Avid Reader - Robert Gottlieb (2016)

This is the first book reviewed as a result of podcasts.  At a certain point, I am going to write a lot about podcasts, maybe.  Suffice to say, they have been an influence on me.

Because I was listening to WTF, I was turned onto the New York Times Book Review podcast, and because I listened to Robert Gottlieb talk about romance novels on that, I was turned onto his memoir.  I first became aware of Robert Gottlieb after I purchased the Paris Review Interview Volume I.  He was one of the interviewees featured in that volume, and I recall reading his with greater interest than most (at least, for say, Richard Price, Jack Gilbert, Robert Stone, and Elizabeth Bishop).  He couldn't hold a candle to Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, James Cain, Rebecca West, Billy Wilder, or Joan Didion, but he came across as one of the more engaging subjects.

I've just leafed through the first few pages of that interview, and I was struck by how I already knew a few of the stories from Avid Reader.  Like about how he renamed the main character Bob from Bill in Something Happened, or the novel Lilith and the emergence of its eponymous heroine 60-70 pages in and how he suggested renaming it after her to create anticipation.  Gottlieb has a lot of stories and he seems to tell many of them with a gossipy relish.  To be sure, he has had an extraordinary life in letters.  But it's almost as if he feels obligated to share all of these stories, lest they be forgotten to history.  Perhaps they are already marked down elsewhere.

In any case, when he started talking about the The Power Broker in the interview, I had to flip back to reality and remember that the portion on that biography and its author, Robert Caro, is one of the true highlights, just because of its outsizedness.  In truth I read this a few months ago and I have a backlog of posts and I don't recall many specific details of it.  I just remember it for some of the nastier things in it.  It almost seems to have a tabloid appeal at moments.  Much of the time, it seems as if Gottlieb is just bragging about all the great stuff he's done.  He basically goes through his life and different jobs and the writers he edited.     

Here they are:
Sybille Bedford (A Legacy)
Rona Jaffe (The Best of Everything)
Jessica Mitford (The American Way of Death)
Joseph Heller (Catch-22) 
Sylvia Ashton-Warner (Teacher)
Mordecai Richler (Barney's Version)
Edna O'Brien
Toni Morrison (Beloved)
Dariel Telfer (The Caretakers)
Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
J.R. Salamanca (Lilith)
Jetta Carleton (The Moonflower Vine)
Robert Crichton (The Secret of Santa Vittoria)
Chaim Potok (The Chosen)
Charles Portis (True Grit)
[not] John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
James Thurber
Sid Perelman
Cynthia Lindsay
Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain)
Robert Caro (The Power Broker)
Brooke Hayward (Haywire)
Barbara Goldsmith (Little Gloria...Happy at Last)
Jean Stein and George Plimpton (Edie)
Gloria Vanderbilt (Once Upon a Time)
Lauren Bacall (By Myself)
Liv Ullman (Changing)
John Cheever
John Updike
John Hersey
Anne Tyler (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant)
Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire)
Maria Riva (daughter of Marlene Dietrich)
Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)
V.S. Naipaul
Roald Dahl
Anthony Burgess
Salman Rushdie
Antonia Fraser
Robert Massie (Peter the Great)
Barbara Tuchman (A Distant Mirror, The March of Folly)
Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment)
Bob Dylan (Lyrics--now he's edited 3 Nobel winners)
Irene Mayer Selznick (A Private View)
Katharine Hepburn
Eve Arnold (The Unretouched Woman)
Robert Townsend (Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits)
John Gardner
Cynthia Ozick
Don DeLillo
Denis Johnson
Robert Stone
William Gaddis
Gordon Lish
Harold Brodkey*
Alfred Kazin
Elia Kazan
Nora Ephron (Heartburn, I Feel Bad About My Neck, I Remember Nothing) (one of the highlights)
Dorothy Dunnett
John Le Carre (The Night Manager)
Katharine Graham (Personal History) (also a nice anecdote about Justice O'Connor)
Bill Clinton (My Life) (also one of the highlight)
Will Friedwald (Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers)

*: "And then there was Harold Brodkey--brilliant, maddening, tricky, self-destructive, troublemaking, irresistible; he and Gordon had tormented each other for years.  He was a sacred icon at Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, perhaps Shawn's favorite writer of fiction after Salinger, and Harold dazzled in the same way Salinger had--and with the same narcissistic obsession with childhood and adolescence. (The New Yorker fiction department was far from pleased with this favoritism of Shawn's.) Harold had embarked on what was meant to be, and was heralded (by himself loudest of all) as, a major work to be called A Party of Animals.
Lynn Nesbit was his agent, and she had sold the book to Joe Fox at Random House, but as time passed and the book grew longer and longer but not closer and closer, at Harold's insistence the contract was switched to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for more money.  It fared no better there, and when I arrogantly decided that I was the one who could wrest a novel from the material, it passed to me--in exchange for yet more money.  Harold had by this time married the writer Ellen Schwamm, whose two novels I had edited--the latter, How He Saved Her, being an account of how he took over her hitherto conventional life. (Harold, with his diabolical psychic potency and ambiguous sexuality, would not have been every woman's cup of tea.)"

Moments like this, followed by further anecdote, make me glad to have read Avid Reader.  Maybe I will never read How He Saved Her but it sounds hilarious.

After Gottlieb moves to The New Yorker, there are less anecdotes about famous writers, and more about the staff of the magazine in a constant rush to put out an issue per week.  I don't try to read The New Yorker but I appreciate what it does for society.  This is an interesting part of the book, noteworthy personally to me because he references handing off the reins to Tina Brown, who had published a memoir of her own about her time at Vanity Fair at the same time I was reading this.  I actually listened to her give interviews on two separate podcasts, and she referenced the same things about her interactions with Donald Trump on each.  Gottlieb later returns to Knopf and tells anecdotes about five more notable authors.

There is an amusing picaresque quality to the tales of his early life and first marriage, but his social life seems to be intertwined with many female friends that are part of the larger publishing scene.  There are just as many un-famous friends that he writes about as famous subjects, but in a review of a book that I would imagine few in the general American public would seek out, in the society we live in, in the medium this review takes, we have to stick with the famous.  It made me think about getting paranoid about writing a memoir and worrying that such and such person would be offended if I wrote something about them or didn't write something about them.  The next book that will be reviewed is Brix Smith-Start's memoir The Rise, the Fall and The Rise and at times, she will create pseudonyms for less famous friends of hers.  I don't want to spoil it but I will just say that I had a significantly better time reading Smith-Start's memoir than Gottlieb's.  In any case, Gottlieb's writing is much more prim and proper.  There were definitely a few sentences where I was like, "Wait dude, you're an editor?" But then I would re-read them and be like, okay, I can see how that makes sense, or is at least grammatically correct.  I'm not going to compare it to Smith-Start's anymore except to stay that this is better edited, and generally less compelling.

That said, Gottlieb has had an extraordinary life filled with amusing anecdotes, and the effect of this book is to be insanely jealous of him and his fabulous life.  It's not as if he didn't work hard for it, but he seemed to get very lucky, being in the right place at right time and befriending celebrities and literary icons. 

Gottlieb frames his narrative in several long chapters, "Learning," "Reading," "Working" (at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker), and "Dancing."  Writing about dancing is an acquired taste.  There is a lot of writing about music that I like.  For some reason I find writing about dancing much less interesting, but that is probably because I am not into dance.  In a way, Gottlieb may sense this, and refrains from mentioning anything about it at all until that last chapter.  I skimmed through it.  (I did a similar thing with the final part of Brix Smith-Start's book, but I found her section--on fashion and running a high-end clothing store with her husband--more compelling).

Yet Gottlieb ends on a beautiful note, summing up his 85 previous years on the planet with a remarkable meditation on "retirement" and mortality .  I haven't read many books written from this perspective, yet I can say that Gottlieb writes with clarity, acceptance and gratitude for the life he has lived.  We should all aspire to his level of personal happiness.  I can hardly think of a better life to have lived--though I don't think I could read nearly as much.  If Gottlieb kept a blog like Flying Houses, he would probably have 10,000 posts in 10 years, not 350.  Publishing indeed may be changing, and Gottlieb may not be laying down a "how-to-become-an-editor," but I wish this book had been published in 2004 rather than 2016.  That's not to say I would have modeled my life on Gottlieb's, but it might have been fun to try.

Zero K - Don DeLillo (2016)

Oeuvre rule: I have read White Noise, Underworld, Cosmopolis, Mao II and the first 50 pages or so of Americana.  Don DeLillo is one of my favorite authors, period.  Obviously one of my very favorite living writers.  I would return to Americana (and likely will one day, as my friend Katerina gave me her copy, at the same time she gave me this book and an autobiography by Isadora Duncan), but I must leave it out of this ranking.  Here is how I would rank these four novels, alongside Zero K.

White Noise
Underworld
Zero K
Mao II
Cosmopolis

Granted, the only one I reviewed was Underworld.  I met DeLillo when I bought Cosmopolis, and recorded the encounter in the Underworld review.  Both White Noise and Underworld are modern American classics, but White Noise is the stronger novel, in my opinion.  Underworld is a powerhouse novel, but White Noise is just so sharp and pointed and entertaining and hilarious and deep and moving, where Underworld is, primarily, impressive.  I'd really need to read Mao II and Cosmopolis again to articulate my rankings, I just remember them as a bit boring (I still haven't seen the film of Cosmopolis, but I did see Game Six, and that was also pretty good).

So then, Zero K begs immediate comparison to White Noise, as Meghan Daum points out in her review, which reminded me that I should reserve this book at the CPL.  I did that, and I was the first person to reserve it from my branch and I got it immediately.  This is definitely one of the most "current" reviews I've done, certainly from a traditional fiction author that I like very much.

It begs comparison because both are deep meditations on death.  In White Noise, it is the medication  of fear of death, and in Zero K it is mastery over death through cryogenics.  But White Noise has a better story, and Zero K is more impressionistic and abstract.  It feels very meaningful and heavy as DeLillo approaches 80.  But it is strange and ultimately difficult to really "get into."  That's not to say that there aren't a few great parts,  Overall I would call it a very good novel, it just didn't grab me by the throat in the way that say, White Noise or Underworld  did.  And it has so much potential, because it has a pretty good plot setup.  A science fiction writer, or so-called speculative fiction writer, could have taken this novel in dazzling directions, but that's not DeLillo's style.

Essentially, the story is narrated by Jeff Lockhart, who is 34 and the son of a very rich and successful businessman who has decided to tell him about his secret operation, the Convergence, which is somewhere in the desert of Eastern Europe/Western Asia, not far from where the meteor fell in Chelyabinsk a few years ago.  The novel seems to take place in true present day.  There are references to the Taliban (though not ISIL) and the recent disturbances in Ukraine.  His father, Ross, is in his mid-to-late 60's, and married to a woman dying of a terminal disease (Artis).  Previously, Ross had been married to Jeff's mother, Madeline, but he left them abruptly and Jeff deals with this throughout the novel.  It is a bit surprising that he admires Artis and seems to connect with her very closely as a kind of stepmother, though Ross was not really in his life at all.  As he remembers, Ross's face was on the cover of Newsweek when Madeline died.

Artis is dying and Ross has invested in this facility that will freeze everyone and bring them back at some point to be determined in the future when technology will allow them to live again.  At the beginning of the novel, Jeff is blindfolded and transported for the better part of two days and brought to the facility and given a sort of extended tour.

As Jeff meets new people along his journey, he gives them names.  They never introduce themselves.  Two of the more notable architects of the Convergence are the so-called Stenmark twins.  Their back-and-forth pleasantly reminded me of a similar scene in White Noise, where Jack Gladney and a new professor at their college traded details about Hitler and Elvis and their mothers:

"'When the time comes, we'll depart finally from our secure northern home to this desert place.  Old and frail, limping and shuffling, to approach the final reckoning.'
'What will we find here?  A promise more assured than the ineffable hereafters of the world's organized religions.'
'Do we need a promise?  Why not just die?  Because we're human and we cling.  In this case not to religious tradition but to the science of present and future.'
They were speaking quietly and intimately, with a deeper reciprocity than in the earlier exchanges and not a trace of self-display.  The audience was stilled, completely fixed.
'Ready to die does not mean willing to disappear.  Body and mind may tell us that it is time to leave the world behind.  But we will clutch and grasp and scratch nevertheless.'
'Two stand-up comics.'
'Encased in vitreous matter, refashioned cell by cell, waiting for the time.'
'When the time comes, we'll return.  Who will we be, what will we find?  The world itself, decades away, think of it, or sooner, or later.  Not so easy to imagine what will be out there, better or worse or so completely altered we will be too astonished to judge.'" (74-75)

The first thing I'd mention about this comparison is that the writing is just not as sharp as in White Noise.  I've never read The Body Artist, but I've heard that it's sort of abstract and experimental, and I'd say the same thing about Zero K, particularly the the short section of the book that seems to portray Artis's consciousness after the cryogenic process.  I'm not sure how DeLillo comes out on this issue, but my guess is that he thinks the concept is insane, but may actually gain traction.  DeLillo is often portrayed as some kind of cultural psychic, that he sees the way things are now and he predicts the way things will be.  The idea of consciousness after freezing and before "rebirth" is sort of frightening, perhaps more frightening than an absence of consciousness.  In this sense, DeLillo may be expressing an acceptance of death in a different way than many other artists before him.  Death is one of the greatest inspirations for art, and his achievement with this novel is noteworthy, but I am sorry to say it is not as essential a work as those previously mentioned volumes.

But I love DeLillo and want to read several of his other books.  This is sort of a chilling addition to his oeuvre, and a pretty cool one to release at his age.  Some artists might put out their best work around age 80 (I'm thinking primarily of Thomas Mann here), and though in my opinion this is not DeLillo's best, it's quite good, good enough to say he hasn't lost it and could put out a still more impressive book yet, if he hasn't run out of subjects that he'd like to write about.

Regardless, there are still little moments of comic absurdity like this, which is pure DeLillo:

"Soon I was turning a corner and going down a hall with walls painted raw umber, a thick runny pigment meant to resemble mud, I thought.  There were matching doors, all doors the same.  There was also a recess in the wall and a figure standing there, arms, legs, head, torso, a thing fixed in place.  I saw that it was a mannequin, naked, hairless, without facial features, and it was reddish brown, maybe russet or simply rust.  There were breasts, it had breasts, and I stopped to study the figure, a molded plastic version of the human body, a jointed model of a woman.  I imagined placing a hand on a breast.  This seemed required, particularly if you are me.  The head was a near oval, arms positioned in a manner that I tried to decipher--self-defense, withdrawal, with one foot set to the rear.  The figure was rooted to the floor, not enclosed in protective glass.  A hand on a breast, a hand sliding up a thigh.  It's something I would have done once upon a time.  Here and now, the cameras in place, the monitors, an alarm mechanism on the body itself--I was sure of this.  I stood back and looked.  The stillness of the figure, the empty face, the empty hallway, the figure at night, a dummy, in fear, drawing away.  I moved farther back and kept on looking." (24-25)

Ultimately, my opinion of this book is colored by feelings of wasted potential and obfuscation.  It seems like there is another deeper layer to this novel that I'm just not getting (it may have something to do with Stak--and indeed I felt the strongest part of the novel was the middle part outside of the Convergence) and it seems like DeLillo doesn't want to write the more "commercial" version of this novel that would be more of a crowd-pleaser, something about how the Convergence actually turned out in the end, and deciding if it is a good or bad thing.  Like I said, my feeling is that it's a bad thing, and DeLillo (ever the satirist) is mocking science and the belief that we can be all powerful gods with a mastery over nature, when we don't even know what that means for us spiritually (i.e. we are not meant to live much longer than 100 years on this earth).  Even though I think DeLillo is ultimately better off being ambivalent, I am still sort of a sucker for the happy ending.  Having said all that, it's definitely an interesting read and I recommend it--I just don't think it will change your life the way say, two of his other novels might.

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen (2001)

Oeuvre rule: I have only previously read How to be Alone, which came out a year after this.  I enjoyed it very much, while I thought Franzen sometimes went on too long and sounded a bit pretentious and cranky.  Some of the material intimates Franzen's raison d'etre in The Corrections--i.e. "this is what I was trying to do" or "this is what I was going for..."  I would like to revisit it in light of those comments, because I'm going to agree with the rest of the world and slap huge compliments on this novel.  Oprah, I'm not going to read everything in your book club, but you got it right with this one.  (No comment on Franzen's disavowal of that institution--except my belief that he regrets that in retrospect.) I don't have a book club, but I do name those I consider the best books reviewed on Flying Houses, and this one makes the list.

Recently, this novel was named the #5 novel of the 21st century so far, and overall it is a very fine piece of literature indeed.  I have minor complaints: the unfortunate media-driven obsession with sex in American society is transplanted into these pages, and Franzen occasionally goes off on a super-long tangent.  The second complaint is also a compliment, however, and I realize it is hard to produce an item designed for entertaining the masses without appealing to baser instincts.

The most notable thing about this book are the extremely long chapters.  There are only a few: "St. Jude" (9 pages), "The Failure" (120 pages), "The More He Thought About It, the Angrier He Got" (99 pages), "At Sea" (97 pages), "The Generator" (117 pages), "One Last Christmas" (99 pages), and "The Corrections" (5 pages).  7 chapters in 570 pages seems unwieldy, but this is not a criticism.  It serves to break the book up into recognizable sections.  "St. Jude" and "The Corrections" are short introductions and conclusions to the novel.  "The Failure" is about Chip.  "The More He Thought About It..." is about Gary.  "At Sea" is about the cruise that Enid and Alfred take.  "The Generator" is about Denise.  And "One Last Christmas" is about the family together for that event.  I found much to enjoy about each of them.  The book is a consistently pleasurable read.

The plot?  The major device is Alfred's failing health--he has dementia and Parkinson's disease, sprinkled together with Alzheimer's.  He is in his late 70's or early 80's.  He worked as a railroad engineer his whole life and raised his family as pitch-perfect members of the middle class.  He is married to Enid, who is constantly trying to put on a happy face and make everyone around her believe that her family is perfect.  Their oldest son, Gary, is a successful bank executive in his early 40's, married to an attorney who has gone into public interest work because they don't need the money, with three kids.  The middle child, Chip, is an anti-establishment English PhD pushing 40 who has recently fallen on hard times after a good teaching job, and is trying to finish a screenplay.  Denise is a chef, but really "culinary master" seems more accurate, 32 and divorced, going through a transitional period.  Enid and Alfred come to visit Chip in New York City before embarking on a cruise along the Canadian coast.  Denise comes to visit from Philadelphia the same day, and Enid pushes the idea of bringing everyone back to the family house for "one last Christmas," because Alfred is losing his lucidity.

The first aforementioned "long tangent" occurs during these preliminary introductions.  Out of nowhere, seemingly, Franzen stops the narrative and tells the entire story of Chip's rise and fall as a college professor.  It was just as engaging, so I didn't mind, but it challenged my expectations.  One other thing I wanted to mention about Chip is that he is the most overused character in all of modern literature: the struggling male writer in his 30's.  I felt like I was reading about Nate or Guert (in his younger days) or even Nick (obviously to a lesser extent)--but while I am sure there are many more examples to be had of this "type," Franzen paints him as more of an unpredictable "bad boy" such that he feels more real, behaving impulsively and making bad decisions.

While Franzen's prose is remarkably pristine, I did come across one passage that made me believe he was not godlike, and could have put in a couple more minutes of research:

"The clerk laughed in a way that was the more insulting for being good-humored.  But then, Chip had reason to be sensitive.  Since D---- College had fired him, the market capitalization of publicly traded U.S. companies had increased by thirty-five percent.  In these same twenty-two months, Chip had liquidated a retirement fund, sold a good car, worked half-time at an eightieth-percentile wage, and still ended up on the brink of Chapter 11.  These were years in America when it was nearly impossible not to make money, years when receptionists wrote MasterCard checks to their brokers at 13.9% APR and still cleared a profit, years of Buy, years of Call, and Chip had missed the boat.  In his bones he knew that if he ever did sell 'The Academy Purple,' the markets would all have peaked the week before and any money he invested he would lose." (103)

Now it is technically allowed for an individual to file Chapter 11 (see Sheldon Toibb, proper citation way too fucking lazy to track down), but that is rare.  It would be most proper to write Chapter 7 here, as Chip would not be a good candidate for Chapter 13 at this moment.  Perhaps Franzen meant to characterize Chip as a business, but I highly doubt it and digress.

From there, the book shifts its focus to Gary.  Gary is somewhat mysterious throughout the beginning of the book, referenced by all the characters but silent, so his prominence in the chapter is noteworthy.  The idea of what the novel will be about is completed here, basically.  Gary is shown working in a darkroom, developing photographs of his family for an epic album that he will give everyone for Christmas, while his youngest son Jonah enthuses about The Chronicles of Narnia.  His two older boys play outside with his wife, Caroline, and seem to like her more.  Gary resents this, and calls her out for lying about a minor injury that she suffers while playing with them.  This happens when Enid calls him and asks if they will all come for Christmas.  Caroline refuses to visit his parents, and Alfred does not feel comfortable staying at their house for more than 48 hours.  She pretty much comes off as a huge bitch when she explains why:

"'The truth, Caroline said, 'is that forty-eight hours sounds just about right to me.  I don't want my children looking back on Christmas as the time when everybody screamed at each other.  Which basically seems to be unavoidable now.  Your mother walks in the door with three hundred sixty days' worth of Christmas mania, she's been obsessing since the previous January, and then, of course, Where's that Austrian reindeer figurine--don't you like it?  Don't you use it?  Where is it?  Where is it?  Where is the Austrian reindeer figurine?  She's got her food obsessions, her money obsessions, her clothes obsessions, she's got the whole ten-piece set of baggage which my husband used to agree is kind of a problem, but now suddenly, out of the blue, he's taking her side.  We're going to turn the house inside out looking for a piece of thirteen-dollar gift-store kitsch because it has sentimental value to your mother---'" (185)

I have to say that Caroline is probably the least sympathetic character in the book.  In one sense she may be rational.  Her husband's family is crazy, and she wants her family to be healthy and emotionally stable.  But the reader feels very bad for Gary, when she seems to think that this fight over Christmas is going to lead to their divorce.  Unfortunately, this is not a very charitable depiction of an attorney.

Much of this chapter is about Gary's fear of anhedonia--basically, depression.  Lack of interest in things.  But then, the end is this long shareholder's meeting of the Axon Corporation, which has offered Alfred $5,000 for his patent on a process for developing pharmaceutical anti-depressants, and which is coming out with a drug called Corecktall.  Later on, Denise and Enid try to get Alfred on a regimen, because it may be able to cure his condition.  While I would never suggest this chapter is "bad," I must admit that while I found certain parts of it highly enjoyable and stimulating, on the whole it was the least memorable section of the book.

"At Sea" details the cruise that Enid and Alfred take, and is fantastic from start to finish.  It reaches its pinnacle in the conversation between Enid and Sylvia, a woman she meets while sharing a dinner table on the cruise, whom she intuits will either be an arch-nemesis or a friend.  The two women spill out all their feelings as they continue to have "just one more."  I do not want to spoil it.

Later, Enid is offered a drug called Aslan by a rogue doctor (who shares his name with a Simpsons character, albeit with different spelling) on board, and I feared that the book was turning into a rip-off of White Noise, which is now turning thirty years old and remains an absolute classic of the late 20th century.  Thankfully, Franzen seems to recognize this (indeed Don DeLillo even offers a blurb in praise on the back cover), so this scene ends up being a mere homage to White Noise.  Maybe it's not and I'm crazy but if you've read that book, you must admit that Aslan and Dylar are essentially identical plot devices:

"'We think of a classic CNS depressant such as alcohol as suppressing "shame" or "inhibitions."  But the "shameful" admission that a person spills under the influence of three martinis doesn't lose its shamefulness in the spilling; witness the deep remorse that follows when the martinis have worn off.  What's happening on the molecular level, Edna, when you drink those martinis, is that the ethanol interferes with the reception of excess Factor 28A, i.e., the "deep" or "morbid" shame factor.  But the 28A is not metabolized or properly reabsorbed at the receptor site.  It's kept in temporary unstable storage at the transmitter site.  So when the ethanol wears off, the receptor is flooded with 28A.  Fear of humiliation and the craving for humiliation are closely linked: psychologists know it, Russian novelists know it.  And this turns out to be not only "true" but really true.  True at the molecular level.  Anyway, Aslan's effect on the chemistry of shame is entirely different from a martini's.  We're talking complete annihilation of the 28A molecules.  Aslan's a fierce predator."  (318)

"The Generator" comes next, and for me it was the strongest section of the book overall, from start to finish (thus, "At Sea" combined with "The Generator" is certainly the strongest stretch of the book).  It is Denise's chapter, and she is probably better developed than any other character.  She spends her last summer before college working at Alfred's railroad company, goes to Swarthmore, and drops out not long after, discovering a love for culinary art.  She marries a man much older than her while serving as his sous-chef.  They get divorced not long after, and the major plot of the section is set into motion.  Paid a generous salary by a benefactor, she travels through Europe to sample the cuisine, and returns to open her own restaurant in a massive building previously owned and utilized by the Philadelphia Electric Company.

Later this same benefactor (Brian) gets involved with a film project, and Stephen Malkmus is name-dropped as a person who would eat dinner with him at fancy New York restaurants, seemingly as a technical adviser.  This really came out of nowhere, and it's particularly ironic because the previous book I reviewed here thanked "Steven Malkamus" in the acknowledgements section.  I really wanted to point that out previously (was it just sloppy editing or some kind of weird SM Jenkins joke?).  There is also this reference, which was prescient in 2001:

"Their few real differences came down to style, and these differences were mostly invisible to Robin, because Brian was a good husband and a nice guy and because, in her cow innocence, Robin couldn't imagine that style had anything to do with happiness.  Her musical tastes ran to John Prine and Etta James, and so Brian played Prine and James at home and saved his Bartok and Defunkt and Flaming Lips and Mission of Burma for blasting on his boom box at High Temp." (349)

Prescient because, Mission of Burma was primed to come back about a year after this novel was published, and because the Flaming Lips were about to "peak."

The last large section of the book, "One Last Christmas," wraps up the story in relatively satisfying fashion.  There is one particular sentence that almost made me want to cry--when Enid says, "This is the best Christmas present I've ever had!" There are a few strange moments at the end, though, and Franzen definitely does not arrange a conventional denouement.  There is one seriously WTF moment (I will just say the word "enema" and anyone who has read it will know what I mean) that I don't understand, unless it's just supposed to be sort of icky and disturbing and nothing more.

The closing eponymous chapter reminded me of the ending to Buddenbrooks, which is also referenced on back cover in a blurb by Michael Cunningham (in the same breath as White Noise)--that is, it feels oddly unceremonious, but appropriate.  There is a short dialogue about whether being gay is a choice and a reference to Six Days, Seven Nights.  And then there is a type of "where are they now?" conclusion.

I've failed when it comes to highlighting the craft of Franzen's prose.  I've picked out really random passages that I found notable for idiosyncratic and insignificant reasons, and I've avoided certain passages to preserve the pleasure of their discovery.  Rest assured this entire novel is well-written.  There are probably 10-15 pages of sentences included throughout the book that annoyed me for some reason, but they do not detract enough to remove it from its rightful place as one of the best books reviewed on Flying Houses.  I just hope this review has done it justice.