerines there. You forget that the tangerines are not there. That's all."

 I find chance repetition like this satisfying. I forget that any reason for it is not there.