Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen Read Free Book Online Page B

year that followed his quitting Nardil. He made strange and seemingly self-defeating decisions about his care, engaged in a fair amount of bamboozlement of his shrinks (whom one can only pity for having drawn such a brilliantly complicated case), and in the end created an entire secret life devoted to suicide. Throughout that year, the David whom I knew well and loved immoderately was struggling bravely to build a more secure foundation for his work and his life, contending with heartbreaking levels of anxiety and pain, while the David whom I knew less well, but still well enough to have always disliked and distrusted, was methodically plotting his own destruction and his revenge on those who loved him.
    That he was blocked with his work when he decided to quit Nardil—was bored with his old tricks and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it—is not inconsequential. He’d loved writing fiction, Infinite Jest in particular, and he’d been very explicit, in our many discussions of the purpose of novels, about his belief that fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. Fiction was his way off the island, and as long as it was working for him—as long as he’d been able to pour his love and passion into preparing his lonely dispatches, and as long as these dispatches were coming as urgent and fresh and honest news to the mainland—he’d achieved a measure of happiness and hope for himself. When his hope for fiction died, after years of struggle with the new novel, there was no other way out but death. If boredom is the soil in which the seeds of addiction sprout, and if the phenomenology and the teleology of suicidality are the same as those of addiction, it seems fair to say that David died of boredom. In his early story “Here and There,” the brother of a perfection-seeking young man, Bruce, invites him to consider “how boring it would be to be perfect,” and Bruce tells us:
    I defer to Leonard’s extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring.
    It’s a good joke; and yet the logic is somehow strangulatory. It’s the logic of “everything and more,” to echo yet another of David’s titles, and everything and more is what he wanted from and for his fiction. This had worked for him before, in Infinite Jest . But to try to add more to what is already everything is to risk having nothing: to become boring to yourself.
    A funny thing about Robinson Crusoe is that he never, in twenty-eight years on his Island of Despair, becomes bored. He speaks, yes, of the drudgery of his early labors, he later admits to becoming “heartily tir’d” of searching the island for cannibals, he laments not having any pipes in which to smoke the tobacco he finds on the island, and he describes his first year of company with Friday as the “pleasantest year of all the life I led in this place.” But the modern craving for stimulation is wholly absent. (The novel’s most astonishing detail may be that Robinson makes “three large runlets of rum or spirits” last a quarter century; I would have drunk all three in a month, just to be done with them.) Although he never ceases to dream of escape, he soon comes to take “a secret kind of pleasure” in his absolute ownership of the island:
    I look’d now upon the world as a thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and indeed no desires about: In a word, I had nothing indeed to do with it, nor was ever like to have; so I thought it look’d as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter.
    Robinson is able to survive his solitude because he’s lucky; he makes peace with his condition because he’s ordinary and his island is concrete. David, who was