Closer - Dennis Cooper (1989)
I found Dennis Cooper through some Internet wormhole, which seems to be fairly apt. I was trying to find something horrible to read. I've done this a few times before and ended up disappointed for whatever reason. A lot of books purporting to be shocking are basically just extremely slim horror books, substandard potboilers with slightly more diverse descriptions of fluids in them. But Cooper was something else: lyrical, beautiful, confusing. I bought and read three of his books in quick succession: My Loose Thread, The Sluts and The Marbled Swarm. While these three books where in some way thematically similar (nihilism, transgression, disaffected gay teenagers and narrative occlusion), in terms of execution they were remarkably different. My Loose Thread's prose is uncoloured, sparse, even touching on the banal. The Sluts is a wildly inventive text, taking the form almost entirely of a series of reviews on a gay escort site, inviting the reader to try and make sense of what on earth (if anything) has actually happened. And The Marbled Swarm is one of the most flowery, frustratingly beautiful books I have ever read, as audacious as it is fleeting.
Cooper, however, is probably most well known (or at least as well known as such an ostensibly 'underground' artist can be) for his George Miles cycle, a series of five novels charting an unrequited obsession he had with a boy named George Miles when he himself was young. From what I understand, they are loosely connected, and highly respected among aficionados of indie queer literature.
Closer is the first of the cycle, and starts with one of Cooper's characteristic modes: ungarnished naivety. His prose is so raw and blunt a panic sets in as to whether this is actually any good at all. But the unpolished earnestness works under your skin, and we are forced to approach the book as something between outsider art and the work of a genuine literary savant. Across eight chapters and seven characters, Cooper switches style and conceit, person and intent, often with striking effect. David's chapter focuses on delusion and ideation of fantastical lifestyles. Alex's chapter considers how we view the world through the metanarratives of books and films. Ultimately though, this book is about confusion, alienation and depression.
Closer is audacious and confident. Yet it is very much a first novel. Many of the themes and concepts explored here are quite frankly done better in later volumes. This is no great problem (it must be embarrassing for artists who can never live up to their early work).
Yet in spite of its naivety, many of the themes and scenarios and obsessions seen in Cooper's later work are played out here. Closer is pornography, and like all pornography, is broadly taxonomic in its scope, as it fixates on what goes where and how and so on. This extends to the generic names of the interchangeable characters and who has sex with who and who kills or maims who becomes particularly blurry. In this sense it touches on the truly Sadean. It is both distant and grimly beautiful.
Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher (2009)
Capitalist Realism is a book whose reputation precedes itself for a number of reasons. And one of the reasons Fisher continues to be discussed and shared so enthusiastically is the comparative readability of his work. Capitalist Realism buzzes along. While it is meandering, Fisher is no Zizek, and his writing is clear and digestible.
Broadly, Fisher argues that capitalism's lazy, necrotic pervasiveness is such that we are left both brutalised and too disaffected to even consider an alternative. Fisher's criticism of capitalist bureaucracy extends to the education system. I had no idea he was a Sixth Form teacher, and his musings of both teaching British A-level students and the frustrations of the Kafka-esque administrative systems of UK further education (and the resignation they encourage) resonated with me rather too much.
The lack of traditional citations (at least in the edition I read) are a little panic inducing but somewhat liberating. It reminds me of old school philosophy books, where the philosopher would simply flap their gums about what they concerned about that day, and conjure up a paradigm that would be critiqued for centuries.
But there's a big flaw with such an approachable, even populist book. It purports itself to be a call to arms. But ultimately, it's all rather depressing. Of course, the machinations of late stage capitalism have made this so, and things are utterly terrible and awful. To see it spelled out so clearly, and using the bureaucracy of my own occupation as an example made me feel pretty hopeless. But what was I expecting?
Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (2010)
This review will contain a lot of names of characters which I am not going to describe because they're all pretty much the same person.
I borrowed this book off my mum about three years ago and it's been sitting on my 'to read' shelf ever since. I kept skipping it over not only because of it's considerable heft (with a few exceptions I'm not really a fan of large books: even 300 pages feels way too stodgy), but also because I got the impression that Franzen is really, really uncool. In fact I kept looking at it and laughing about "the great American novel", and imagining brown leaves falling in some hyperreal middle class suburb where there are laughs and love and tears and everything in between. I kept it on my 'to-read' shelf because I genuinely wanted to read something that is perceived to be 'good'. It was the same compulsion that lead me to 'worthy' directors like Ozu when I was going through a stint of only watching 80s gore films made by stoned teenagers. Sometimes, you need a big, nourishing bowl of literature, and Freedom is a big bowl of a book.
The first adjective that rolled through my head as I read the opening chapter was 'meaty'. These are some meaty sentences, and some meatier paragraphs, and some colossal chapters. Say goodbye to paragraph breaks, because there are NONE in Franzen Land. My knowledge of American geography is terrible, so I had to consult Google Maps quite extensively to get a grounding as to the very specific location this book takes place in. Normally I wouldn't give a toss but I was VERY intent on giving this book a fair chance, despite all sorts of conflicting preconceptions I had. Freedom is the very definition of WYSIWYG, and it has the very good graces to begin with a 28 page precis of sorts, outlining in breathlessly dense prose the tale of an ordinary middle class family moving to a non-descript and ungentrified neighbourhood near Minnesota and their unexceptional and duly compelling tribulations.
Initially these monster sentences are not exactly intimidating, but annoying. Even smug. I became very quickly familiar with the paradigms that constituted 'Franzenesque'. Yet, far from being just a sigh-inducing affectation, the reader quickly will come to appreciate the purpose they serve, rattling the reader in a hyper invested and ultra privileged perspective. Very few authors could construct such prose. It rolls with the precise momentum of a well-driven freight train, and Franzen is wise never slow down, lest the whole thing descend in to a wheezing and rusty mess.
One almost fascinating thing about this book is how mundane it really is. Hardly any of the characters create art or have any compulsion too. Many are extremely middle class and almost all extremely white, but they are also completely without note and heroism. They are not quite revolting, but they are certainly not heroic. Their lives pass, whether we care or not.
Freedom is not always convincing. The sex scenes are mercifully short yet ripped straight from 90s erotic thrillers. The suburban tittle-tattle is well realised, but the punk rocker turned troubled country star Richard Katz has clearly been crafted by someone who went to exactly two gigs at university. Around page 200, I made a number of realisations. Not least that this great American Novel is to all intents and purposes a soap opera, albeit a particularly compellingly told one. But the biggest and most damning realisation is the Freedom is not art, it is not poetry. Whereas a slender, poetic book will sketch in vague details about characters and their motivations and over the course of 100 pages or so will allow the reader to dip in to a world all too briefly, Freedom elucidates every facet of everyone's life in unyielding detail. I hear the tired argument that 'good character development' essentially involves spending a vast amount of page or screen time telling us all about a character's history. Many modern Korean shows are particularly guilty of this, for example Squid Game, Sweet Home and Hello My Twenties all devoting a significant amount of screen time to seemingly unending flashbacks. There are many ways to tell a story, but one rather misses the narrative device of simply observing how a character reacts to and deals with whatever situation is thrown at them, and making assumptions and judgements accordingly. There is no need for this in Freedom. You will be told, from many perspectives, but always in the same paternal and exacting voice.
With this in mind, reading a book like Freedom is ultimately an exercise in submission. Yes, of course one can resist it's very obvious charms, and you can take issue with its lack of diverse representation or its aforementioned monolithic sentences. The wheels well and truly fall off in the third part, which focuses on the larger than life and previously mentioned Richard Katz, now middle aged deck builder who, bizarrely, thinks and narrates exactly like every other character. I am sympathetic to authors writing every character in the same voice. Often an author's skills lie elsewhere, and we should willingly suspend our disbelief. But this is excruciating. Richard is referred to by another character as a misogynist, and a taciturn enigma. Jump inside his head and... well he's a misogynist and a taciturn enigma. There's no nuance. To pick a single, often maligned author, Brett Easton Ellis used the multi character epic The Rules Of Attraction to wildly shift expectations based on a series of enigmatic and highly restricted narrations. In Freedom, every one is omniscient. There are no surprises. Nothing is left to interpretation. We are absolutely hammered with an authoritarian narration.
For a novel presenting itself and marketed for its elegance, it's really rather vulgar in structure. A kind of narrative triad is formed between unconvincing rocker Richard and his penis, histrionic girl jock Patty and weedy, acquiescent Walter. Then there's some ancillary characters; Patty's vaguely Sapphic teenage love affair with Nancy, whose character sort of reverberates and is reflected in Connie, who is an object of obsession and revulsion for Joey, who himself is a rebellious reverberation of Richard... Yep its all very literary fiction. The issue of course being that none of this is subtextually encoded, the book basically tells you all of this. Again blunt, but also, undeniably satisfying, like a burger and a pint of craft ale from an upmarket burger restaurant chain that is absolutely, unequivocally not McDonald's.
It's perhaps Joey's narrative arc that is simultaneously the most on the nose, and the most subtle and affecting. Joey is, in stark opposition to his Liberal parents, a republican capitalist. He's literally sexually aroused by money. It literally says this. Yet his relationship with Connie, a moping, almost mute symbolic reincarnation of his mother's teenage infatuation (WHOAH) is perhaps the most touching, relatable and almost poetic element of the whole book. His embarrassment of her is confounded by his desire for her, which manifests at times in almost phantasmagoric accounts of phone sex. While he's trying to bang his rich room mate's sister for connections and clout, dowdy, normal Connie remains an object of fetishistic desire to him, her wholesomeness contrasting bluntly with his Randian 'greed is good' narrative. Joey is also a little shit and his chapters are probably the most sigh inducting beyond Richard's aging rocker, but at least there's a semblance here of something touching.
Once more, to complain or even to dwell on such shortcomings is pointless. Freedom is a singular and exacting narrative that cares not for what you want out of it. Freedom is not art and Franzen's prose is not poetry. It's nice. It's a blunt force instrument. You will not have any profound realisations reading Freedom, but you will feel happy, surprised, and sad. Perhaps Freedom's greatest accomplishment is indicating the void that exists between well honed craftsmanship and genuine profundity. After 600 undeniably well honed pages I genuinely cared for and loved every character. It is warm, ruddy cheeked and human. I liked it. I will never read another book by Jonathan Franzen.