Nell Zink gained fame in the literary world this year when Jonathan Franzen championed her work. The cover of her first novel, Mislaid, has a Douglas Sirk quality to its art. Confused identities and complications to ensue were promised.
I should have been warned by the Franzen praise. For a contemporary novelist writing complex stories, he sure doesn’t appear to understand much of today’s world, especially women and the internet.
His upcoming novel, Purity, includes a Julian Assange-like character and much about what he calls the totalitarianism of the internet. In an interview published this past week by The Guardian, he says you either have to take part in groupthink, or mob mentality, online in social media or ignore it. And that makes the internet totalitarian.
Despite past problems with misanthropy accusations, his idea of a feminist in Purity is that she forces her husband to sit down in the bathroom “to atone for his maleness”, as it’s described in a the Guardian article.
Add young people to the list.
In the same article, Franzen says he considered adopting an Iraqi orphan because he didn’t understand young people and was irritated at them for being angry, for not being what he thought they should be (which is similar to the way he apparently feels about the American reading public for not lionizing him).
What?
This all rather misses the point of literature. Where a writer explores what she sees, thinks and feels, reflects and processes it all through narrative and characterization to help make sense of the world. There is a difference between doing this, even if the world is not completely to one’s liking, and wanting to take in a stranger to analyze why that person doesn’t think as you would like.
Franzen may be honest, but I expect someone of his experience to have more knowledge and more discernment than what appears to be there. That, or it’s because we look at the world so differently. Franzen appears to think that everyone thinks like he does or if they do not, there is something wrong with them and he’s irritated by or even angry at them. I tend to notice when people don’t think the way I do and wonder why; that is, how did they come to their conclusions?
Although Franzen’s ideas are far more subtle and complicated than what I’ve conveyed here, I do think I’ve hit the essence. There’s a certain rigid quality in the absoluteness that puts blinders on. With those kind of blinders on, sometimes people can’t tell when someone has gone too far.
Which leads back to Zink. Here are the basics of her novel:
Lee is a minor poet and a minor instructor at a minor university in Virginia, scion of a rich family but with little of his own in the ‘60s. He’s happily living an uncomplicated gay life. College freshman Peggy is a lesbian because everyone else decides she is one. But she and Lee are drawn to each other sexually when she’s a college freshman. They have one child, the boy Byrdie, and in between Lee’s casual dalliances, a daughter.
Then there’s one dalliance too many and Peggy leaves. Daughter Mickey pops into the car with Mom but her son refuses. She leaves anyway. In hiding for years, Mickey is now old enough to go to school. Mom enrolls her blonde daughter as black. According to this novel written by a white woman:
“Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people.”
I just can’t. I can’t. I just can’t even.
Yes, there are more variations to the spectrum of how people in any particular race look. And the way people view themselves and others is a serious, worthy subject of a serious author. But that’s not what I see Zink doing. What I see is something more callous than exploration of an aspect of society. I see appropriation.
While the white girl going to school as black was the last straw for me, it also started me back to thinking of the whole set-up and how it dwells on stereotypes setting up the characters of Lee and Peggy.
There’s too much co-opting of other groups of people by those in the dominant culture for me to be comfortable with this kind of storytelling. I’m tired of it. And if I’m tired of it, how can people who are not part of the dominant culture withstand this?
Zink’s mentor may have won “all the whiteness” on Twitter after the adoption idea broke last week, but his protegee isn’t far behind. (And yes, through Franzen's viewpoint, I get the irony of using a Twitter quote here.)
James Baldwin ended his essay “Autobiographical Notes” in Notes of a Native Son by stating: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” Regardless of how well any serious author succeeds in any work, this is the feeling that this reader should have after encountering that work. When that feeling is missing, there's a whole lot else that is missing as well.
http://www.theguardian.com/...
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