M > Status Update

I've got to get this book, it appears. My all-time favorite quote is Thoreau's "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," and this seems like another riff on that.

Except whose desperation is quiet anymore in this narcissistic, blogtastic, twittering, self-help, ego-stroking, death rattling empire? Our misery is cliche to the most educated and self-aware and neurotic of us which simply adds a new couple hundred feet of track to this cyclical sadness train, which the less educated and self-aware and neurotic bypass, opting instead to advertise their psychological problems in even less interesting forms. Of course I'm making huge generalizations here. Just runnin my mouth (hands?) really.

I'm gonna have to give Franzen a chance one of these days. I've expressed my tortured skepticism about him before. He was good friends with my hero DFW yet there's something obnoxious about him to me. Hopefully his writing transcends this. I'm pretty sure it will. Wallace has yet to steer me wrong. Same with Reynolds.

There are things I love about Franzen, but ... his focus always seems constricted--in content and in tone. He really, really, really wants to write a big social novel. But what he's good at are tightly-defined character obsessions and pathologies. And he is enormously empathetic (I think), not scornful, yet he's also utterly unable to resist a constant judging. His characters suffer for their desires, and you get the sense that well they should. (I'm reminded of Sinclair Lewis, another biting social satirist....) Of course, this is entirely unfair when I'm not even half-done. But...

Except whose desperation is quiet anymore in this narcissistic, blogtastic, twittering, self-help, ego-stroking, death rattling empire?

True words, though we're as guilty as the next guy, I suppose, rattling off opinions cheaper than K-Mart gewgaws on the thin and heady air of the ethernet. Speaking for myself, I often fall under the delusion that some people care what I say about books here (and I trust I'm not alone).

Correction, then: The mass of men lead lives of noisy desperation. As for the quiet, we'll just assume they're desperate.

Excellent. I like the new version. And yes, absolutely, I've also projected bits of myself into The Network, much of it I'm now highly embarrassed by.