Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage by Philip Weinstein (review)

Jonathan Franzen, considered by many to be the most important writer of serious fiction of his generation, has proven in his most successfully realized novels that humor serves a serious function in his work. No reader of The Corrections (2001) can forget Chip Lambert stuffing an expensive salmon fillet into his pants at a haute supermarket called Nightmare of Consumption or, pages later, Chip's drugged, impassioned lovemaking to an antique chaise lounge, nor will readers fail to recall the repellant Joey Berglund of Freedom (2010) forced to knead his own excrement in search of the wedding band he had ingested. Franzen's enormous potential is apparent as a novelist in general and as a comic writer in particular, so it is unsurprising that he has become the subject of academic scrutiny. With The Comedy of Rage, Philip Weinstein offers the first critical biography of Franzen to date. Weinstein, a Swarthmore professor and the author of several books on literary modernism and Faulkner most especially, offers an overview of Franzen's life and works up to the time before his latest novel, Purity, was published in 2015.

Weinstein describes a central tension that animates Franzen's body of fiction, a tension between what he sees as highbrow rage on the one hand and mainstream acceptance and love on the other, and he grounds his claims in the biographical evidence he amasses. Weinstein's project raises the question of how "a suspicious intellectual loner and the mainstream writer idolized by millions … come together as one person" (2), and for Weinstein, the answer is that Franzen's once-corrosive rage becomes tempered over time by love and that this "oppositional encounter produces … the inimitable comedy of his work" (3). Weinstein charts the early childhood of Franzen as one of alienation and uncertainty, characterized by a distant and taciturn father and an emotionally suffocating mother. He recounts Franzen's formative years as a German major at Swarthmore and details the harrowing dissolution of his marriage, life experiences figured here as the necessary constituents for his career as a novelist.

Weinstein, like most commentators on Franzen's fiction, argues that Franzen's first two novels, while promising and intermittently brilliant, are less than wholly successful. The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992) are ambitious but also marred by postmodernist pretensions, and both suffer because Franzen creates caricatures—strawmen—on whom he heaps his curdling invective rather than complexly realized characters capable of evoking compassion and censure in readers. At this stage of his evolution as a writer, Franzen had not tamed his dogmatic predilection for withering highbrow critique of a bankrupt America. In Weinstein's binary reckoning, Franzen chose a "status" over "contract" ethos (Franzen's terms) in his early novels (89). Significantly, Franzen's decision to mine his own fraught family's struggles and transmute the personal into art signals his claim to greatness for Weinstein. The Corrections (2001) abandons formulaic types and gains emotional heft from Franzen's choice to love the characters enough not to judge them; we now witness Franzen's generous attention to dynamic, complex characters drawn from his reimagining of his own father and mother. Likewise, Freedom (2010) features his most complex female character in the person of Patty Berglund, whose many sides are revealed in his sustained and pitch-perfect dramatization of marital discord and resilience. Weinstein's concluding chapters are devoted to Franzen's sometimes notorious New Yorker essays and a cursory overview of Purity (2015), still an unpublished manuscript when Jonathan Franzen went to press.

Despite Weinstein's contention that substantial parts of his biographical portrayal of Franzen have been gleaned from interviews and private email exchanges with the author, the evidence suggests that actual engagements with Franzen were limited. Instead, most of the biographical data has been cobbled from previously available and well-known sources, including Franzen's own autobiographical essays, his memoir The Discomfort Zone (2006), and published interviews, such as the lengthy one in the 2010 Paris Review...