Booking It: "Farther Away"

Jonathan Franzen’s new collection, Farther Away, gathers together 21 highly readable essays, originally published between 1998 and 2011.

The essays cover a wide variety of topics — ranging from birds and the environment, technology and the death of Franzen’s friend, the writer David Foster Wallace — that obsessively repeat themselves. The title essay combines these recurrent themes into a single, beautiful essay, which is easily the most compelling nonfiction writing in the book. In it, Franzen recounts a dangerous journey he made to Masafuera (“Farther Away”), an island five hundred miles off of the coast of Chile.

Motivating the journey was Franzen’s deep sense of boredom and frustration after he completed his latest novel, Freedom, as well as the desire to retreat to an isolated location and properly deal with the recent death of his close friend.

Carrying with him only the bare supplies to live and navigate on the island and a copy of Robinson Crusoe (the novel that inspired him to try his luck alone on an island), Franzen hoped to escape from his ever present Blackberry and see the Masafuera rayadito, a songbird native only to that island.

Although the essay is at times humorous — he arrives at the island prepared with a tent only to discover the comforts of a refugio (a well-stocked wooden cabin), which he humorously becomes unable to refuse — the tone of the essay is unmistakably serious, meditative and, as is customary with Franzen’s fiction, angry.

At times, the beginning and purpose of novels becomes the topic, and at other more impressive moments, the sadness and fury that accompany Wallace’s suicide. In these moments, Franzen comes off as truly furious; at one point, he claims that his friend’s suicide was “done in a way to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most.” These sentences are both painful to read and shockingly honest.

In the wake of this moving essay are pieces covering, more specifically, its individual themes. In “Pain Won’t Kill You,” which was originally a commencement speech, Franzen perceptively comments on technology’s “commodification of love,” a subject that he explores further in “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” Both explore that extreme difficulty love faces in the contemporary world, and they convince the reader to reconsider the significance of technology.

But Franzen’s more impassioned writing concerns birds and the environment. Two of the longest essays “The Ugly Mediterranean” and “The Chinese Puffin” (around 40 pages each) investigate the environmental and aviary atrocities in China and Malta. In particular, these essays feel journalistic and documentary-like, making them by far the most informative and shocking. Little did I know that bird-hunting and the consumption of songbirds as a delicacy is both rampant and illegal in the Mediterranean. Here Franzen displays a gift for effectively and humorously quoting interviewees. Whendiscussing the status of anti-bird hunting laws in Malta post-EU-membership, Franzen quotes one man who said that “the situation has gone from being diabolical to merely atrocious.”

Aside from the essays on birds and technology, a formidable chunk of this collection, nine essays totaling about 75 pages, consists of book reviews. Some focus on contemporary writers like Alice Munroe and Donald Antrim, but most consist of, in Franzen’s own words “pleas for underappreciated writers,” whose works are invariably older. These reviews, while interesting at times, are neither urgent nor convincing. Despite the reviews’ immense readability — Franzen consistently writes clearly in both his fiction and nonfiction — I found myself, like the narrator of “Father Away,” a little bored.

But for me that is not the real problem with these essays. The greatest difficulty with reading Franzen is his tireless anger and pessimism. It seems that, regardless of subject, Franzen discovers some new and innovative way to be outraged. Even worse, this attitude is intentional; in the first essay of the collection, Franzen admits that “Whatever I most hated, at a particular moment, became the thing I wanted to write about.” I find it challenging to recommend over 300 pages of hate-motivated prose.

Recommendation: Unless you really like Franzen, or you’re looking for some insight into his novels (“On Autobiographical Fiction” reveals a great deal behind the writing process behind the National-Book-Award-winning novel, The Corrections), I do not recommend buying or reading this collection. I do, however, suggest reading the title essay, which you can find for free on The New Yorker’s website.