"So, Am I in the Club?"

It's fascinating to watch a generation congeal into literary history, and see figures like Franzen, DFW, Mary Karr, and Eugenides, who I once knew mostly as names on books and guys who were uncomfortable at their own readings, harden into the polished subjects of literary anecdotes, like those Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald figurines we know so well. I have half a mind to rewrite Midnight in Paris as Midnight in Somerville and Syracuse, with me in the Owen Wilson role. The next best thing, I guess, is to read The Marriage Plot, which is indeed next on my reading list.

I'm speaking of Evan Hughes's new piece in New York, on the aforementioned and their friends:

Karr was teaching at Syracuse by this point, as she still does, and in Lit she describes Wallace’s coming there with “a pal” to scout out places to live in ’92. The pal was Franzen, who had taken a road trip up from Philadelphia with Wallace. They slept in Karr’s attic guest room in her house in the university ghetto. It was the last weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament, the year Christian Laettner hit the turnaround shot to beat Kentucky. Though his focus was clearly on Karr, Wallace was floating the idea that he and Franzen could both move to Syracuse. Franzen was open to it, but lost interest when it started snowing in April. They all went out for cheap Chinese and talked for hours, Karr writes, “till fortune-cookie slips confettied the linoleum booth top.” Karr’s marriage was on its last legs. They were three disheartened people.

Is it just the passage of time that makes this summing up possible, or is it that one of them died? If The Marriage Plot and Freedom can both be read as veiled portraits of DFW, then maybe his death is becoming the 9/11 of that literary generation, the event they all feel they must reckon with. Frankly, it's a subject I'm more interested in.

Comments

[Lisa]

So did you read The Marriage Plot? I was ready to buy it, but it has received very mixed reader reviews on Amazon. I really liked his last book so I'm afraid my expectations may be set too high.

Glad to find your blog via the MyBallard post! I look forward to spending some time here. And btw, we watched you the last 2 nights on Jeopardy, and my Whittier second grader informed me today that he is thinking of making Jeopardy-viewing a new regular thing..

[Tom Nissley]

Thanks for coming by, Lisa. I got derailed by a different stack of reading and haven't gotten to The Marriage Plot yet, but it's still on my list. A friend who liked Middlesex recently told me she was disappointed with the new one, but I still want to find out for myself. And my old Amazon colleagues certainly liked it--they made it #3 of the year. We'll see...