My eyeballs hurt. I have the sneaking suspicion that too many years of HTML coding and general tech-geekery are coming to bear, and in the not-too-distant future, I may find myself standing in front of an eye chart in an optometrist’s office seeing icons instead of letters, a giant <a> tag where the big “E” should be.
But that’s alright. I don’t like that my eyes hurt, or that I squint more often than ever before, but, perhaps not so secretly, I’ve always kind of wanted glasses. I can hear the chorus of voices rising from my four-eyed friends: “You don’t know what you’re saying! It’s a huge inconvenience! And contact lenses! Think of the children!” (Someone in a crowd always shouts “Think of the children.”)
And I’m sure they’re all right. I probably don’t really want glasses. But there was a time, sophomore year in college, when I wore big, black, thick, horn-rimmed fake glasses around all the time. Sure they were fake, but I looked cool.
(Fact: Writers with thick glasses are cool.)
Sadly, it may be this very thing that attracted me to an author who is quickly becoming a favorite. That thick-rimmed, prolific, and word-nerdy author is none other than Jonathan Franzen, bearer, not only of cool glasses, but an excellent first name, and author of, most famously, The Corrections.
I was introduced to Franzen through his now-famous “Harper’s Essay” as it first appeared in that magazine under the title “Perchance to Dream.” In it, Franzen laments what he sees as the impending death of fiction by conjuring Flannery O’Connor’s emphasis on mystery as a major tenet of story. By the time I got around to reading the essay it was re-titled “Why Bother?” and had been included in Franzen’s first collection of essays, How to Be Alone.
This is all by way of explaining my tardy introduction to Franzen, and let me recommend one more piece before I move on to the actual subject of this article: as my wife and I make our way through life here in New York City, Franzen’s essay “First City,” also from How to Be Alone, provides a kind of meta-story for what city living means in the United States in the twenty-first century. I highly recommend it.
On a Friday night last December, I had the chance to actually see (and hear) the man in person.He was reading from a recently published book entitled State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, wherein Franzen, accompanied by Parker Posey (of Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, etc.), Sarah Vowell (author, most recently, of The Wordy Shipmates, a kind of irreverent history of the Pilgrims), and several other actors presented a staged reading of Franzen’s essay for that volume.
State by State is a collection of essays, stories, and reporting written by fifty contemporary authors – with a few actors, musicians, and artists thrown in there – about the United States, each writer taking on a different state. The inspiration for the collection is the American Guide series, commissioned by the government as part of the New Deal and completed as a part of the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s.
Franzen’s essay is about New York, not the state he’s from, but one he loves. He wrote his piece in the form of a short play, which is why it made for an entertaining reading and why he solicited the help of actors. In it, Franzen was trying to get an interview with New York State for his chapter in the book and found, much to his surprise, that the New York that he was in awe of as a young man has disappeared, replaced by a more superficial, commercial, and all-around unpleasant version of her former self, seen most notably in her largest city.He laments the lack of personality and the lust for money that he sees as typifying the city and somehow in the meantime manages to tell the history of the state, its geological makeup, and how it came to change from the place he remembers (or thought he remembered) to the place it is today.
I love the idea behind State by State. When I began reading it, its themes fed like tributaries into my stream of thought, simultaneously bolstering and challenging ideas I had been mulling in the year leading up to the election of President Obama, and even before. There was a time beginning with my junior year of college when I could have been, and often was, described as unpatriotic. It started after 9/11 while everyone was displaying the flag in their windows, on their cars, on their bodies, on advertisement – everywhere. I’m not even sure I actually was unpatriotic; I was just so busy asking questions that I forgot to go out and get an American flag bumper sticker.
The way I see it, too much was up in the air for me at that time, and not enough had yet landed. But as I began to sort things out, I realized that I never lost my American identity; in fact, my sense of my place in this country and in the world was greater defined.
I’ll explain it another way. Remember, during the endless presidential campaign, when Michelle Obama got in all kinds of trouble for saying that for the first time in her adult life she was proud of this country? I resonated with that. After the long night of pondering my personal identity in relation to my national identity, I woke up to a country that had answered a very planned and pointed attack with flailing punches in the dark. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, despite the fact that I and many others in New York City, and around the world, took to the streets to ask the President not to attack Iraq, he did it anyway. And then the next six years happened. It was quite a rude awakening for me.
But after all those years of questioning, I began to find some answers. Then, in 2004, I heard an inspiring politician (the first person, in my lifetime, to whom the words “inspiring” and “politician” both apply) give a speech that energized a party and, eventually, a country, and I was all in.
It’s a good time for Americans to read a book like State by State, a good time to remember why our country is great. It’s a time to look ahead and a time to heal. I’m interested now in knowing how they live in those “red” states that, for so long, have formed an unnavigable sea between the East and West Coasts, and, in each of the essays in State by State, I can get just that.