Non-Franzenable Tokens
Jonathan Franzen | Crossroads | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2021 | 591 Pages
“Most of the people who have complaints with me aren’t reading me,” or at least, that’s what Jonathan Franzen claims. His novels, he says, are simply too long and girthy, too interior and flavorful, too full of blood and viscera and passion, and at thirty bucks a hardcover—twenty for a paperback—“there’s only one way to get it… you’re going to actually have to be a reader.” But just as I finished copying and pasting this quote from the New York Times (and caught a glimpse of the next paragraph: something about his fear of electric cars), I accidentally hit the alt + left-arrow keys, effectively backpaging me out of my last free article. How was I to exorcize my fascination—my Franzination, if you will—and find some sort of catharsis from my latest career spiral? I mean, sure, I could decimate my grocery budget on one of Franzen’s hardbacks. But that’s no fun. And besides, Franzen’s name has graced every literary publication imaginable, whether it’s an old dude praising him for his bygone sensibilities or a younger writer calling him out for saying something sexist, racist, and/or vaguely reptilian—especially since his latest novel, Crossroads, has come out: “The Church of Jonathan Franzen,” “Is Jonathan Franzen too big to fail?,” “Jonathan Franzen’s many controversies, explained,” “Jonathan Franzen Is Fine with All of It,” and “Jonathan Franzen, With Mom in Mind, Softens His Edge.”
Each time I scroll through promo for Crossroads, the voices of past professors and employers ring in my ear with the same infantilizing tone: if you want to be taken seriously, you have to man up, get your hands dirty, do the busywork—no matter how pointless. (Mind you, these authority figures tended to bear an uncanny resemblance to Franzen.) What prompted this infantilizing tone were often simple questions, matters of survival that had never crossed their minds: what are the procedures for dealing with transphobic slurs in the classroom? Can we do anything about a living wage because inflation is a thing? I’m in the hospital with a lung infection—can you find someone to cover my shift this weekend? More times than I’d like to admit, I’ve wondered about detransitioning—if these same folks would suddenly lend me half the grace of a bumbling Franzen, if they’d see my angst as innovative, rather than a symptom of gender deviancy.
I could’ve given Crossroads a critical read, as so many others have. I could’ve poured over its passages and cataloged each and every half-assed political implication cached within its craft, all to hack out some very serious “gotcha” response to match the seriousness of the book, as if such Intellectual™ hoop-jumping would finally—finally!—prove me eligible to critique the master himself. Then again, Franzen has taken up so much space for so long, and I needed relief. My smooth brain offered one solution: stare into the Internet’s Franzen-shaped hole, and perhaps, catch its gaze as it winked back.
•
—via Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NYT
Let’s go back a few steps: I’ve never read Crossroads, nor any Franzen for that matter. I’ll confess to owning a thrifted copy of his breakthrough novel, The Corrections, which has thanklessly served as a coaster for my morning coffee. I’ll also confess to once using his fifth novel, Purity, as a 563-page prop for my laptop when I had to take a Zoom call in a Barnes and Noble. By those measures, I imagine Crossroads is also a really good book.
Based on its reviews, Crossroads seems to be about a dysfunctional Midwestern family. Russ Hildebrant, the protagonist and Franzen stand-in, is a deeply uncool Protestant minister, desperate for approval from the youths. Marion, Russ’s wife, just kind of exists for the purpose of reminding Russ he can do better. Meanwhile, their kids—Clem, Becky, and Perry—are off experimenting with drugs, rock-n-roll, and state-sanctioned war crimes in Vietnam, leaving Russ to wonder where he went wrong as a father figure.
Based on my non-reading, it’s equally possible that Crossroads is about NFTs. And not the clumsy, ape-JPEGs-cum-cryptocurrency thingamajigs. Rather, it’s Franzen’s abstract interpretation of NFTs: NFTs as an over-stretched metaphor for social clout and literary branding, and better yet, how writers wield these intangibles as a form of currency. Franzen is writing about how his name has become far more valuable than his writing itself. Or in other words, his tokens are non-Franzenable, just $29.99 a pop (plus tax).
For those who don’t know—and if I’m being honest, I didn’t know until about five minutes ago when I skimmed the Wikipedia page—an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is the original file of an image or video that can be bought and sold like a one-of-a-kind painting. Sure, plenty of people have taken pictures of the Mona Lisa when they’ve visited the Louvre, but only the Louvre owns the original object. By this logic, even if Crossroads is fiction, its underlying truths serve as a unique account of Franzen’s humiliation in the public sphere, thereby staking a claim to a more-than-authentic “authenticity.” A publication like Vox might document and address all the stupid shit Franzen has said throughout his career, but they’ll never get inside Franzen’s brain quite like the author himself. “Forget all the think pieces calling me out,” Franzen seems to say with Crossroads, “I’ll give y’all the raw, unfiltered foot-in-mouth straight from the tap.”
It’s a profitable move, for sure. Even if it’s a self-parody in the way all half-hearted apologies, performative confessionals, and reactionary promises to do better are. Ever since Franzen rejected Oprah’s offer to include The Corrections in her book club, citing her as “schmaltzy” and a threat to his street cred with “male readers,” he became a meme. A meme synonymous with elitist authority and gatekeeping “high art” from marginalized folks, routinely producing soundbites like, “I just write it like I see it and that gets me in trouble,” when asked to elaborate on his side of the Oprah beef (and most of the other gendered shit he’s bumbled through since). He’s literature’s token oblivious white dude who simply can’t shut up.
So, what’s a modern Franzen to do? Capitalize on the meme, of course! And by capitalize, I mean double-down and self-mythologize—like literally go full Greco-Roman origin story. Crossroads declares itself the first installment of a trilogy entitled The Key to All Mythologies, which, fittingly, is set in 1970s white suburbia. Critic and fellow uncool dude, Thomas Mallon, clarifies Crossroads’ conceit for audiences who just don’t get Franzen: “I think [he] has a humorless image among a lot of readers, and I don’t think that’s entirely the case. There are a couple of clearly self-mocking, self-deprecating passages in his book, where he seems to make fun of his own maybe excessive attention to detail.”
Hearing this from Mallon, I imagine Crossroads could feature a scene of Russ Hildebrandt catching two tweens smoking weed in the parking lot of his church. Instead of scolding them, he might offer a dad-joke: “To be or to NFT, am I right?”
“Cringe,” one of the girls would reply.
“Kill yourself,” the other might say, then spit the roach in his face.
Humiliated, Russ would scamper away from the girls, tear open the door of his Porsche 930 Turbo, barrel through stoplights, and crawl up the steps of his six million dollar brownstone to sob his existential irrelevance into a set of obscenely high thread count sheets. “It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins,” one article quotes from Crossroads. “None was deadlier.” Alas, Russ feels things fully as a man. He is free.
—via Isaac Chotiner, Slate
Despite what Franzen’s work suggests, I’m sure he never set out to become a literary antagonist. I’ve no clue if it’s true, but other reviewers say he’s an impeccable stylist. And, yeah, I don’t doubt he’s a masterful technician, balancing images and plot with the precision of the finest recycling machine on the market. But typically, I don’t turn to recycling machines to admire their efficiency or their beauty if they aren’t actually recycling; I worry about their ability to counteract an impending climate apocalypse.
If Franzen is a “social novelist,” as some critics claim, then it’s worth mentioning how clueless he is when it comes to influencing real-life people. Like, horrifically clueless. From jokes about adopting Iraqi children in order to “better understand young people,” to responding to questions about race in by saying he’s “never been in love with a black woman,” he manages to routinely word-vomit his way through interviews, as if everything he says has occurred to him for the first (and last) time. If I had to armchair-psychology the shit out of the situation, I’d say Franzen exists in a cocktail of uninterrogated whiteness, gifted-child entitlement, and honest-to-god social discomfort. Go ahead, watch any YouTube video of him speaking at a camera. I guarantee it seems like he’s A) longing for his weighted blanket back home or B) on the verge of shedding his skin to auto-oculolinctate.
But that’s the thing: cringe begets memes, and memes become objects to circulate, trade, and persuade. The New York Times, whose literary editors routinely publish the most lukewarm opinions, can’t help themselves when it comes to a good ol’ Franzening. “[His] cultural situation these past two decades,” Dwight Garner writes, “sometimes reminds me of Orson Welles’s comment to Kenneth Tynan: ‘My trouble is that I exude affluence. I look successful. Whenever the critics see me, they say to themselves: it’s time he was knocked—he’s had it too good for too long. But I haven’t.’” Praise him or hate him, the NYT depends on careers like Franzen’s, careers that hinge on the ethos: “Any publicity is good publicity.” After, all what better way to garner clicks than to hype up the hate machine?
—via The Huffington Post
By now, I hope my hypocrisy is obvious and, dare I say, relatable. I’m a bit of a self-punisher. I value scrolling through comments sections on transphobic subreddits, meninist Facebook groups, and more—not to argue with people, but to get a better grasp of what I’m up against, stepping into the world as a nonsensical faggot. To dress myself each day and wonder if a skirt might invite unwanted commentary, if shitty mascara might dissuade eye contact, if a dangly earring alone might stilt an interview or department meeting, a kind of nihilism looms on the horizon, I feel: an internal clown-car-ing of others’ perceptions: strangers’ slack-jawed stares in the supermarket, college boys’ drunken slurs, supervisors’ impulse to float the words “maturity” and “professionalism” into conversation when I ask how I might dissuade undergraduate students from leveling transphobic remarks in my classroom. To exist like this—a “non-man” in a “man’s” body, for lack of a better term—carries clutter. Few non-chemical things can reduce mental elasticity like watching someone’s face deaden as they math you out in their head. Like, if my exterior is read as “unprofessional” and “childish” based on appearance alone, then perhaps playing stupid feels like a way to take control of a situation—not survival in spite of obliviousness, but because of it. Clown your marginalized self and condescending assholes tend to reveal themselves. After all, their tricks may evolve, but their preoccupations remain the same. They need control to feel self-assured. They need exteriority to feel validated. Some deep, wounded part of them still cries out: “I was once wrong, and now I’ve done everything in my power to become right, so why can’t you, clown, take this cruel world as seriously as I do?”
•
Thus, thusly, and henceforth, to get a few steps closer to how Franzen defines “seriousness” in his work, I googled as much about him as I could. One particular article, a listicle on LitHub, written by Franzen himself, touted ten rules for writing. Perf, I thought, only to realize something felt missing. It felt too restrained, too measured, too safe, too sparse.
So, I absolutely totally most definitely reached out to Franzen’s agent to see if my hunch was right, and she absolutely totally most definitely offered me Franzen’s original draft, prior to the LitHub editors’ intervention:
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator. Unless, of course, that reader is Oprah.
Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money. That’s why I go for the money.
Limit your use of conjunctions. My golden doodle suffered from chronic conjunctivitis. It’s insensitive.
Never eat clementines while writing. They’ll leave your keyboard sticky.
When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it. The Internet has become a cesspool for affording millions access to information and education. If there’s one thing to be learned from NFTs, it’s that traces of the true self exist within presentations of the false self. The page is pure projection. Therefore: real writers don’t write. They network at Brooklyn cocktail parties; they bemoan their pedestrian upbringing in West Springs, Illinois; and they skewer other writers with mean book reviews (but not my books).
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis. If this sounds like it conflicts with rule #2 and rule #5, no it doesn’t. You’re wrong.
You see more sitting still than chasing after. That’s why I’ve given up on protesting and sign-waving and will one day self-immolate on the doorsteps of the Audubon Society. They’ve turned their backs to the horrors of glass buildings. What do they orient their efforts toward instead? Funding climate change research. Climate change research!
It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
There’s a proper way to write. Conversely, there’s an improper way to write. I won’t tell you what either of those are. The correct way is just whatever I’m doing at the time.
You have to love before you can be relentless.
Did I take liberties with this listicle? All I’ll say is a magician never reveals their tricks. (Also, I’m a clown, so the answer is yes, but that’s beside the point.)
The point is: it’s not a stretch that my edits could’ve chundered out of Franzen’s mouth at some point. It certainly doesn’t help that Franzen’s fanbase, in all their parasocial religiosity, are capable of the same mental gymnastics as the gold medalist himself. “He writes to, about, in a way, a large demographic of American life, that is, by all kinds of cultural forces being pushed a little bit toward the margins now,” Thomas Mallon explains in The New York Times Book Review podcast. “He’s really writing about Protestant middle America.” (In much of my search, it was only two or three hyperlinks before Franzenites started to smell like white nationalists.) For the sake of evidence, I’ll allow superfan Mallon to continue. He elaborates: identity politics governs the country, good fiction centers on living people “and not just… an abstract clash of ideas.” Thus, Franzen raises the question of whether a character can be over-realized, “doing things through people, through characters, and characters that are all not like himself.” Which is why at least a quarter of the characters in Crossroads are women who exude a “warm cloud of momminess” (yes, that’s a direct quote of Franzen à la Dwight Garner), and most, if not all these characters, haven’t yet established trust funds for their children.
As both an essayist and an abstract clash of ideas, I don’t buy into this “living, breathing people” defense. Franzen and his fans claim to be interested in “over-realized” human beings while also hiding behind prescriptions like “that’s just the way it is.” More than likely (big assumption here!), they don’t have many close Black friends or queer friends or poor friends, and their sampler for “over-realized” human beings isn’t reflective of the world as “it is,” whatever that means. Perhaps their world as “it is” involves multimillion dollar Upper East Side apartments and second homes in Santa Cruz—not classrooms and bookstores where so many readers are born.
So, when Franzen’s confessional shame comes into play, it feels like manipulation, however (un)intentional, to the point of plausible deniability; when really, to his fans and haters alike, a name-drop alone is what’s non-fungible. Throw in an average person’s fumbling, and the greater public’s reaction is often “meh.” Throw in Franzen’s, and baby, you’ve got yourself a party for English Departments and news outlets across the North American continent.
Using serious modes and channels to critique writers like Franzen only legitimizes them as serious people to be debated. Which is why, halfway through writing this, I realized I’d gotten too caught up in critiquing Franzen’s ideas on his terms. The temptation loomed like his bespectacled gaze every time I sat down to write, so what better consolation than to shitpost? Back to misinterpreting Crossroads, it was.
—via me (and FaceTune)
•
In my last lap around the internet, I came across a rumor on reddit; an editor at Macmillan slashed Franzen’s intended ending for Crossroads, only to replace it with something about tripping on ayahuasca or writing angry letters to the Audubon Society (again, I don’t know). Moments after this fabled email exchange, user @seagull.lover.42069 uploaded an untitled pdf, claiming to have leaked the original draft, in fear its brilliance would never see the light of day.
I found the questionable document and will summarize as best I can for you now:
In said unreleased ending, a newly divorced Russ Hildebrant drives to Nevada dissuade Perry, his military-complex child, from deploying to Vietnam. As Russ arrives at the base in Lincoln County, security mistakes him as one of their own. “The guard cast a glassy-eyed stare at Russ’s polo, settling on the cookie crumbles decorating his right breast. ‘My wife didn’t pack me a snack,’ Russ improvises. Without a word, the guard buzzes Russ in.”
Thing is, as Russ scours the base, there’s not a single sign of new recruits—no obstacle course, barracks, armories. Confused, he stumbles into the first warehouse he can find. Cold air smacks him in the face. Monitors throb. The sole source of light is two-story screen on the far side of the room. A child of the forties, he tries to fathom how any of this technology could exist—“Just the other day, he typed ‘5318008’ on his desktop calculator, and now what, this?”
Across the room, the screen crunches ones and zeros until they form an image, often a cartoon ape chewing a cigar, or something called a “minion” (which really is just a one-eyed Tic Tac, Russ thinks, except some are homely and chaste, and other sport anthropomorphic breasts). These images shrink as soon as they appear, slinking into a skeuomorphic folder at the bottom of the screen, labeled “$$$.”
“What in God’s—”
“They’re memes,” a voice says. “That’s what we call them on my planet.”
Russ notices a body slumped against the wall. For the most part, it could be human, save for a down of feathers and elongated snout. Is this an actor in a Big Bird costume? No, Russ thinks, it’s too goddamn sexy.
“Who are you?” Russ asks. “What are you?”
“I came to your planet as an act of diplomacy. To warn your species of the impending threat of big, glass buildings. However”—the creature kicks out a foot revealing an ankle restraint—“your government imprisoned me and demanded I recreate my species’ weaponry. Only, my species has no need for violence. We settle things with memes—electronic photographs that can transform reality into toothless absurdities. With these images, we can make demagogues and aggressors say whatever we want, diluting their lukewarm messages into oblivion.”
“I don’t have time for this,” Russ says. “Perry, have you seen my son, Perry?”
“He’s in the zeitgeist now,” the alien says, gesticulating toward an orb on the console. “Your government has slotted him to return sooner than the others. As a platypus, I think.”
“Perry’s in the machine?”
“Project NFT. When I couldn’t provide a weapon, your government took my people’s meme technology and tried to privatize it for the sake of gain. It won’t pierce flesh. But surely, it’ll become a destabilizing commodity and potentially orchestrate a global health crisis. By my calculations, your scientists will discover how to make these ‘NFTs’ viable in forty to fifty earth years. Please, there’s no more time to explain! Destroy the machine!”
Palming the orb, Russ thinks to himself of all the shame and humiliation he’s had to endure, all the times he’s had to think before speaking, the audacity of strangers to question him for speaking out of turn, the unappealing “momminess” of his wife (a phrase so empowering to him, he’d demand every reviewer quote it if he were to ever write a novel). If what the sexy bird-person proved true, he could save Perry—or he could remake himself, become part of something so much larger, so much more untouchable.
Sooner than soon: a pop at his fingertips, an undoing of the boundaries between skin and screen. The system reboots. Numbers crunch once more. This time, instead of apes or horny Tic Tacs, a human face forms: first, a shag of gray hair and a prominent forehead; then a pair of thick, black spectacles; then a scrum of stubble encasing a tight-lipped smile. A smile not unlike the writer Jonathan Franzen’s. It was pure beauty, un-incarnate.