Farther Away

March 26, 2012
Franzen (The Corrections) follows up his 2010 blockbuster novel, Freedom, with a collection of recent essays, speeches, and reviews, in which he lays out a view of literature in which storytelling and character development trump lyrical acrobatics, and unearths a few forgotten classics. Franzen’s easy dismissal of a few canonical works, such as Ulysses, may invite contention, but when in his native realm—books that revel in the frustrations, despairs, and near-blisses of human relationships—he is an undeniably perceptive reader. In other essays, he confronts an epidemic of songbird hunting in the Mediterranean, tracks a novelty golf club cover back to a Chinese factory to investigate that nation’s notoriously ambivalent stance toward environmental conservation, and withdraws to a remote South American island to meditate on Robinson Crusoe and the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace. He also weighs in on Facebook’s narcissistic death spiral and the way the “sexy” new gadgets that never seem to leave our fingertips get in the way of real life and relationships, as well as the uneasy subject of autobiographical fiction and the effect a failed marriage had on his early novels. This intimate read is packed with provocative questions about technology, love, and the state of the contemporary novel. Agent: Susan Golomb Agency.

Starred review from March 15, 2012
Further dispatches from one of contemporary literature's most dependable talents. Franzen (Freedom, 2010, etc.) returns with a nonfiction collection that includes book reviews, reportage and personal reflections on such topics as the social scourge of cell phones and the pleasures of bird-watching, but the collection as a whole is haunted by the author's relationship with David Foster Wallace, a peer similarly lauded for erudition and seriousness of purpose who committed suicide in 2008. Wallace's suicide provides the emotional ballast for the title essay, an account of Franzen's sojourn to an impossibly remote island where he hoped to escape the demands of modern technology, see some exceedingly rare birds and scatter the ashes of his dead friend. The piece functions as travelogue, a reckoning with the novel Robinson Crusoe and a howl of despair at the suicide of a friend, and Franzen's formidable intelligence and literary skill combine these strands into an unforgettably lyrical meditation on solitude and loss. Elsewhere, the author makes impassioned cases for such obscure novels as The Hundred Brothers and The Man Who Loved Children, recounts hair-raising adventures protecting endangered birds on Cyprus from poachers, wrestles with Chinese bureaucracy and the ethical implications of golf and, in a whimsical, digressive faux interview with the state of New York, manages a highly amusing impersonation of Wallace's lighter work. Franzen can get a bit schoolmarmish and crotchety in his caviling against the horrors of modern society, and he perhaps overestimates the appeal of avian trivia to the general reader, but anyone with an interest in the continued relevance of literature and in engaging with the world in a considered way will find much here to savor. An unfailingly elegant and thoughtful collection of essays from the formidable mind of Franzen, written with passion and haunted by loss.

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December 1, 2011

Readers of Franzen's monster literary successes, Freedom and The Corrections, know that he holds nothing back in his sharp-eyed assessments of whatever aspect of modern life he chooses to visit. In these essays, written mostly over the last five years, he ranges from an honest assessment of his feelings about the suicide of friend and rival David Foster Wallace to a look at China that forced him to investigate ingrained assumptions. Essential for all smart readers.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2012
Franzen performs a profoundly evocative feat of literary triangulation in the title essay in his third and strongest essay collection. He describes a harrowing stay on a remote desert island in the South Pacific. He conducts a rigorous and revealing inquiry into Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe. And, with anger, grief, and love, he pays homage to his late friend and kindred writer, David Foster Wallace, uniting all three strands together in a haunting meditation on loneliness, the solace of fiction, and suicide. That Franzen can juggle multiple subjects, perspectives, moral dilemmas, and tones (he shifts readily from the comedic to the elegiac) is no surprise in the wake of his many-faceted epic, Freedom (2010). Anyone curious about what drives Franzen, an intense, edgy, and skeptical writer of acute moral intelligence, will find much that is deeply illuminating here as he writes about his love and concern for birds, especially in bewitching, alarming, and painfully funny accounts of risky sojourns in Cyprus, where the poaching of songbirds runs rampant, and China, where birds are imperiled by habitat loss and pollution. Here, too, are distinctive insights into the many-pointed impact of digital technology and superlative critiques of the work of other fiction writers. Franzen is at once a nuanced and clarion champion of literature and nature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)