Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

It's been three months since I've posted. I'm sorry. It's not that I haven't read anything. In fact I've read some excellent stuff, mainly non-fiction. For example, Tony Blair's exceptionally interesting memoirs; Geoffrey Robertson's persuasive and damning indictment of Pope Benedict's refusal to radically confront the huge problem of paedophilia in the Catholic priesthood; Paul Berman's Flight of the Intellectuals, which is a fairly savage critique of currently chic Islamic theologian Tariq Ramadan and his liberal stance in regard to Islam and its place in Western societies; and John Thompson's very interesting survey and analysis of today's US and UK book publishing industry - Merchants of Culture (which I'm reviewing in the international publishing journal LOGOS, out in November). 

But my review today is of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom. I'd read his first novel The Corrections when it came out in 2001 and went on to win the prestigious National Book Award. I enjoyed it, but can't say I loved it. I found it rather dry and frequently tedious, and most of the characters cold and distant. Technically of course it was brilliant. But Freedom, in my humble opinion, is a far more interesting and accomplished work. Without a shadow of a doubt, this book will become a classic of American literature. Put simply, it's spellbinding. It's absolutely enthralling. It's easily the best American novel I've read in years - up there with the classic Middlesex, and probably better.

It's the story of two young people who are attracted to each other in college, and then marry, for better or worse. They have two kids, who, unfortunately but fairly universally, develop personalities of their own. They all grow, develop careers, interact with society and politics. They have wide and varied family networks, and friends supportive and dangerous. Franzen's genius is in the way he creates full, living, breathing, passionate and thoroughly modern human beings. The ripe, combative richness of modern America is here - the passionate liberal versus conservative politics, the anger of middle America, the educated Eastern elites versus the resentful working class. It's Bush and Cheney's America - 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the coming of Obama.

But, in the end, Freedom is not a political book. It's a novel of love and hope - the deep, profound connections between human beings that bind and last, no matter the pain, the wrenching divisions, the awful disappointments. Read this book for the dialogue alone - the arguments, the angry phone calls, the sheer intelligence and emotional intensity of their verbal interactions. It's spellbinding. The writing is magnificent. Witty, alive, ambitious.

The ending, which was absolutely right, had me in tears. I could barely find my way to the scotch bottle. Much American literature has always struck me as overripe. Everything is bigger, larger than life, more intense and dramatic than any ordinary reader has ever experienced. The English are subtle, understated. But Freedom, although thoroughly within the American tradition, has a sureness and credibility that resonates.

Read this book over the Xmas holiday season. It's 562 pages long, so you need the time get involved in its world.

You won't regret it, and you will emerge a far better human being.

Brett Easton Ellis: Imperial Bedrooms

Imperial Bedrooms is a sequel to Brett Easton Ellis' first published novel Less Than Zero (1985). Like Salinger's Catcher in the Rye thirty four years previously, LTZ seemed to define the zeitgeist of a generation, and propelled the 21 year old Ellis to literary superstardom, an exaltation he has struggled with, and indeed creatively mined, ever since.


Many critics seem to think Ellis essentially is this self-referential teller of the one evolving story - the story of his rich Los Angeles friends and their aimless, destructive rituals, and his place as an author at once participating and observing. But I don't think this really defines Ellis at all.


To me he wrote one of the greatest English novels of the post-war age, a true classic - American Psycho. When this was first published in 1991 most countries, including Australia, banned it outright, or only allowed it to go on sale if shrink-wrapped!! I was living in Queensland at the time and simply couldn't get it. A friend sent me a copy from the US (this was pre-Amazon days).


American Psycho was a savage, devastating critique of late 20th century decadence. A searing, powerful, relentless indictment of meaningless, indulgent, voyeuristic lives. Many readers were warned off it because of the violence. Too bad really. They missed the entire point. Your nose had to be rubbed in it - that was the point.


So where does the new novel Imperial Bedrooms fit within the Ellis oeuvre?


It's a disappointment. Nowhere near the power or resonance of American Psycho, and missing the freshness and surprise (perhaps this is to be expected) of Less Than Zero. The same Ellis obsessions are there, however. His young friends from 25 years ago are now power-players in Hollywood, making B-grade movies, attending endless parties, awards nights, launches, etc, but still as vacuous, bored and desperate as ever. They have become the Champagne dregs, with all the appurtenances of material success - BMWs, BlackBerries, fake tans, fake faces - but none of the substantiality of character. There are no wives or kids, just endless, meaningless sex with young, grasping, aspiring actors. The only coinage the women have is their c..t. The main character, Clay, is a sick, perverted, sexual predator. Truly an ugly human being.. 


Ellis is a chronicler of surface glitter. But there is always menace, a sense of being caught up in something larger, an overriding evil. Violence is always happening or threatening, and is as meaningless as the glitter and baubles.

Unlike in Less Than Zero there is an unfolding dramatic narrative in Imperial Bedrooms, but it is less than believable and rather contrived. I thought at one stage I was reading a script for Days of Our Lives! There was dialogue but no communication. But then again, this is quintessentially Ellis.

If you like Ellis you'll like this book. I certainly liked it, although it's far from his best.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

I must admit I approached this new novel from English novelist David Mitchell with a certain amount of trepidation. I hadn't read his widely praised Cloud Atlas, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2004, but I knew it was regarded as a 'difficult read'.

Well, his new novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is absolutely brilliant. This book will be soon regarded as a classic. It is a rich, absorbing, highly dramatic and hugely enjoyable saga of life and society set in a secluded, anti-Western and anti-Christian Japan in 1799. The sea-faring Dutch have managed to negotiate a commercial relationship with the isolationist Japanese authorities, and have been allowed to set up a small piece of 'foreign territory' on a small island in the port of Nagasaki.

The intense relationships between the Dutch themselves and between them and the Japanese provide most of the drama of the book. The dialogue is superb, enlivened by an earthy crudity that is frequently funny and, of course, downright racist in today's terms:

'The jaundiced pygmies'.

'What was that frog-croak?...how I hate a man...who farts in French and expects applause'.

Towards the end of the book the British get involved, and carry on as only the British know how ('So let's give this despotic backwater a taste of the coming century..'). But 'untainted' Japan is an equally flawed and brutal society, with sheer evil and hypocrisy riddled throughout.

'If only, Shiroyama dreams, human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders'. 

The re-creation of that moment in history two centuries ago brings home some basic truths that Mitchell constantly underscores. The ordinary lives of ordinary human beings today are qualitatively better on just about every level and on any measure. There is no romanticising of the past going on here. In terms of medicine (there were no x-rays or antibiotics so people suffered awfully from common complaints we can cure so easily now), communications (replies to letters took three years to arrive), education (superstition and sheer ignorance had awful consequences), social structures (slaves and the lower classes were treated with abject cruelty), law and justice (corruption reigned supreme), and international relations (power and subjugation ruled) - compared to these brutish realities the modern world is a highly civilised place.

We tend to forget this. Mitchell rubs our noses in it.

In the end this book celebrates the value of honorable and courageous men and women, individuals who stand up for what is right, and thus power the progress of liberation for all.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet  is an enormously satisfying novel, and I urge you to read it. You won't be disappointed.

I predict a shortlisting for the Booker, for sure.

Recent Books Worth Reading

David Marr's Quarterly Essay on Kevin Rudd is a fascinating read. It's a sensitive and incisive overview of the driving forces in Rudd's life and career, and the final 20 or so pages (of 86 in all) are simply superb. Buy it for these alone. As a writer Marr has an extraordinary ability to cut through his expertly assembled material with arresting short, sharp jabs that give the narrative a punchiness that keeps it constantly moving and interesting. Many lesser writers would find writing a lengthy piece on someone as intrinsically deadening as Rudd an almighty challenge!

Here's a typical para:

 'Hours aren't the issue. Bureaucrats don't mind working hard, long days. They object to feeding material in when nothing much comes out; demands made at midnight that might be made at midday; wild flurries of activity driven by petty media squalls; calls for detailed briefing on fourth-rank issues that need never go near a prime minister; and urgent requests for material they know to be sitting in Rudd's office already. They mind wasting their time.' (p.72)

You don't have to agree with Marr's conclusion that Rudd is 'a politician with rage at his core, impatient rage.' But you will have to acknowledge that he has painted a truly revealing portrait of a profoundly irritating man.

Young, gay Brisbane writer Benjamin Law has written a truly enjoyable memoir of growing up in a rather eccentric Chinese-Australian family from the Sunshine coast.  His mother, Jenny, is hilarious, a wonderful creature, full of quirks and personality, and the rest of his family - five kids and an absent father - are pretty much the same. It's brilliantly written, with a deceptively light touch, often refreshingly crude, and frequently LOL funny.

Paul Harding's Tinkers won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction so I was keen to read it. It is quite a short book of 191 pages, but it is not an easy read. It's highly literary and tightly written as a poem. You need to be in the mood for this. If you feel miserable, profoundly ordinary and insignificant, and prone to wonder if it's all worth it, then you will be in absolutely the right frame of mind to enjoy it. It's a meditation on ordinariness, on little people with little, seemingly unnoticed and barely meaningful lives, as they just go about tinkering.

I can do no better than quote Marilynne Robinson's brilliant prose from the blurb: 'Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls'.

If you read and enjoyed Scott Turow's magnificent bestseller Presumed Innocent, which was published in 1987, then you simply have to read his just published follow-up Innocent. Turow is a (still practicing) criminal lawyer and his fiction is imbued with the law and its players - the court system, the prosecution, the defense, and of course the guilty and the innocent. But what gives the the books their power is his ability to craft believable characters in all their emotional depth and complexity. The drama derives from them and their interaction as much as it does from the inevitable playing out of the legal processes in the courtroom.

Don't read this follow-up until you read the original. Do yourself a favor - take a week off and read them both.

I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography Infidel when it was published in 2007, and was profoundly moved by it. It was the story of her life as an intelligent girl in a Muslim family in the deeply tribal and war-ravaged African country of Somalia, and how she eventually escaped to the Netherlands and discovered the liberating philosophies and lifestyles of the West. Essentially the book was a relentless assault on Islam, and particularly its treatment of women.

Nomad, just released, tells of her time as a controversial and outspoken parliamentarian in Holland and her eventual migration to America after she received serious death threats from fanatical Muslims. It is a seriously enjoyable book. Ali is a highly intelligent and gifted writer, and like any convert, passionate about the new life of political, religious and intellectual freedom she has discovered. It is impossible not to cheer her on. The obstacles she overcomes are legion.

Yet, Hirsi Ali presents us in the West with an almighty challenge: she is a denouncer of all things Islamic. Not just the so-called Islamofascists, who commit terrorist atrocities; who murder their own wives, daughters and sisters to protect male 'honour'; who mutilate young female genitals as part of a cruel circumcision rite; who force women to cover themselves from head to foot in heavy, hot gowns, devoid of any religious meaning; who proclaim murderous fatwas against Booker prize-winning novelists and Danish cartoonists.

Ali is not just against these. She is against Islam as such. She does not believe there can be any such thing as 'Moderate Islam'. Westernised, moderate, Muslim theologians are 'trapped in confusion...because they want to maintain that the Quran is perfect scripture, and that all of its key injunctions - kill the infidels, ambush them, take their property, convert them by force; kill homosexuals and adulterers; condemn Jews; treat women as chattel - are mysterious errors of translation'.

'Afflicted with similar pangs of white guilt, many prominent Christian theologians have also become accomplices of jihad'.

According to Ali 'Islam is not just a belief;it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence.'

She calls on the Christian churches to reactivate their missionary past, to virtually re-create the crusades, and work to free young minds and spirits in Muslim countries from falling prey to the menace of Islam. Too many Muslims are 'seeking God but finding Allah', because they are not being exposed to more enlightened voices'.

It is a radical precept, but a potent one from a crucially important voice. Highly recommended.

Murdoch and Hitchens: Two Great Non-fiction Reads

Over the last two weeks I've read Sarah Ellison's War at the Wall Street Journal and Christopher Hitchens' Hitch-22. You won't find any better non-fiction around at present. Both books are superb.

Sarah Ellison was a senior reporter with the WSJ during the months of struggle by Rupert Murdoch to acquire the paper, a true American icon, in 2007. She covered the story for the Journal, so was in a prime position to bring all the threads together to produce what must be one of the best business books of the year (up there with Michael Lewis' The Big Short).

What is simply amazing about this book is the incredible access Ellison obviously had to all the players, major and minor, in the drama. This is about as 'inside' as a book can get. It's almost as if she had secret microphones under board tables, tray tables, crockery, car seats, beds, urinals...whatever. Everybody seems to have disclosed virtually every piece of detail to her. Even Murdoch himself seems to have allowed her unlimited access. 

But the real pleasure of the book is the riveting tale itself - how the Bancroft family, owners of the Journal for over a century, were slowly but surely worn down and outmanoeuvred by a master at the game. 

And the subsidiary story is just as powerful: it's about newspapers and their future, if any. How, in the first instance, would the WSJ change under Murdoch's control - would the culture, values and journalistic integrity it enshrined for decades be undermined? And how would, not just it, but all newspapers fare in a radically changing media world?

Ellison is fair, broad-minded, and professional to the end. Her own biases are never thrust down the reader's throat. But the facts she marshalls speak for themselves. The Journal is a very different paper two years after Murdoch took control. Many observers lament this. But Murdoch, of course, begs to differ: 'We produced a better paper. I'm sorry but it's as simple as that'.

I've long been a fan of Christopher Hitchens, one of the West's most vociferous and intelligent defenders against fascists, extremists, dictators, totalitarians and other fools. Since the Iraq war however, when he, alone in leftist circles, came out in support of Bush's 2003 invasion, he has been pretty universally vilified by friend and foe alike, and he's challenged the loyalty of his many fans. He's also recently, of course, joined the Atheist brigade along with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. (I found his 2008 treatise God is Not Great almost unreadable in its anthropological ignorance and all round pomposity).

Hitch-22, A Memoir can be seen as a monumental justification of his unpopular positions (it's a densely typed 435 pages), or as a fascinating exploration of his lifelong obsessions, beliefs, passions and friendships. It's clearly the latter but works also as the former.

This is a beautifully written story of a passionate believer in political liberalism, secularism and global democracy. One admirable feature of Hitchens' style of journalism is his constant determination to get out from under his desk, to get away from his books, friends and comfortable lifestyle, and personally visit the trouble spots of the world on a regular basis. He's been a political activist, a player, all his life, from his rabble-rousing Oxford and Cambridge days, through to his frequent excursions to Cuba, Poland, Argentina, Romania, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Morocco, Uganda, Venezuela, Nicaragua and many others.

He's almost Woody Allen's Zelig, his famous everywhere man...talking to heads of state and other key players at seemingly every momentous turning point in world history.

But one of the real pleasures of this book is the fine intellect and profound literary and cultural erudition that underpins it. There are so many wonderful allusions and apt quotes - they could be assembled as small books in themselves. And talk about interesting friends!

Hitchens is a fabulous character who has written a fabulous book. Well worth an investment of your time.

The Miles Franklin Shortlist: and the winner is..?

The Miles Franklin literary award is Australia's most famous, as well as being its most controversial. This year one shortlisted author, Alex Miller, received headlines when he offered the quite reasonable observation that Kevin Rudd's new 'Prime Ministers Award' was a mistake, and that the substantial prize money on offer could have been better spent bolstering the preeminent and far more prestigious Miles Franklin.

Apart from the fakery wrought by the dreadful Helen Darville in 1994 when her The Hand That Signed the Paper, supposedly written by one Helen Demidenko, caused a critical and media sensation, most of the controversy and debate over the years has been caused by the stipulation in Franklin's will that the entries explore 'Australian life in any of its phases'. This has worked to exclude many brilliant novels written by Australians that were simply ineligible because their settings were not specifically Australian (eg. The Book Thief; Dog Boy).

This year's shortlist is presented above, and what an extraordinary dilemma it presents the judges.


Who's likely to win? Let's discuss:


Sonya Hartnett's Butterfly has no chance at all. It's barely an adult novel, Hartnett still tethered, seemingly, to her Young Adult origins.


Deborah Forster's disturbing The Book of Emmett is a powerful portrayal of a cruel and stunted husband and father, and the emotional wreckage he visits upon his working class family. It's hard to believe this first novel hasn't sprung from the author's personal experience. It reads like a gut-wrenching memoir, visceral and raw.


Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey is a truly remarkable, very mature book by a young novelist which has been called Australia's 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. I absolutely loved this novel and predict it will become a much read and discussed one for many years to come. It is so rich in character, story, drama and humour that it's very hard to put down. It could have been even better, an instant Australian classic, pushing Cloudstreet off its pedestal, if only a gifted structural editor had got hold of it and addressed its one big flaw: its main characters get off too lightly. Justice is not allowed its relentless course, and there needed to be a major tragedy - all the ingredients were there. Then it would have been superb.


Alex Miller has won the Miles Franklin twice in the past, in 1993 and 2003. Will Lovesong be his third? In a word, no. It's a great book but is pulled off the top rung by a fairly insipid ending. There's a real lack of resolution.


So it's down to Peter Temple's Truth or Brian Castro's Bath Fugues, both truly great works of art, but soooo far apart on the literary spectrum. One popular, the other utterly inaccessible. Truth is crime fiction at its best, brilliantly written and conceived. But will the judges award it our preeminent literary prize? Or will they opt for a highly literary work by an accomplished Australian master?


I was determined to read Bath Fugues because I needed to read all the shortlisted entries in order to pick a winner, or subsequently condemn or otherwise the judges' choice. (Last year's choice, Tim Winton's Breath, left me speechless. It was the same old, lightweight piece of surfer-boy flim flam that's Winton's traditional line of load).

Three-quarters of the way through Castro's longish book I still hadn't got into it and it was annoying me intensely. I scribbled these notes to myself: 'clogged with writerly indulgence - the meandering reflections of his self-obsessed main characters'; 'what narrative there is gets utterly buried in a sort of faux-philosophical Montaigne/Baudelaire mud'; 'hard work - but it doesn't pay off'; 'constant undisciplined digressions'.


But by the time I'd finished the third part of this three-part novel, I realised what was going on and it had finally got to me. There's no doubt this is a complex, very difficult piece of work, sort of like the poetry of Ezra Pound. It's a hard slog, highly intellectual and with little emotional power. But in the end....quite a magnificent achievement, rich with meditations on decay, art, beauty, youth and sex. Very few readers will have the patience to read it, and it will certainly not be a popular win if it gets up. But it could be Castro's time.


So Castro or Temple. Back both. The decision will be announced June 22.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

In a very handsome (hard cover), well-priced ($32.95) volume, Text Publishing (for a few years now Australia's best publisher in my view), has FINALLY published in Australia (within 40 not 30 days of its original British release) Philip Pullman's intriguing, provocative and highly controversial The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

Fervent, believing Christians will dislike this fictional retelling of the Jesus story intensely. There is no doubt it is heretical in the accepted, ecclesial sense. It denies miracles and most importantly Jesus' bodily resurrection. Jesus is a man, nothing more, nothing less, in possession of no supernatural or otherworldly powers, and to whom nothing that conflicts with the normal laws of physics happens. He is a powerful preacher however, whose simple message offers hope to the poor, the sick and the oppressed.

But he has a twin brother called Christ, who has an eye to history and politics, and the need to 'interpret' his brother's message of radical love and poverty so as to make it more palatable, worldly and enduring. He is, clearly, the emerging institutional Church. He is not a saint, this Christ, although well meaning. He is a sinner who sleeps with prostitutes and eventually betrays Jesus with a Judas kiss.

'Christ wrote down every word, but he resolved to improve the story later....For the Kingdom to flourish, it needs a body of men, and women too, both Jews and Gentiles, faithful followers under the guidance of men of authority and wisdom. And this Church - we can call it a church - will need men of formidable organisational powers and deep intellectual penetration, both to conceive and develop the structure of the body and to formulate the doctrines that will hold it together. There are such men, and they are ready and waiting. The church will not lack organisation and doctrine.' 

Pullman's seemingly simple story of a good man and his clever, conniving brother is anything but. This novel is situated in a rich, theological tradition in its quest for the truth of the historical Jesus, the beginnings of the 'official' gospel story, the canon, and the critical first 100 years of the Christian offshoot of Judaism.

It is beautifully written, in graceful, simple and elegant prose, and it brings to vivid life the people and pivotal events of 2000 years ago.

An astonishing achievement really. I urge you to read it.