My friend Marc knows

This post is from my friend Marc Wilson. He is a middle school teacher in New York City, which is weird because usually people like him stop being teachers in order to become investment bankers or hospital administrators, but he nobly keeps at it. They (my friends in Hollywood) are currently developing a movie about him called "Dangerous Minds: The Freedom Writers Refuse To Stand and Deliver." He and his wife Sunny and his kid Harper come to visit us once during the summer, and that visit always wins #1 when I compile my year-end "Best of" list for cool events. Read this and comment, and you will be blessed.

I teach 8th-grade English, and one of my main lessons to my students is to consider their audience when they write. This is a dumb lesson, because their audience is always the same: me. I am now considering my audience when writing. As best I can tell, my audience here on James’s blog is James, his graduate school friends, and his firecracker brother. So I would like to write about a topic near and dear to most of you: the life of an academic. This is a topic I should not know that much about, but I feel like I’ve been exposed to a lot of it.

I just finished reading The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. It was intelligent, engaging, insightful, and entertaining. The back of the book should have said things like that. Instead Pat Conroy said this: “With this dazzling work, Franzen gives notice that from now on, he is only going to hunt with the big cats.” This is possibly the most annoying blurb quote I’ve ever read. But it does kind of feel like Franzen is shooting for (or with … or whatever) “big cats” in this book. I received this book from friends who will likely read this post, so I want to assure them that I enjoyed this book very much, but at the same time I found it really annoying.

The scope of the book is ambitious: It intends to map out the various dysfunctions of a grown-up family. Franzen exposes and assaults a variety of postmodern ills and traumas as they turn up in the lives of parents, children, and grandchildren in the story. For dragging us through this, he offers a small redemptive package at the end. Franzen brings us through this all in insightful and entertaining fashion, but the wit and ambition of the author were too palpable. I could see his smug jacket photo at the turn of every clever phrase, pleased with himself at his cunning humor and brilliant social acumen. This feels pretty picky—shouldn’t I be satisfied if I’m entertained and enlightened? Probably.

My other complaint is that this book is guilty of dwelling largely on the life of an academic. An alarming number of books that I have read in the past few years have done this. I’m sure I’m not the first to notice this glut, but it’s getting annoying. Tortilla Curtain (this is a bit of a stretch, but it’s such an annoying book overall I had to include it), Herzog, White Noise, Possession, Crossing to Safety (actually I don’t know about this one, I couldn’t handle the self-satisfied life he was conjuring and I had to drop it), and Norwegian Wood all reveal far more than I ever need to know about the insecurities, arrogance, sexual frustrations, existential anxiety, acute postmodern (I’ve used that word twice now, still not completely sure what it means) torments, and hypocritical regrets of middle-aged white men who spend their lives studying. I did genuinely like most of these books when I read them, but I am tiring of them. There are simply too many books like this that seem self-serving in the community of contemporary (I realize I’m stretching the use of that word here) fiction writers.

I’ll offer up some authors and books that can serve as a counterpoint to this, with writers that flex their theoretical/philosophical muscles to illuminate something less tedious. Tim O’Brien’s treatment of the Vietnam War and its continuing effects on individuals and our society is phenomenal. Kazuo Ishiguro encases brilliant and lyrical thoughts about memory and conscience in alarmingly taut stories with varied settings. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses writes with scholarly intelligence and forces us to rethink the American West and the border. Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days employs a freeloading journalist to comment on race and question common values. E. Annie Proulx’s Shipping News uses a quirky village to explore perspective.

In high school and probably college, too, I held on—as all earnest melodramatic white males with inclinations toward the humanities do—to the dream of becoming a writer. The advice I found about writing is that you should always “write what you know.” This is perhaps good advice for grounding dreamy young men, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting body of literature. Since it is my duty to solve this problem, here is my solution. Two things need to happen: 1) educate the scholarly class about something other than their own anxieties, and 2) give people who are not angst-ridden white males (over-generalizing here) the tools to become credible and insightful writers.