The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 13, 2018

I didn’t know what a gloomy guy Jonathan Franzen is until I read The End of the End of the Earth. There’s no point in having a bucket list, he says, because it won’t change the fact that you’re going to die. Well, okay, but seeing every bird you possibly can before you die won’t change the fact that you’re going to die, and I’m not sure how Franzen squares that obsession with his rejection of bucket lists, except for his impression that bucket listers want to cheat death by “strategic vacationing.” I don’t have a bucket list but I’ve taken a lot of vacations, and I always thought they had something to do with enjoying life rather than cheating death. Maybe if the buckets are filled with birds, Franzen would have more use for them. Or maybe he’s just the kind of guy who sees the bucket as half empty rather than half full.

Franzen starts this essay collection by telling the reader that the “pure” essay, the personal exploration of an idea, is an extinct form, in part because subjectivity is the new norm in reportage, reviews, and even literature, which increasingly conflates fiction with autobiography. In an essay that explores the idea of essays, Franzen contrasts the subjective opinions of bloggers and activists on the left and right — the people who claim “the right not to hear things that upset them and to shout down ideas that offend them” — with essays that, like the best literature, invite you “to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.”

Franzen pushed my buttons from time to time, and I’ll gladly acknowledge that he might be right and I might be wrong. Maybe it really is too late to avert climate change and we should stop pretending that environmental doom is avoidable (although misplaced hope, in my view, is a necessary motivational tool to even incremental policy changes). To his credit, Franzen admits that he might be wrong, that maybe the focus should be on climate change deniers, a conclusion he pondered while writing and then abandoning an essay about birds. He eventually converted the essay to one about finding meaning in improving a world that is coming to an end. That’s a perspective I hadn’t considered. Inviting readers to consider new perspectives is an essayist’s greatest gift.

Most of these essays in this collection touch on Franzen’s love of bird watching and the anxiety it produces. I couldn’t tell from reading Freedom whether Franzen was on the side of birds or cats (fans of both are excoriated in the novel), but now I know. Franzen has a passion for birds. Cats, not so much.

Franzen makes an inspired defense of the ethical imperative to protect the environment in order to protect birds. I suppose one could translate that to an argument for saving all habitats to protect all wildlife, and for that matter oceans and possibly even places where people and their dogs might dwell.

One essay discusses the impact of unregulated hunting on bird populations in Albania and Egypt. Another discusses his frenzied attempt to see all the possible birds in a couple of Caribbean islands. His birdwatching trip to East Africa sparks his gloomy condemnation of bucket lists and tourism (because the world doesn’t need another picture of a giraffe, as opposed to, I don’t know, another sighting of a bird?). One of the more interesting bird essays discusses the decline of seabird populations and the simple ways that fishing fleets can avoid killing birds by accident. And the end of the end of the Earth turns out to be Antarctica, which has glorious penguins, although the essay morphs into a gloomy discussion of death before it becomes an amusing take on expensive tours to places most people don’t want to go. I’m glad Franzen went there and described the trip so that I can cross it off my bucket list as a vicarious trip taken.

Franzen writes about his personal experience with (and contribution to) the gentrification (and whitening) of New York City. He shares Sherry Turkle’s concern that smart phones and social media are reducing empathy. He dissects friendships (Bill Vollman and David Foster Wallace). In an essay about Sarah Stolfa’s photographs of patrons in a Philadelphia bar, he talks about the miserable lonely year he spent in Philadelphia. Being lonely and miserable is an undercurrent to many of the essays, but not to the same extent as his love of bird watching.

One of the most interesting essays addresses how readers feel about books when they cannot sympathize with the author, and how authors make readers sympathize with characters who are in many ways unsympathetic. He uses Edith Wharton and her novels to advance both discussions, but he also points to a string of unsympathetic characters (from the murderer Raskolnikov to the sociopath Tom Ripley to the pedophile Humbert Humbert) to whom the reader feels drawn, perhaps as a function of “the guilty pleasure of imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples.” I think Franzen explained my love of crime novels that focus on criminals rather than good guys.

Bird watchers will probably love this collection. I grew a bit weary of the bird themes, but there are enough non-avian essays to make the book worthwhile for readers with more generalized interests.

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#SAD!: Doonesbury in the Time of Trump by G.B. Trudeau

Published by Andrews McMeel Publishing on September 18, 2018

Satire doesn’t change minds, but good-natured mockery can be therapeutic. That, at least, is Garry Trudeau’s theory. Even as President Trump mocks everyone he perceives as an enemy (in childish terms that are far from good-natured), he hates being mocked. Hence this collection. And since I have been a Doonesbury fan from Doonesbury’s first appearance in my local paper a very long time ago, I am well acquainted with the therapeutic benefits of Trudeau’s political humor. Never has it been needed more.

It’s easy to mock Donald Trump. Every time he opens his mouth or Twitter account, he provides a satirist with new material. Trump’s self-aggrandizement, his claims that everything to which he is connected is the biggest or the best, have become a form of unwitting self-mockery. Trudeau’s satire zeroes in on the president’s ill-informed opinions (“TrumpFacts” is an alternative reality service that provides callers with alternative facts), his rambling, vague, and self-contradictory proclamations, and his habit of blaming everyone around him for problems of his own making. I particularly liked the strip in which Trump blames Paul Ryan for failing to keep the promises that Trump made (“the best promises in history”).

Trudeau widens his net to mock Breitbart, Bill O’Reilly, disinformation in Texas textbooks, and voter suppression efforts, among other political targets. He also takes an occasional break to check in with Zonker’s quest for spiritual awareness (and marijuana business), Roland Hedley’s tweets, Joan Caucus’ takes on post-feminism, and Sam’s disbelief that a feminist movement was ever needed to advance an idea as obvious as gender equality (it’s like a movement to make people believe in gravity).

The first pages document the Trump campaign and the rest of the strips track the early stages of the Trump presidency. He also takes some digs at Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, the wall, congressional hypocrisy, and evangelical hypocrisy (Christian values aren’t what they used to be). Isn’t it fun to live in the age of Trump?

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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on October 30, 2018

Colm Tóibín begins Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know with an essay that melds the literary history of Dublin with the city’s sociopolitical history. Wilde and Yeats and Joyce and Beckett and Stoker and Shaw and many other writers and poets are still alive in the city’s memory, still called to mind by certain streets and structures. From that stroll, Tóibín journeys to three essays about “prodigal fathers” who, at least for a time, called Dublin home.

Sir William Wilde was the father of Oscar Wilde, but Tóibín begins the essay with a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s two-year imprisonment at Reading Gaol, during which Wilde wrote De Profundis in the form of an angry letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father, the Marquess of Queensbury, played an instrumental role in causing Wilde’s sodomy conviction. We eventually learn about Oscar’s father William, a doctor, archeologist, statistician, and man of learning who straddled England and Ireland.

William’s life was at least tangentially touched by the longstanding conflict between Dubliners who advocated independence and Home Rule and those who opposed separation from England. William is almost tangential to the essay, which tells us at least as much about William’s friends and acquaintances as it does about William. Much of the essay’s interest comes from its description of a time in which “revolutionary fervor in Ireland was ill-fated, half-hearted or part of a literary rather than a serious political culture.” William’s life is a good deal less interesting than Oscar’s, although he did manage to work a scandal into his High Society life involving a scorned and vindictive lover.

John Yeats is the most interesting of the three fathers that Toibin profiles. Toibin compares John to the father of the novelist Henry James: “they sought self-realization through art and general inquiry.” (John earns a gold star from me for his belief that Henry James’ novels are unbearably tedious.) Unfortunately, self-realization doesn’t pay the bills.

To the dismay of his wife, John Yeats abandoned the study of law to pursue a career as an artist. He was never satisfied with his paintings and generally began them anew each day, a habit that impaired his ability to earn money. He could only paint portraits of people he liked, another “infirmity of will” (his son’s assessment) that made it difficult to earn a living.

As a father, John Yeats was “exasperating but also inspirational.” John seems to have been most notable for wielding the Irish gift of gab. He lived the last 15 years of his life in New York, writing splendid letters and gaining American admirers while depending on his famous son to satisfy his debts. Tóibín admires John's ability to write “sentences of startling beauty,” but it is difficult to know what to make of him. John Yeats felt a passionate longing to be something more than he ever became; he lived in imagination more than reality. In the end, his correspondence reveals him to be too self-centered to be a successful father, husband, or lover.

The discussion of James Joyce’s father differs from the first two portraits. We often see John Stanislaus Joyce as James Joyce fictionalized him in stories and novels. In actual life, John ran up unmanageable debt (a common theme among three men Tóibín examines), had a serious problem with alcohol, and was a miserable father. Toibin gleans these facts from various sources, including My Brother’s Keeper by James’ brother Stanislaus, whose anger at their father is palpable.

Yet James, unlike his brother, resisted the temptation to be angry, finding ways to reimagine his father in his fiction. James’ stories often depict his father as his friends see him, not as his children knew him. John is portrayed in Ulysses as Simon Dedalus, “a complex figure of moods, an unsettled rather than a solid presence in the book.” That seems to be an accurate description of all three men.

I’m not sure what this volume tell us, except that difficult fathers sometimes produce sons who are capable of literary brilliance. Tóibín has demonstrated his own literary genius over the years, and while this work of nonfiction doesn’t display the depth of his fiction (it’s difficult to be stuck with facts when imagination offers a richer environment), it is worth reading for its insight into a time and place that produced such vital writers.

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Calypso by David Sedaris

Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 29, 2018

It’s difficult to say what any particular David Sedaris essay is about, since they meander delightfully, like a puppy in a garden filled with squeaky toys, until it becomes clear that the essay is simply about Being David Sedaris, a unique person living a unique life in a world he shares with billions of other unique people, each of them full of stories.

Sedaris writes about the perils of middle-age, the acquisition of guest rooms, and the fear of losing family members, as well as the regret of not asking questions about half-overheard conversations that pop up in memory years later. A couple of essays describe family gatherings before and after his sister’s suicide. One is about his strained relationship with his father and jazz, the real only connection they ever made; another addresses his father’s reluctance to move out of a home he can no longer maintain. A particularly poignant essay focuses on his relationship with his (long deceased) alcoholic mother. Sedaris is a humorist, but much of Calypso is touching and personal, not necessarily the stuff of humor.

Sedaris fans need not fret, however, because other essays showcase his quiet wit. He writes about being short, the discoveries he makes while walking (including the discovery that his Fitbit was ruling his life), his preference for feeding snapping turtles rather than attending family gatherings. He talks about gay marriage, which he favors in the abstract but opposes in his own life as mundane, like wearing Dockers to Olive Garden.

Other funny essays discuss words and phrases that should be banned (“awesome”), his arguments with his long-term lover Hugh about appropriate behavior and pets, family gossip and family quarrels, his attempt to feed his tumor to a snapping turtle, ghosts, psychics, the reasons he’s depressed (hint: Trump and Trump voters), his fear of crapping his pants, and phrases that people in various countries yell from their car windows when they are angry at another driver (he proclaims Romania the winner in the contest for most creative vulgarity). I think the essay about pants-crapping edged out the others for most laughs per page, although your mileage may vary.

I can’t say that I was enthralled by his descriptions of the odd clothing he purchases while shopping in Tokyo, but one essay that did nothing for me compared to twenty that provoked smiles or empathy isn’t a bad ratio. On the whole, the essays in Calypso are so insightful or amusing or both that I can forgive Sedaris for writing about his questionable taste in attire.

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Uncommon People by David Hepworth

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on November 21, 2017

David Hepworth argues that the era of the rock star has passed. Uncommon People chronicles their rise and fall, from 1955 to 1994. After talking about what makes someone a rock star and what we expect from a rock star, Hepworth explains that he wants to profile individual rock stars: who they were before they achieved rock fame, how that happened, and what it did to them. He does that by selecting and discussing an important day in rock history and using that day to provide a window into the star’s life. Targeting a single day is presumably a strategy to keep the book from becoming unwieldy.

Hepworth’s method is to talk about that significant event, and then to provide some background about the rock star in question. He often discusses other significant events in that year, or trends that began in that year. At the end of each chapter, he provides a playlist of 10 songs or albums from that year.

Many excellent and influential rock musicians are left out of the book, presumably because they don’t meet Hepworth’s loose definition of a rock star, which includes glamour, authenticity, late nights, recklessness (at least in image), swagger, sexual charisma, self-assuredness, good hair, and a bunch of other qualities that Hepworth scatters through his introduction. In the end, a rock star is whatever you want a rock star to be, and you know one when you see one.

Readers can quibble with his choices. My quibble is that the Beatles, individually or collectively, are given four entries, but Neil Young receives only some passing mentions. What, he doesn’t have good hair? And Eric Clapton gets mentioned over and over but doesn’t deserve his own chapter?

Readers can also quibble about whether all of his chosen rock stars perform rock music, which might or might not be fundamental to the definition of a rock star. I think of Madonna as a pop star, of Bob Marley as a reggae star, of Bob Dylan as a folk-rock star, and of Kurt Cobain as a punk-rock star, yet they all get chapters. Readers might disagree with Hepworth’s choices, but that’s part of the fun of reading a book like this.

Uncommon People provides a bunch of interesting, gossipy information. Aging rock fans will probably have heard many of the stories before, but it’s fun to hear them again, and anyone who isn’t a rock historian will probably learn something new by reading the book. Some of the significant events seem to have been chosen because Hepworth happened to be there, but I suppose that’s inevitable when a book is written by a rock journalist.

Will you learn anything particularly insightful about the phenomenon of rock stardom or the commonalities that link rock stars together? Probably not. They are what they are, and once again, you know one when you see one.

The profiled rock stars and their significant days are:

1955 - Little Richard (creates the “clean” version of Tutti Frutti which, in its original version, was pretty far from clean); 1956 - Elvis (drives from Memphis to Tupelo and realizes just how much his life had changed); 1957 - Paul McCartney and John Lennon (meet for the first time); 1958 - Jerry Lee Lewis (unsuccessfully explains his 13-year-old wife to the London press); 1959 - Buddy Holly (dies in a plane crash, creating the first full-length rock star story).

1960 - Brian Rankin, a/k/a Lee Marvin (the Shadows release the guitar-hero single “Apache”); 1961 - Bob Dylan (earns his first review by performing at Gerde’s Folk City); 1962 - Ringo Starr (replaces Pete Best as the Beatles’ drummer); 1963 - Rolling Stones (a new manager kicks Ian Stewart out of the group and thus fashions the band’s lasting image); 1964 - Brian Wilson (melts down and stops touring with the Beach Boys).

1965 - Roger Daltrey (punches Keith Moon in a dressing room in Denmark as The Who makes chaos a trademark of rock bands); 1966 - Jimi Hendrix (plays in London with Eric Clapton and Cream); 1967 - Janis Joplin (plays at Monterey and redefines the rock star image); 1968 - The Beatles (begin their ending as John gets with Yoko and Paul gets with Linda); 1969 - Black Sabbath (changes the band’s name from Earth).

1970 - Jim Morrison (reinforces the role of the crotch in rock and roll); 1971 - Lou Reed (makes a comeback); 1972 - Rolling Stones (bring the concept of “big” to concert tours); 1973 - David Bowie (retires after inventing the rock star as an art project); 1974 - Bruce Springsteen (writes “Born to Run” and creates a legacy).

1975 - Bob Marley (records a live concert that Hepworth attended); 1976 - Stevie Nicks (is worshipped by fans at a Fleetwood Mac concert in Tampa); 1977 - Elvis (dies); 1978 - Ian Dury (records “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick”); 1979 - Led Zepplin (plays a weekend concert over two weekends and proves that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page have turned into dinosaurs).

1980 - John Lennon (dies); 1981 - Duran Duran (give birth to the intersection of sex and music videos); 1982 - Ozzie Osborne (sleeps on the bus while his guitarist crashes a stolen plane, although the chapter is mostly about the use of cocaine by rock and Hollywood stars); 1983 - This is Spinal Tap (spoofs but captures the sad reality of rock star wannabes); 1984 - Michael Jackson (sets fire to his hair).

1985 - Bob Geldof (makes rock noble by creating Band Aid, which spawned Live Aid and cemented U2 as rock stars); 1986 - Bob Dylan (makes a comeback, although the chapter is mostly about the interview that Dylan gave to Hepworth); 1987 - Axl Rose (makes the “Welcome to the Jungle” video emblematic of the sensationalist ethic of hard rock); 1988 - Elton John (auctions his old stuff so he can acquire new stuff); 1989 - Bonnie Raitt (goes to rehab while confronting middle age, as do Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, and about half the rock world).

1990 - Madonna (touches herself on stage in Toronto); 1991 - Freddie Mercury (dies of AIDS); 1992 - Red Hot Chili Peppers (appear naked on the cover of Rolling Stone without guitarist John Fruscuiante, who went a bit bonkers); 1993 - Prince (changes his name to a symbol); 1994 - Kurt Cobain (dies, bringing the rock star era to an end).

One can argue that rock stars didn’t end with Cobain. If Madonna is a rock star, why isn’t Beyoncé? If Bob Marley was a rock star, why isn't Jay Z? Hepworth suggests that pop stars in the digital age are the product of marketing and have less purity than those in the 40 years that the book covers. Maybe that’s true, although whether that should disqualify recent artists from being regarded as rock stars is less clear.

More to the point, books have to end, even if music doesn’t. The 40 years covered by Uncommon People produced some great music, and the book captures some great moments.

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