Thinking about regional literature the other day, I turned once more to State by State, “featuring original writing on all fifty states” and edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. I don’t know how I managed to not read the entry on New York before—a state I know well, and by Jonathan Franzen, whom I like—but I have now, and I was surprised at how much I liked it. (You know how you never like things you actually know about. Plus, Franzen is totally from St. Louis.) So, a post in honor of the fact I’m headed there tonight.

At first I thought the conceit of the entry was a bit much: Franzen pretends he’s gone for an interview of the State, and gets bounced around by her publicist, who gets worried that he’s working for a small press; her personal attorney, who warns him not to mention the late seventies or early eighties; and a historian, who gives him a lot of interesting info but gets kind of…wrapped up in it. It’s when he’s rescued by a geologist that things get good. He’s interested enough for Franzen to confide in about his first New York experiences, notably a day spent in the City with his older cousin, and the drive back to Westport, CT late at night.

JF: And over the Whitestone Bridge we went. And that’s when I had the clinching vision. That’s when I fell irretrievably for New York: when I saw Co-Op City late at night.

The New York State Geologist: Get outta here.

JF: Seriously. I’d already spent the day in Manhattan. I’d already seen the biggest and most city-like city in the world. And now we’d been driving away from it for fifteen or twenty minutes, which in St. Louis would have been enough to get you out into pitch-dark river-bottom cornfields, and suddenly, as far as I could see, there were these huge towers of habitation, and every single one of them was as tall as the tallest building in St. Louis, and there were more of them than I could count. The most distant ones were over by the water and otherworldly in the haze. Tens of thousands of city lives all stacked and packed against each other. The sheer number of apartments that you could see out here in the southeast Bronx: it all seemed unknowably and excitingly vast, the way my own future seemed to me at that moment, with Martha sitting next to me doing seventy.

Shit, Jonathan Franzen, you so get it. He’s killing me:

There’s a particular connection between the Midwest and New York. …New York’s like the beady eye of yang at the center of the Midwest’s unentitled, self-effacing plains of yin. And the Midwest is like the dewy, romantic, hopeful eye of yin at the center of New York’s brutal, grasping yang. A certain kind of Midwesterner comes east to be completed. Just as a certain kind of New York native goes to the Midwest to be renewed.

The interview format turns out to be perfect. Franzen can use the state geologist as his confessor, and get these people to tell him a bunch of facts, and get some of them to oppose him, to show the bits of New York he doesn’t really like. Including the State herself, who thinks Donald Trump is cute, and wisely tells Franzen, “It was always about money. You were just too young to notice.”

I’ve been flipping through Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays, How To Be Alone, and I’m really enjoying them. I like Franzen a lot so that’s not a surprise. “The Reader in Exile” was the first one I checked out—yes, because the word “reader” is in the title; the second one I read was “Books in Bed” which is not about what I thought it would be—and it was really surprisingly smart. You see, it was written in 1995, and it’s all about how the internets are going to make us too stupid to read. Or not, because Franzen isn’t that silly.

He discusses a few things, including the then-impossibly-hip Wired magazine, and the book The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts. I haven’t read that book, and based on this I don’t think I ever will, but I’m so impressed with what a cool and thought-out take Franzen had on the whole business. On Birkerts:

His nightmare, to be sure, “is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference.”…Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd.
…
It’s no accident that Birkerts locates apocalypse in the arch-hip pages of Wired. He’s still the high-school loner, excluded from the in crowd and driven, therefore, to the alternative and more “genuine” satisfactions of reading. But what, we might ask him, is so wrong with being an efficient and propserous information manager? Do the team captains and class presidents really not have souls?

It’s funny; I could not agree more with Franzen here. Which I think is probably unusual for a “reader”—of course he is one too. But he’s right to call out the elitism here, which is mostly baseless and also bizarre—“an aristocracy of alienation.” I mean shit, I love books, I love reading, I love what it brings me. But I know better than to assume other people are soulless. And more importantly, I don’t think there’s anything inherently better about reading just-any-book than about playing online or watching TV or movies, both of which have some pretty incredible writing these days.

On to Franzen’s last point, which I also loved. After the aesthetic elitism, Birkerts moves on to the idea “that while technology is merely palliative, art is therapeutic.” Franzen likes this idea, but knows better. I quote at length, because I say, “Right on!”

Unhappy families may be aesthetically superior to happy families, whose happiness is all alike, but “dysfunctional” families are not. It was easy to defend a novel about unhappiness; everybody knows unhappiness; it’s part of the human condition. A novel about emotional dysfunction, however, is reduced to a Manichaeanism of utility. Either it’s a sinister enabler, obstructing health by celebrating pathology, or it’s an object lesson, helping readers to understand and overcome their own dysfunction. Obsession with social health produces a similar vulgarity: if a novel isn’t part of a political solution, it must be part of the problem. The doctoral candidate who “exposes” Joseph Conrad as a colonialist is akin to the school board that exiles Holden Caulfield as a poor role model—akin as well, unfortunately, to Birkerts, whose urgency in defending reading devolves from the assumption that books must somehow “serve” us.

I love novels as much as Birkerts does, and I, too, have felt rescued by them. I’m moved by this pleading, as a lobbyist in the cause of literature, for the intellectual subsidy of his client. But novelists want their work to be enjoyed, not taken as medicine.

And again, this was in 1995. Fourteen years later there are still people worrying about those soulless neotroglodytes. I think we’re okay.