Jonathan Franzen got me kicked off Instagram

What a way to start Franzen Fall!

On Sunday night, I opened Instagram to do my usual ill-advised evening scroll and found something I’d never seen before: a screen informing me that I was suspended from Instagram. I instantly panicked, partially because I don’t want to lose my Instagram account (would it be the nuclear option for curing me from my social media addiction? Yes. But I do love having all those memories stored in one place, and it’s a good way to communicate with readers!) and partially because I hate breaking rules. This is probably my number one personality trait, to my detriment. We’d have to do some psychotherapy to figure out why I’m this way, but while I don’t feel the need to follow nonsensical rules, I do think that following the rules in most situations is important. Am I lawful good? I think so.

I couldn’t figure out what Instagram rule I’d violated. They seem to mostly suspend people for impersonating or harassing others, both of which I was certain I’d never done. But the last thing I posted before getting suspended was a story about reading a particularly disgusting line in Crossroads.¹

I can only assume that some of the words in this story triggered an automatic suspension. However, there’s always the possibility that somewhere in the world, Jonathan Franzen was typing away at his computer that doesn’t connect to the internet and his ears perked up like a Golden Retriever’s when he got a feeling that someone was talking about him on his mortal enemy, social media. Am I suggesting that Jonathan Franzen himself somehow used magical powers to suspend me? Perhaps. Either that or, as Lauren posited, a rabid Franzen fan reported me for the crime of speaking ill of Franzen. I guess we’ll never know, because Instagram emailed me a few hours later and said my account was restored, with no information about my supposed infraction. Apparently mentioning Jonathan Franzen’s grosser word choices isn’t actually against their community standards. I’m afraid to post about this project on Instagram again, but I feel safe here on Substack, where they rarely suspend anyone (for better or worse)!

I was feeling a bit like my favorite quote from my favorite not-actual-relative, Oprah.

Regardless of the social media consequences, we’re getting into Crossroads today. I will not be silenced. In the first 202 pages, a lot happened. Let no one ever say Jonathan Franzen writes a slow book. There are five points of view, there are countless tragedies, there are sex scenes I wish I could unread, there’s a horrible scene involving mice that I might not even recount here because it was so terrible. It’s just a lot.

The book is set in December of 1971 (it’s a sad Christmas book!) and is about the Hildebrandt family: father Russ, mother Marion, college student Clem, high school students Becky and Perry, and little kid Judson. So far everyone gets their own POV section except for Judson, so we’ll see if that changes as the book goes on. It’s the first in a planned trilogy called “A Key to All Mythologies.” To me, that sounds like a rejected title for a Wheel of Time book.

We start with Russ’s point of view and this whopper of a first line:

The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas, when Russ Hildebrandt made his morning rounds among the homes of bedridden and senile parishioners in his Plymouth Fury wagon.

When I’m in a reviewing capacity, I think it’s important to go into a reading experience with a few assumptions, one of which is that the writer is doing their best and I have to be willing to go where they want to take me. With Franzen, however, I have to admit that my expectations are a little higher that just “doing his best.” I assume that his best has been labored over in a way that I don’t expect from, say, someone who publishes a book a year or someone who hasn’t gone on record complaining, at length, about bad writing. When he was on 3 Books, he said, “Take a hard look at every sentence. Shake it. Shake it again. I guarantee you, it can be better.” So I’m reading this assuming that he’s really doing that, that all repetition is intentional, any awkwardness is intentional, any omissions are intentional. I’m reading this like I’m taking a course on it and the teacher has assured me that it’s worth analyzing.

So I spent a decent amount of time rereading this sentence and wondering why Franzen chose to start here in this exact moment, with these exact words. How many times did he shake this sentence, and is it a good one? I think it is, and it clearly telegraphs one thing: we’re not in commercial fiction land anymore. Forget it, Jake, it’s Franzentown.

I was kind of instantly into Russ as your classic repressed, guilt-filled, mad-at-his-wife Franzen hero. Granted, it’s been a minute since I’ve read The Corrections or Freedom, but the main thing I remember from them is terrifically unhappy marriages. Russ is a pastor who laments how uncool he is and he keeps referring to his “humiliation.” For some reason he’s blaming all his problems on his wife, but he’s found the thing that’s going to be his salvation. Not God. It’s, big surprise, a woman: a widow named Frances Cottrell. Frances is going to help him deliver toys and canned goods to the needy, and little does she know, Russ is thinking of this time alone with her as his Christmas present to himself. Uh-oh.

Also, thank the Lord, Franzen mentions poop on the literal first page with this unique combination of words: “the mingling smells of holiday pine wreaths and geriatric feces.” Who else is doing it like him…literally no one. Show me an author who uses the words “geriatric feces,” I dare you!

Russ is obsessed with Frances in a way that shows he’s kind of transferring a lot of energy that might be more usefully spent, like, bettering his own life or mental state. Maybe he should get a new job, or start training for a 5k, or get really into baking sourdough. But no, he’s got a boyish crush on Frances and he’s gonna impress her with his old jazz records and a cool old coat he found in the back of his closet. You know, the stuff chicks care about. And speaking of boyish…

Russ refers to Frances as “boyish” four times and “androgynous” once. Four of those usages are in a two-page spread, two in the same line! “Her hair naturally blond and boyishly short, her hands boyishly small and square.” When I read stuff like this, I cannot help but imagine my own copy editor leaving a note that says “flag for repetition. OK?” But Jonathan Franzen is replying with a firm “STET” because this is clearly intentional!² I hope this becomes clearer later on because right now I simply don’t know what’s going on with Russ.

This section, in particular, reminded me of what the Franzen haters don’t like to admit: he’s funny. On a word choice level and just in general. We’re dealing with a lot of characters with no self-awareness, people who are acting against their own self interest over and over again. So many writing teachers/books will instruct you not to use many adverbs, specifically not with dialogue tags. But Franzen does it and he does it well. For example, when Russ is pissed off (his usual state) and trying to impress Frances and two other widows:

“I happen to have the original recording of Johnson singing ‘Cross Road Blues,” he bragged, repellently. (emphasis mine)

That adverb adds something. You know what other writing rule really sticks in my mind (although I clearly ignore it in this newsletter)? You shouldn’t use many exclamation points. I’ve even heard that they’re only acceptable in dialogue, not in narration. Well, Jonathan Franzen doesn’t care. He even uses an exclamation point in the book’s dedication, and you know what? I find it charming. He’s a rebel.

Footage of Franzen talking about his process.

One of the notes I took while reading was “this is what happens when you think about yourself too much,” and that’s kind of the problem for most of these characters. Sure, Russ is ostensibly helping the needy, but he’s also trying to get his freak on with a widow and thinking truly hilarious, self-absorbed thoughts. This made me genuinely LOL:

Russ was able to survive further minutes by rooting through the food cartons, culling the lazy or thoughtless donations (cocktail onions, water chestnuts), and taking comfort in the weight of jumbo cans of pork and beans, of Chef Boyardee, of pear halves in syrup: the thought of how welcome each would be to a person who was genuinely hungry and not merely, like him, starved in spirit.

A simple can of Chef Boyardee cannot sate Russ’s hunger, for his hunger is spiritual. Russ, please, be serious for one moment. He’s over here being like, “damn I wish I was just literally hungry so that pork and beans could cure my problems, but alas, only a hot widow will do for I am spiritually dead inside :(.”

Can you tell that Russ is my favorite character and this is my favorite section so far? He’s so over the top. I love him. He also has a mortal enemy named…Rick Ambrose. Rick Ambrose is the younger, hotter youth group leader who all the kids like better than Russ. Rick Ambrose is hip and Russ is watching him like he’s the best friend from Teen Witch.

Russ ends his chapter by accidentally giving Frances a double thumbs up and then feeling embarrassed. He’s living in a YA novel of his own making.

We move onto Perry, who so far I’m not as into. He’s Russ and Marion’s second-youngest son and he’s mainly into smoking pot and being way too smart, but now he’s resolving to be good, which means no longer selling drugs to children and just being “less bad” in general. He wants to sell his remaining drugs off so that he can afford to buy a camera for Judson, the only member of the family he respects aside from his mom. Another thing I love about this book: how it highlights changing family dynamics, how there are shifting alliances and teams. I’m currently listening to David Sedaris’s Calypso, another book about a big family, and he talks about this, too. They’re a family, but they’re also many smaller partnerships.

Perry’s chapter further explains the church youth group that Russ so cruelly got booted out of for being too square (that was his “humiliation”). It’s called Crossroads, and it’s a cool youth group. For starters, they don’t really pray. They mostly focus on relationship building, as they believe that God is found there:

The idea was that God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and to approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with His disciples, by exercising honestly, confrontation, and unconditional love.

On paper this sounds quite nice, but upon reading more I quickly realized this was not for me. You’re telling me I have to put my head on someone’s belly and then have someone else put their head on my belly as we all form some weird human centipede train of young Christians? Oh, no thank you. Just call me Russ Hildebrandt and give me liturgy and ritual.

Perry, however, is into it. He stays in the group after his first meeting partially because he’s groped by so many girls: “He was touched by—squeezed by, pulled into the exciting breasts of—twenty times more female bodies than he’d touched like that in his life. Very pleasant!” (There’s that exclamation point!)

Perry spends a lot of time thinking about his soul and trying to game Crossroads by displaying his emotions at appropriate times and in appropriate ways so as to get praise. Perry is seeming a little bit like a sociopath but like…not in a bad way? He ends his section by spotting his dad driving his Fury with “Larry Cottrell’s foxy mother” in the passenger seat. Note that Perry does not call her boyish!

And now, Becky. Franzen gets some flack for the way he writes female characters, something I’m not sure if I agree with or not (yet). Certainly his female characters are strange, but then again, so are his male characters. He does display that very male author assumption that hot teenage girls are constantly thinking about how hot they are and how to maintain their social standing (I wouldn’t know if this is true, having never been hot, and definitely not in my teenage years), which is a literary fiction trope I get really tired of reading. And there’s no denying that his sex scenes are male-focused, but…do we really want to change this? Maybe we should just let our artists write what they know.

Anyway, Becky starts out her section elated at just receiving her first kiss. Even when she goes to the bathroom, she thinks, awkwardly, “The person who sat down to pee was a woman a man had kissed.” You could show me that line with no context and I’d know Franzen wrote it. Becky pretty much hates Perry and her parents and really likes Clem, the oldest brother. In fact, she says, “She might have worried that there was something weird about their friendship, that she felt close to him in an almost married way that maybe wasn’t healthy, that she wasn’t as physically repelled by his beanstalk body, his scarred and pimpled face, as a sister ought to have been, if she hadn’t been so sure that everything Clem did was good and right.”

Let’s just put a pin in that one.

Becky’s whole thing is that she misses her aunt Shirley, who was a single woman in the city and left her a ton of money, and she’s in love with a slightly older hippie guy in Crossroads named Tanner. My worry for Becky is that Rick Ambrose is way too into her. He’s acting like a stereotypical bad youth group leader.

And then we move onto the most memorable and most disgusting character: Clem. I know Becky was just like, “my brother Clem is so perfect and could never make any mistakes,” but we quickly see that Clem has some problems. And, big surprise, they’re all in his head! Just like all the Hildebrandts (except possibly Judson, who might be totally chill for all we know at this point), he wants to be morally good but doesn’t know how to do so. He’s landed on dropping out of school, thus forfeiting his deferment and making him eligible for service in the Vietnam War. Clem is doing poorly in school because he can’t stop having sex with his girlfriend, Sharon, whom he doesn’t even treat that well. For starters, he’s so worried that she’s short. He can’t stop being like, “my tiny girlfriend, my miniature girlfriend, everyone notices the height difference between me and my petite little girlfriend.” Clem, who cares. Not me!

Clem also seems to think her intellect is less than his simply because of her gender. In a two page span, he says two interesting things about her:

Being female, and sentimental, Sharon didn’t seem to realize how grotesquely immoral the war was.

She was little, and female, but her thoughts were original.

Oh, so she occasionally has an original thought in that tiny petite miniature brain despite the disadvantage of being female? Wow, so generous of Clem. Please note that I am not ascribing these views to Franzen himself but to the character. Despite my feelings about Franzen and how he may or may not have psychically kicked me off Instagram, I don’t wish to malign his character and I understand how fiction works.

Clem proceeds to have some of the most unpleasant sounding sex ever with Sharon (ahhhh, I originally typed “Becky”…a Freudian/Franzian slip). The thing about Franzen is that he’s known for writing weird sex scenes—back when the Bad Sex in Fiction award existed, he was nominated for Freedom. However. I don’t really agree with a lot of the complaints about bad sex in literary fiction for the often-overlooked reason that sex in literary fiction is not always supposed to be good. I know many of us are coming at this from a romance novel point of view, where a sex scene serves several points, one important one being emotional connection. But they also need to read well! They need to actually be sexy or people are going to put the book down. Romance as a genre doesn’t only exist to turn people on…but that is one thing it can do. Literary fiction does not have that as a necessary goal. This is why I’m so confused by people who say that, for example, Normal People was a “sexy” book. Were we reading the same book? Because I found those sex scenes bleak and uncomfortable. But I didn’t think it was bad writing, just serving a different purpose. Sometimes when people talk about any example of literary fiction being sexy, I just want to tell them to please read a romance novel if that’s what they’re looking for.

Clem describes sex in very unpleasant, clinical terms and seems to feel nothing but shame and panic about it. He’s addicted to Sharon, but he’s feeling so bad about it that he’s going to enlist in the army. Fellas, you know when you like a girl so much that you willingly enter a controversial never-ending war?

Franzen’s way of writing about sex is almost beautiful in its ugliness, poetic in its awkwardness. The line that I posted about (but did not share!) on Instagram is perhaps the grossest thing I’ve ever read. I can’t even bear to type it out here, so I’ll just share a picture from the book. I love underlining but rarely annotate, mostly because Alex read my old copy of Jane Eyre when he got to high school and (rightly) roasted me for the very embarrassing high school “deep thoughts” I wrote in the margins. Ever since then I’ve found it, as Russ would say, repellent to read my own thoughts scribbled on the pages. And so I simply marked this with “ew” so I would easily be able to see it when flipping through pages.

This is, clearly, not meant to be sexy. Franzen just has his own way of writing about sex. It’s a…Franzenominon.

Get it hot like Papa John (Franzen)

So Clem has some issues. This is clear.

Finally, it’s time to meet our final character: Marion. Franzen introduces her as only he can:

Disgusted with herself, the overweight person who was Marion fled the parsonage.

That’s the first sentence. The first word is “disgusted,” which is fair, as all of these characters are disgusted with themselves. But it’s interesting to list her as “overweight” before she’s a person, before she’s Marion. Hmm! This is one thing I actually hate about reading literary fiction: you’re just going to have to get used to reading constant talk about how fat people are gross. Romance, as a genre, doesn’t do this as much anymore (of course it happens! But people are very aware of it) but boy does literary fiction love to describe people’s bodies, lingering on anyone who’s larger than they “should” be. And in a mere two pages, we get into it. Her gait is “more waddling than striding,” there is “no point of relief from what she and time had done to her,” “no angle from which a man on the street might catch a glimpse of her and be curious to see her from a different angle.” Oh, and she hates jogging because of “the thudding downward flesh-tug of her heavy parts.” That’s interesting, isn’t it? Of course Marion’s mired in shame about literally every other element of her life, but it’s interesting that we’re focusing so much on her visceral disgust with her human body.

I won’t tell you how much she weighs, but it’s less than I weigh. But I don’t think Jonathan Franzen really cares much about triggering your or my long-standing body image issues (lol).

Marion’s section was probably the most exciting and certainly the most action packed. She sees a psychiatrist and really gets into her past, which involves a youthful illicit affair with a car salesman and a full-on nervous breakdown. I’m glossing over this because this post is so long already, but a lot happens and I barely underlined anything because I was flipping the pages so quickly. It’s also extremely upsetting. I was trying to figure out why I felt so bad this week and I genuinely think that reading Marion’s section made me a little anxious and depressed. Suffice it to say, Marion has a lot going on.

The final chapter before this week’s selection ends is just Russ still lusting after Frances while he finds out Perry’s smoking pot. I think Russ and Frances are going to get high together. You know what…good for them. I’m sure nothing bad will come of that and Russ won’t be wracked with guilt afterward or possibly during.

This section left me with a lot of questions, including:

-What is Rick Ambrose’s deal? Is he a creep or is he simply trying to help? I’m leaning toward creep.

-Okay but seriously what is going on between Becky and Clem and why does it feel like they’re in a love triangle with their dad? They need to stop referring to Becky as their “special friend.”

-Is Perry a sociopath?

-Do you think Franzen actually thinks Marion’s weight is impossibly huge? I did a quick google and people on Twitter were happy to assume that Franzen is stupid, has never seen a woman, has no idea what women weigh, etc. However, these are Marion’s thoughts, and Marion is full of self-loathing. Are we meant to think she has the wrong idea about herself? I don’t know. I don’t love reading it, but in general I think it’s good to resist the whole “a character’s thoughts equal an authors’s thoughts” thing. I certainly don’t agree with everything my characters think (don’t tell the people on Goodreads who think I’m really stupid because I write goofy characters). However I know that if I was reading this in a college course in 2007 (pretend there’s time travel and this book existed then), my male professors and male fellow students would have accepted this without question. I very much think they would’ve been like, “sure, she’s unhappy because she’s overweight.”

-Are we ever gonna hear from Judson? It would be funny if he comes out with a chapter where he just rips all these people apart, like when Shoshanna went off on everyone on the best episode of Girls.

-Is it even possible to be happy in a Franzen book? I think not.

I realize this was maybe my longest post ever and I have NO idea if it’s entertaining whatsoever. When I decided to do this, I just hoped I’d have enough thoughts to write about this book the way I write about movies, and clearly that wasn’t a problem. Sometimes I wonder if I should be focused on, I don’t know, helping my books sell with this newsletter, but then again I think it’s very important to have a writing project that’s just for you and isn’t really about business. That’s what this newsletter is for me!

If you’re reading along, please let me know your thoughts on the questions above or about anything related to Crossroads! Next Friday, October 4th, we’ll be discussing pages 202-369 (up to “Easter”). I’m both nervous and afraid. See you soon. xo

1. Of note: Emily correctly guessed the gross line just based on this story, so I’m not the only one.

2. Okay I’m done with copyediting talk now.