A plague on our literary culture is this thing about counting. A prize list comes out and people rush to ask how many women are on it, then how many people of color, then how many women of color, then how many queer women of color, and on and on until at last Twitter runs the tally and confers either its approval or censure. It’s absurd, maddening. The trouble is that it’s also incalculably better than the old plague, which was never to count at all. The emergence of identity politics in America was, as Jackson Lears has succinctly observed, a tragic necessity.

I thought about this a great deal last year, when, like many people, I tore through Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, about a survivor of sexual slavery and the group of friends who try to give value to his subsequent existence. It was a book I found first consuming, then unsettling, and finally, after I had some distance from it, reprehensible. Why? It’s a work that’s “right” in so many of the ways we presently value, matters of sexuality, race and representation. But it seemed wrong in ways that mattered more. Only a monster could have read about Jude’s abuse without feeling sick at heart, and the novel took utter advantage of that susceptibility, to ends that were neither realistic nor allegorical, that I could discern, merely operatic. The same sin of manipulation lurked behind its widely praised treatment of race. The strongest characters in A Little Life – and they are very strong indeed, because Yanagihara’s talent is immense – are JB and Malcolm, people of color, and the book betrays both, not in the authentic sense that life can betray us but in a distinctly authorial way, discarding them casually in favor of its two beautiful white men.

Purity by Jonathan Franzen review – vastly entertaining Read more

Not long after finishing A Little Life I started a different big novel, and in reading it had an almost precisely inverse experience. It was by an author who has frequently been derided as “wrong” by people interested in identity politics, but who felt to me irresistibly right from sentence to sentence, from thought to thought. The book was Purity by Jonathan Franzen.

Franzen turned 57 on 17 August. A few weeks before, he celebrated by telling Slate that he doesn’t have very many black friends. (It’s often tough to tell whether he’s incredibly bad or incredibly good at PR.) He added, answering the question of whether he would consider writing a novel about race, “I have never been in love with a black woman,” then went on, “if you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person … I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.”

This is an artistic statement that was received, predictably, as a political one. Anyone who bothered to read his comments, rather than immediately tweeting in disgust at their theoretical content, would have found Franzen speaking with express anxiety over his limitations as a white male. “I feel it’s really dangerous, if you are a liberal white American,” he told Slate, “to presume that your good intentions are enough to embark on a work of imagination about black America.” This is a definitional awareness of privilege. (Imagine for a moment what the reaction might have been had he said the opposite, that his goodwill was enough to understand the black experience.) Countless people on social media nevertheless excoriated him for it, with the novelist Celeste Ng summing up their pious tone when she called his words “a failure of writing and of humanity”.

It’s a curious paradox that a writer whose signal gift is his almost barometric sensitivity to the emotional drift of our society attracts the most reductive, disconnected responses to both his work and his attempts to explain it. Again and again, over the years, people have called him a sexist. (Jennifer Weiner is no doubt hand-pressing T-shirts somewhere as you read this.) It’s certainly true that the structures of the world favor the type of person he is; it’s also true that many of the women he writes about, from Patty Berglund to Edith Wharton to Purity Tyler, are troublingly disempowered. But of course another place where women are troublingly disempowered is late capitalist society, and inconveniently for Franzen’s feminist critics he has been obsessed with that very fact, with the precariousness and unfairness of women’s lives, from the outset of his career. Read this, please:

A man was a creature who thought it was a sympathetic portrayal of himself to say, ‘I love women’ … the perfect gift for the man who had everything was a quarter-ounce bottle of feminism … inescapably immersed in a history made by people of his own sex, a man could never be as selfconscious as a woman: could never feel as much shame. Even a thoughtful man lacked a radical appreciation of how it was only luck … that had made his life straightforward. At some level he would always still believe that the ease of his life implied a moral superiority.

This is from his 1992 novel Strong Motion, published when Twitter was negative 14 years old. It seems very hard to me to read it and argue in good faith that he, Franzen, is a sexist, just as it seems very hard to read his remarks about race and argue in good faith that he’s a racist.

Jonathan Franzen’s lack of black friends is unsettling but it’s hardly unusual in white America Read more

And yet, in a Franzenian irony, there’s something kind of splendid and meaningful about the fact that people can go on Twitter and be so wrong about him. It’s no doubt the case that the internet enslaves us, numbs us, increases our solitude, as he has often declared and uses Purity to argue at length. To borrow his own phrase, though, he is the default person – a middle-class white male. He doesn’t need to find a world online, since the real world is already made for him. There’s an arrogance in the way he rails against a tool that has allowed unthinkable kinds of communion between people who might have previously felt completely alone – young, small-town, gay, victimized, oppressed, poor. In other words, Franzen may be wrong about race; just not in the ways people say he’s wrong about race.

There’s something agreeable about the possibility that everyone is wrong, both Franzen and his critics – in the very clear possibility that I’m wrong about A Little Life, for that matter – because as a novelist his deepest theme is the certainty of failing our ideals. Think about the books as they stand in mocking relation to their titles: Purity is about the unavoidable impurity of all human action; Freedom is about how variously constrained we are by our circumstances, our desires, our loyalties; The Corrections is about how it’s impossible to fix anything.

This melancholy realism lies in opposition to the irritating, admirable romanticism of the people who bicker, on social media, in the direction of perfect social enlightenment. They’re interested in making the world immediately fairer, which is useful when some idiot tweets that all lives matter but has nothing to do with Franzen. The quality that drives people crazy about him is the same quality that makes his novels remarkable, which is his ruthless, tenacious honesty, his refusal to write the world as we wish it would be, and to engage instead as truthfully as he can with this transcendently weird business of our existence together on earth. In the end that’s far more valuable, both in literary terms and in human ones, than any declaration of solidarity could be. Which is why I hope his next novel is about race.