Role Models

Role Models is the most recent book by John Waters. Marketed as a memoir, it’s really more of a memoirish collection of essays paying homage to the numerous role models Waters has looked up to over the years. Of course, if you’re at all familiar with Waters — a.k.a. the Sultan of Smut/King of Bad Taste/Pope of Trash — you might already have the feeling that his role models aren’t exactly of the Oprah Winfrey, Mother Teresa variety. No. Instead, Waters’s role models run the range from Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo and her Comme des Garçons clothing line to the “freaks” he grew up around in Baltimore. Being a prolific writer in addition to being a filmmaker, Waters has had the chance to meet many of his role models over the years, and it is from these encounters that he culls many of the stories in the book.

In the interest of keeping my word count down (I love Waters and this is still gonna be a long post, y’all) and the review PG-13ish (him being the Sultan of Smut all all), I’m only going to touch on a few of my favorite essays in the collection. Fascinating as I found “Outsider Porn,” that one did not make my cut.

I’ll start with “Little Richard,” which appears in the last half of the book but gives some funny, interesting insight on what Waters was like as a child. He was a handful early on, and Little Richard was an early role model (in fact, that’s who inspired Waters’s trademark pencil mustache). Of all the people Waters has interviewed in his life, Little Richard was one of the people he most wanted to meet since he idolized him growing up. He writes:

Farther Away: Essays

I’ve been surprised this week by how little fanfare has been made over Jonathan Franzen’s latest book, Farther Away. Are people still suffering from Freedom overload? Are his fiction offerings the only things people are rabid for? Was his most recent essay on Edith Wharton the last straw? Are people just Franzened out? Who knows. All I know is that I pre-ordered the book over a month ago in anticipation, and it was so worth the wait.

Spanning the years from 1998 through 2011, the book offers a collection of twenty-one essays and speeches. I immediately recognized the first essay, “Pain Won’t Kill You,” which was his 2011 commencement address to Kenyan College graduates. Another one I recognized was “The Greatest Family Ever Storied,” which was originally published in The New York Times in 2010 (and whose title, coincidentally, I spent forever trying to recall about a month ago).

Many of the essays are on themes that fans of Franzen are now long familiar with: birding, environmentalism, and technology. But while these three recurring themes do permeate Farther Away, readers also get to see the more personal side of Franzen. The book is also filled with essays about some of Franzen’s favorite books (and least favorite books: apparently, the man really has it in for American Pastoral).

Those who have read The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History are already privy to some details of his private life, such as the pain of his divorce and the relationship with his family. He opens up a little more in Farther Away in essays like “On Autobiographical Fiction,” which was originally a lecture. I loved this essay, as he addressed some of the more annoying questions that novelists are constantly asked, beginning with “Who are your influences?” and ending with “Is your fiction autobiographical?” It’s a fantastic essay (and honestly not as obnoxious as that last line makes it sound).

The True Memoirs of Little K

At the age of 100, Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs. Now living in Paris, Kschessinska looks back fondly–albeit delusionally–on the prime of her life, when she was the prima ballerina assoluta of the Russian Imperial Ballet. As a talented and scheming girl of seventeen, Mathilde caught the eye of tsarevich Nicholas Romanov, the man who would later become the last tsar of Russia. The two entered a whirlwind romance; as Nicholas’s mistress, Mathilde gained professional opportunities and amassed material possessions. She envisioned herself as the future matriarch of the imperial family, but of course, it was never a possibility: Nicholas went on to marry Alexandra, and Mathilde was left with nothing but an empty home and a name of ill repute. As the years passed and Alexandra gave birth to several daughters but no male heir, Nicholas’s affections began to waver, and Mathilde found a way to capture the tsar’s attention once more. By this time, the revolution that would bring down the imperial family was beginning to foment, and Mathilde’s rekindled relationship with Nicholas would have dark consequences.

I didn’t like The True Memoirs of Little K at first. The first few chapters are devoted extensive descriptions of St. Petersburg at its height, and no detail is spared. Unfortunately, this meant that the beginning of the book is sorely lacking in plot and character development, and I was frequently tempted to stop reading. Once you do start seeing some character development, it becomes apparent that Mathilde is unbelievably vain, and she thinks so highly of herself and her place in history that I often wondered if she was mentally ill. A reliable narrator she is not.

The Marriage Plot

To say that Jeffrey Eugenides’ latest novel, The Marriage Plot, has an air of pretension would probably be an understatement. It revolves around the lives of Brown University students. Pages upon pages are devoted to literary criticism, semiotics, religious theory, and biology. One of the main characters, an intelligent man battling manic depression, wallows in narcissistic self-examination. Post-graduation, the characters go off and do what the progeny of rich, white east coasters did in the late 1970s: traveled abroad.

Yet to regale The Virgin Suicides or Middlesex and act disgruntled over the subject matter of The Marriage Plot–which I’ve seen a lot of online–is disingenuous. I just read The Virgin Suicides about a month ago, so it’s fresh in my mind; every time I see these complaints online, I think, “this is how Eugenides has always been!” He’s an academic. If you have the opportunity to see him at a reading, that becomes apparent right away. Though the characters do a lot of the same soul-searching people go through at some point in life, ultimately, The Marriage Plot reflects a fairly small segment of the U.S. population. I expected as much. Did it bother me? No, not really.

The book’s title comes from a course that Madeline, one of the three main protagonists, takes in undergrad called “The Marriage Plot: Selected Novels of Austen, Eliot, and James.” The professor of the course posits:

In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for divorce later?…[M]arriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where could you find a marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t.

Freedom

Aside from a few snarky tweets, I’ve tried to hold my tongue on the Franzenfreude brouhaha.*  I’ve also largely managed to steer clear of every review of Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Freedom, reason being that I wanted to come at the book with as fresh a perspective as possible.  But let’s be honest here: I love Franzen’s work, so I’m already a little biased in his favor.

Sure enough, I loved this book. Loved the writing, loved the eloquence, loved the nuance with which the characters were written. I even teared up at one point. The first part of the book is utterly mesmerizing.  The politics in the second part got pedantic at times, but by the end, one can see they served their purpose well. I could probably gush on and on, but it seems you can’t turn a corner without running smack into a gushing review of Freedom (though I’m sure now that the book is out, the negative reviews will also commence in earnest).

What I prefer to talk about instead are the dismissals of this book as The Corrections Redux. Both books are set in the Midwest and revolve around families that are very easy to dislike; several characters treat readers to heavy doses of upper middle class elitism. Both books have a son go off on questionable get-rich-quick schemes abroad. Both books even have entire scenes solely devoted to shit. Actual shit.**

But where The Corrections can be boiled down to family dysfunction, Freedom is much more sprawling in scope. At its root, Freedom is about family relationships, but it is also about overpopulation, the environment, politics, the numerous faults of society in general, and of course, the concept of freedom (i.e., is anybody ever really free?).  Time and again, the characters kept running into emotional and psychological walls when they should have been at their freest.

And though he is often dismissed for writing about white Midwesterners (thus alienating people), I also distinctly recall people praising Franzen for his nuanced handling of rape, race, and class when his short story, Agreeable, was published in The New Yorker a few months ago.  The story is actually an excerpt that appears early in Freedom, and is all the more powerful in the larger context of the book.  Furthermore, as with my response to The Corrections, I could absolutely see myself in these characters.  I live in a completely different world and have a different background? But I still see myself in them. It’s what I love about Franzen’s writing.

The Corrections

Worst was the image of the little girl curled up inside her, a girl not much larger than a large bug but already a witness to such harm.  Witness to a tautly engorged little brain that dipped in and out beyond the cervix and then, with a quick double spasm that could hardly be considered adequate warning, spat thick alkaline webs of spunk into her private room.  Not even born, and already drenched in sticky knowledge.

Alfred lay catching his breath and repenting his defiling of the baby.  A last child was an opportunity to learn from one’s mistakes and make corrections, and he resolved to seize this opportunity…But he’d squirted such filth on her when she was helpless.  She’d witnessed such scenes of marriage, and so of course, when she was older, she betrayed him. (281)

I first read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections about 8 or 9 years ago, back when it first came out.  By the time I finished it, I was in love with the work; for the past 8 or 9 years, I’ve considered it one of my favorite books of all time.  Upon re-reading it, I found that so much of my memory of the events in the book has faded.  I vaguely remembered some of the plot, but the one passage of the book I clearly remembered (and have thought of occasionally throughout the years), is the above passage.

It’s so strange to think of angsty, 20-year-old me falling in love with The Corrections. The book, which follows the various travails of the Lambert family, is not a terribly easy read.  I mostly remember delighting over the fact that Franzen spurned Oprah’s Book Club.  I also remember relating so much to the characters’ experiences in some weird way, even though most of the situations the characters found themselves in are things I can’t fathom ever doing.

And now here I am, a twenty-something (still somewhat angsty) grown woman with much more sophisticated literature under my belt (definitely picked up on the Infinite Jest influences).  I also have much more life experience under my belt, and I find myself relating to some of the characters themselves.  I really don’t know what this says about me, as all of the characters are obnoxious, horrible, abusive people with little to no redeeming qualities, but I think that’s what I love about Franzen’s book.  He takes various aspects of humanity, turns them up several notches, and presents them in their most extreme forms as train wreck you can’t tear your eyes away from.  Yet underneath the humor, the wacky side plots, and the drama still lie those truths about human nature.

Publisher/Year: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2001
Source: Bookstore
Format: Print