Your Damaged City: Jonathan Franzen Gets His Comeuppance

In the 1930s and 40s, my father owned a tavern on the South Side of Chicago. He called the place O'Pollack's, since in those days Jews were subject to frequent mob teasings in the more provincial neighborhoods of our Second City. I often pulled the tap for thirsty common laborers or ran bets down to the corner book. Mostly, though, I sat and listened to the stories of work and love and loss and eventually turned them into my first book of oral histories, The Men of Chicago, which was later, without my permission, adapted into a third-rate Broadway musical. Since those long-faded picaresque days, I'm often filled with longing for the cheap beer and salty talk of urban tavern-dwellers. So from time to time, I put on my worst shirt and sally down from the penthouse of my mind, seeking fresh perspective and fresher material.

The other day, I found myself drinking a beer in Bunion's, one of the last remaining working-class joints in Cobble Hill. The times I'd had there! I'd simultaneously clocked Hamill and Breslin in one memorable 1966 night, and one year later, I got the best blowjob of my life from Lou Reed. Well, that had nothing to do with Bunion's, but I still like to brag about it.

On this particular Tuesday afternoon in late October, I met up with three ironworkers of my acquaintance named, respectively, Pete, Sid and Dan.

"Hello, boys," I said.

"Hey, man," said Pete. "I really liked the piece on you in Lingua Franca."

"That was the last issue," I said. "They ran out of money."

"What a shame!" he said.

"So what's up?" I asked.

"We're very traumatized," Sid said.

"Damaged," said Dan.

"I would lean toward ruined, myself," added Pete. "I can't believe what's happened to New York."

I felt myself begin to weep internal tears. Would the effects of September 11 never dissipate? God save this fragile nation!

"We all feel it, boys," I said. "The attacks have changed us forever."

They looked at me, puzzled.

"What attacks?" said Dan.

"The World Trade Center attacks," I said.

They laughed.

"Shit, we've been over that for weeks," said Sid.

"Then what's the problem?"

"It's Jonathan Franzen," said Pete. "We can't believe what he said about Oprah Winfrey. It broke our hearts."

?

Franzen's rejection of Oprah's Book Club has struck at the core of New York City's working class, which had always accepted him as one of its own. Pete, for instance, said he's memorized the first half of The Twenty-Seventh City, and is trying to translate the book into Spanish for his mother in Mexico. Sid told me that he's long wished for a movie adaptation of Strong Motion starring Reese Witherspoon.

"She'd be perfect," he said.

Dan had taken it the farthest. He pulled up his sleeve. There, next to the Marines insignia and a guitar on fire, was a perfect likeness of a tweed-wearing, unshaven Jonathan Franzen, encased in a heart, with the initials "J.F." running underneath like a secret totem.

"You don't understand," he said. "For us, Jonathan Franzen is the guy who made it out."

Of course, I understood how they felt. Five years previous, a younger, less wise Franzen had written me a letter, asking me about the future of the novel. I swore to write him back, but I got pretty busy. Still, I understood his yearnings, and kept his number around in case I needed an invitation to a book launch party.

"Well, shit," I said. "Let's give him a call."

As it happens, I caught Franzen at home. He was working on a response to a response that was responding to something he had written for Salon responding to a piece that someone else had written about him.

"J. Franz!" I exclaimed. "Get your ass over to Bunion's, pronto! Three hardworking men have lost faith in you!"

He was at the bar within 10 minutes. Sid, Pete and Dan accosted him.

"Why'd you do it, man?" Sid asked.

"I was just saying what I thought my audience wanted to hear," Franzen said.

"Don't you get it, man?" Dan howled. "We're your audience!"

"You are?" he said. "But...but...your kinds of people don't read."

That was where Jonathan Franzen was wrong. He'd totally misjudged his public. Long novels about yuppie anxiety in the face of global capitalism's inevitable decline have an enduring popularity among urban workingmen. They all watch Oprah, every day, and Franzen is their hero. They told him so. He began to weep.

"How could I have been so foolish?" he said.

I patted him on the shoulder, gently, mentorly.

"It's a lesson we all have to learn someday, J. Franz," I said.

"Stop calling me J. Franz," he said. "It's pretentious."

"Yeah," said Pete. "Don't fuck with Mr. Zero!"

All three ironworkers, and Jonathan Franzen, their god, began to look at me menacingly. Well, this was Bunion's after all, home of the literary brawl. I ordered a shot of Maker's and an MGD Light, and downed them both.

"Eat me, dick cheese," I said.

Franzen lunged at me, fists flying, his three musketeers phalanxed behind him. I was pleased. Novelists must fight with their hands, not their pens, and we were bound to bleed together.

The literary balance had been restored.