Sometimes it seems I like to read book reviews more than I like to read books. While this isn’t in the end true, there is a pinprick of truth to it. It comes back to an essential character of my nature, which I am becoming more aware of as I muddle my way through this ad hoc life I continue to try to cobble together: that I find myself operating much more successfully when I have a framework within which to operate and also against which to rebel. Two quick thoughts on that: a) This is probably not unique, and may not even be unusual, even for an artist; and b) it may seem counterintuitive to people who are familiar with the way I have chosen to lead my life, which consists of a large degree of freedom (freedoms
from and freedoms to) compared to many or most people’s lives. While this is interesting, and I may pursue it at a future point, I will leave it at that statement and continue on with my earlier thought, which was, that book reviews can occasionally make explicit what in a book is implicit—that certain books (and here I’m going to stick with fiction, as it’s what I do and what I am most familiar with), perhaps most obviously with a certain kind of ambitious novel, but I imagine with most successful novels (the definition of successful to be left unexplained), operate with certain underlying assumptions that function, in this way, as a framework. So a quote from Sam Tanenhaus, a few sentences from the end of his long review of Jonathon Franzen’s Freedom:
In these pages, Walter, “a fanatic gray stubble on his cheeks,” seizes hold of the novel, and Franzen makes us see, as the best writers always have, that the only pathway to freedom runs through the maze of the interior life.
