Ferrante vs. Franzen

In the 19^th century the novel was king of the narrative arts as the drama was in an earlier era and before that the epic poem. The novel was largely overthrown in the 20^th century by the movie. In the 21^st century the movie has, in its turn, been pushed aside by the TV series. Whereas a film generally has a cultural impact lasting a week or 2, a TV series like The Wire, or Mad Men, or Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones, can remain a part of the cultural conversation for years. I'm as susceptible as the next person to these marathon narratives, yet retain a nostalgic fondness for the novel. For one thing, it's a less tyrannical art form. Whereas a film or TV series utterly dominates you with music, visual images, and dialog, forcing you into a passive role, the novel allows you to participate in the creation. It merely suggests and lets you fill in the rest. It's a more intimate art form.

The last night in August we attended a publication party for Jonathan Franzen's new novel Purity. Franzen was there and I was charmed by him. He made a few opening remarks, read a selection, entertained questions. It was clear that speaking in public was not his favorite activity, but he managed it with wit and aplomb. I felt he would probably be an entertaining dinner companion. The selection he read was composed of lively, inventive sentences, as were the opening sentences of the book, as I dipped into it over the next week. It was clever, laced with humor. But somewhere between page 36 and page 45 I realized that, despite the quality of the sentences, I wasn't all that interested in the characters he was describing. 

Around that time The Story of the Lost Child, the 4^th and final volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan tetralogy, arrived in the mail. I'd had it on pre-order. Opening it, I was immediately sucked in, even though it had been a year since I'd read the previous volume. Of course, having read the previous 3 books, I knew all the characters and was already instilled with curiosity about them and their fates. Frieda, who had been postponing starting the series until the publication of the final volume, began the first volume, My Brilliant Friend, at the same time. Ferrante's appeal is not so much the construction of high style sentences as the creation of living, breathing characters that you care about, described with an unprecedented degree of honesty and candor. Her passion for her characters is clear in the way she lavishes attention on them. The sentences are not flashy, they downplay clever metaphors that tend to keep you on the surface of the text. Instead, her sentences are transparent. You look through them into the depths of the characters, and this gives them authenticity. The prose carries you. Feelings you had barely sensed are described with clarity, and this may lead to a catharsis of sorts. Not only did I weep again and again on my voyage through the text, but weeks afterward, whenever I thought about it, the tears would well up again. Just the poignancy of it all, of life, the way that everything we care about most deeply is, in the end, swept away. Frieda, who ripped through the entire tetralogy in a few weeks despite the interruption of the trip and her efforts to slow down, said it reminded her of the great Italian films The Best of Youth and Cinema Paradiso. “There's something about the Italians,” she said. “They just get it.” And they try to get it all in.

I finished Ferrante before we left on our trip to eastern Europe. After we got back I decided to start over with Purity. It required some effort; it's the more demanding prose to read, with a lot of surface action. Intermittently I enjoyed it, though without developing much feeling for the characters, which remained concepts rather than actual people. The character that most came alive for me was Tom, perhaps because a chapter is written in his voice, in the 1^st person. It's the only 1^st person narration in the book and 1^st person is the natural way to tell a story, it's the way everyone speaks in conversation. Thus it communicates verisimilitude, authenticity. Third person, by contrast, seems artificial, contrived, mere literature. After all, in real life there are no omniscient narrators. No one is omniscient.

I developed an intellectual interest in what Franzen was going to do with his characters, because Franzen is an interesting guy, but they didn't touch me emotionally. And as soon as he switched to the 1^st person, his prose backed up, became cooler and even more analytic, as if he didn't want to get too close to his character, didn't want to care about him too much, or was unable to. Perhaps a fear of slipping into sentimentality, the bugaboo of male American writers, holds him back. Rather than warm, emotional and engaged, like Ferrante, he is comic, intellectual and detached. (Comedy requires a certain detachment). He feels safer that way. With Franzen you frequently find yourself saying “Wow, what a clever metaphor,” whereas with Ferrante you're more likely to find yourself saying “I can't believe she's doing that!” They are different sorts of pleasures. But I suspect the writer who is deeply moving is the rarer type.

Franzen apparently feels that a book should have a topical theme. In Freedom it was overpopulation, a theme I have great sympathy for and that favorably disposed me toward the book. This one is something about the internet, the death of privacy and the downside of fame in an era in which everyone craves fame as a hedge against mortality as the hedge of religion continues to fail. These themes do seem perhaps slightly more trivial if more personal than the concerns of Freedom. But the problem with hitching your star to social topics like these is that 30 years from now they may no longer be salient and this may leave your novel heavily dated or even irrelevant. One of the themes of the Neapolitan tetralogy, on the other hand, is the difference between the people who stay in the town where they grew up and the ones who set off into the unknown. Somehow this seems a more fundamental, more basic, and more enduring trait in the human personality, something that will never be resolved. Not a social issue but a psychological one; rather than topical, timeless.

Finally, I think it comes down to this: there is enough going on in Franzen to make him worth reading, but it is Ferrante who gets a bigger slice of the pie of life into her oven. And it's not merely because she had more pages to work with. She dives deeper into the maelstrom of human personality. And she's writing for posterity rather than for the present.