Prose at a Crossroads

Does prestige literary criticism care about how books are written?

Macmillan Publishers

There’s so much to say about even the limpest of novels, so much terrain to cover. The novel is special in that way, its canvas so empty and boundless, so relatively limitless, that the form presents infinite opportunities for veering and swerving and lying and toying, run-ons and blanks, flourish and restraint. 

The novel is grand but it’s also intimate; the words, written by a stranger, bond to the reader, she latches on, and when she’s really connected, when the author has written the words really well, she becomes them, or something like it, she breathes them, feels them, becomes capable of navigating the ocean blind, undulating in rhythm beneath the crashing waves, diving just far enough under the surface to escape the lip, foam bubbling overhead, tingling her insides, before gliding smoothly to the surface. To attempt to know a book like this is as thrilling as the depths of the ocean. But it’s equally precarious. Because to know a book, to really fall into its rhythm, is to agree to an implicit deal with the words: don’t let me down. The intimacy of the novel is a double-edged sword; with an awareness of a work’s brilliance also comes an understanding that, at any given moment, the hand guiding them could let the pen slip, fall off the tightrope. A plot’s suspense is one thing, but the true tension of any great book is the increasing friction which develops between reader and writer as a work escalates: are you actually going to pull this thing off?

Needless to say, then, the task of reviewing a novel, in the face of the form’s great potential, is almost comically pedantic. How to assess, in relatively few words, all the intricacy, all those peaks and valleys, landmines triggered, traps narrowly averted, of even the most unambitious and rote of novels? Or, more difficult yet, of those novels which you finish listlessly in a week or so, shut, put down, and think, meh.

At the end of October, I read Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, “Crossroads,” which follows a family living in the fictional suburb of New Prospect, Illinois, over the course of a few months in the early seventies. Inhabiting five different perspectives over nearly six hundred pages (that of a preacher father, Russ, his disillusioned wife, Marion, and three of their children, Clem, Becky, and Perry), “Crossroads” weaves together the disparate narratives of parents and children to paint a portrait of a 1970s America searching for its moral compass. The family’s Christianity is the main vessel through which such morality is explored; with differing levels of self-awareness, each character, in his and her own way, centers their understanding of themselves around God, using Him as a lodestar to guide their often fraught choices.

While the ambition of Franzen’s effort is laudable—he’s clearly shooting for a masterpiece, commendable in itself—his big, morality-centered themes fall flat due to the subtle inability of his prose to match the correct tone of plot and characters. The author’s attempt to pair each perspective with a distinctive writing style is admirable, but the novel’s seams are too visible, its janky mechanics slightly too exposed, for him to fully nail the landing he seeks. 

Your enjoyment of “Crossroads” will likely be determined by whether you think paragraphs like: 

Among Larry’s insecure tics was rubbing the sebaceous nodes around his nose and sniffing his fingertips. Perry, too enjoyed the smell of his own sebum, but such sniffing was better done privately

are justified by the book’s logic of switching writing styles section-by-section to better capture character. In context, this passage fits in more snugly than it does shivering out here in the cold, but its iciness is indicative of Franzen’s tendency to over-write, a habit which detracts from multi-faceted, interesting characters and some moving (albeit overdone) themes.

Combined with a slightly unbalanced plot (eons, it seems, pass by with single characters, isolated from the family, as others inexplicably fade into the distance), the novel’s overwrought prose detracts from its obvious ambition, knocking “Crossroads” down from a thundering and definitive meditation on religion, aging, and community into a more typical, if still enjoyable, treatise on a complicated family and country at a crucial point in each of their histories.

That’s a pretty crude review, but given my limited space I tried to touch on what I think are the four most important aspects of any novel (plot, character, theme, prose) and pull at least one quote to give the reader a sense of what, specifically, I’m criticizing. I’m discussing a book, after all; I feel an obligation to give the reader at least a vague idea of how the work being reviewed was written.

This would appear to be an obvious goal for any reviewer. Yet here is Dwight Garner of the New York Times Book Review—America’s definitive source of book reviews—assessing Franzen’s novel, and leaving the reader almost entirely blind to how well, or even just how, “Crossroads” was written.

In his 1,100 word review, Garner gestures at the novel’s prose—how the words were written—three times. Here they are:

• “Crossroads” is “shot through with intimations of light” 

• It’s “a mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker…warmer than anything he’s yet written”

• “The action in ‘Crossroads’ flows and ebbs”

One and two reference the book’s prose, and three glances against it in a larger point about plot. Either way, it’s inexcusable, even given the limitations Garner, or any reviewer, is working against in any formidable review space (word count, house style, compulsory plot summarization) to write a thousand-plus word review of any novel and pay this cursory level of attention to such a foundational aspect of the form; to implicitly treat prose as if it’s less worthy than plot, character, and theme. The defining feature of the novel, the thing that separates it from film and television and children’s books and song, is the centrality of how it is written, how pleasing it is to read, how it tingles the senses, mirrors a story’s structure. How can one discuss the novel without discussing prose?

The New York Times Book Review is delivered to my apartment every Saturday, and for the last year I’ve dutifully pored over nearly every issue. This problem isn’t isolated to Garner’s “Crossroads” review—it’s endemic to the publication. America’s preeminent home for book reviews, its industry gatekeeper, barely seems to care about how books are written. What does it care about instead?

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Crossroads,” is the first in a projected trilogy, which is reason to be wary. Good trilogies rarely announce themselves as such at the start. And the overarching title for the series, “A Key to All Mythologies,” may be a nod to “Middlemarch,” but it also sounds as if Franzen were channeling Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly, or Tolkien, or Yes.

And,

Like Franzen himself at times, in the public arena if not on the page, Russ is so intolerable and so uncool, such an ungainly apparition from an earlier era, that you sense him on the verge of redemption, of coming out the other side. Franzen’s cultural situation these past two decades sometimes reminds me of Orson Welles’s comment to Kenneth Tynan: “My trouble is that I exude affluence. I look successful. Whenever the critics see me, they say to themselves: It’s time he was knocked — he’s had it too good for too long. But I haven’t.”

In lieu of a brief but cogent discussion of the singular most distinctive aspect of the form, Garner twice drifts into rambling, extratextual asides which have nothing to do with the experience of reading “Crossroads.” In the most preeminent book review in America, here’s 160 words—nearly a fifth of the review—devoted to what essentially amounts to industry gossip.

The first passage at least helps the reader put “Crossroads” into context—I didn’t know it was the first of a trilogy until reading it—but I cannot possibly see how Franzen’s having declared his work a trilogy from the start could portend anything about the quality of the forthcoming series, other than allowing the reviewer to flex his knowledge of other epics of various shapes and sizes.

The second passage is less defensible. I’ve spent a lot of time reading that paragraph, trying to find something redemptive to pull out of it, but the more I review it, the more I scratch my head. What is Garner even attempting to convey here? How could an Orson Welles comment to Kenneth Tynan about the pitfalls of personal success possibly have anything to do with the contents of Franzen’s novel? This is straight-up insider posturing, and, if I’m being less generous, a sad demonstration of insecurity and jealousy, niche Franzen gossip in place of meaningful engagement with Franzen’s ideas. Even in the context of a review of his latest novel, who gives a shit about Franzen’s personal life? How is this information helping the reader to better understand Franzen’s work?

Here lies my central frustration: that reviews like these seem to care less about seriously discussing literature than they do making the reader who actually has an awareness of Franzen’s personal life (maybe that’s 99% of readership and I’m just a dunce who should cancel my subscription and stick to Highlights) feel special. If you have an intimate enough knowledge of Franzen to understand the personal gripes, this is all wonderfully gratifying, proof at last of literati supremacy. That’s the upside of this style.

The downside is the alienation of, well, everyone else. I’ve often wondered if the same people lamenting over and over again about how no one reads anymore don’t do so with a little glow emanating from their loins, because while they’d never admit it the fact that they’re the one saying “no one reads anymore” really serves to imply that they still read, and the implication of their not-so-subtle implication is that they’re special because they read. I’m certainly not immune. You think my chest didn’t puff up a little on that 10th grade trip when the girl sitting next to me told me what I was reading (“The Tipping Point,” I think) was a “smart person book”? When a guy stopped me in a hostel in Bogotá and told me he didn’t expect to find a guy here reading Nabakov? Pride, friends, pesky, pesky pride. It inflates and inflates but always, always, always, like the morale of a kid at a pool party discovering for himself the after-effects of inhaling a jumbo pack of Skittles in the fashion of a Cybertruck guzzling gigawatts, it crashes, pops, and fizzles, a limp balloon, abandoned and alone, realizing all at once that being seen as the guy unexpectedly clutching “Pale Fire” in a youth hostel is great and all, but wouldn’t, actually, the better thing be to be able to meaningfully discuss “Pale Fire” with someone else?

I’m not arguing here for a reversion to poptimist criticism, or a lowering of the standards expected of the readers of reviews. If anything, I’m doing the opposite: I’m asking for a reprioritization of how we analyze books. Don’t make reviews dumber; make them about books. Suffocate me with analysis, spin me with meaning, tangle me deep within roots stretching into literature’s history. Make me work to claw my way out. Force me to improve as a reader.

Dwight Garner and prestige reviewers like him have forgotten more about books than I’m likely to ever know. All the more frustrating, then, to read such intelligent thinkers resort to the glib, the washed Orson Welles aside, the “as everyone knows” attitude permeating Garner’s review. Show me what you know. This is the intricacy I crave, the insider knowledge I want spewed. Spare me your concerns over likability, marketing, ego. If you’re writing about a book, at least pretend you give a damn about how it’s written.