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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Now -- as of this week -- Freudenberger's collection, titled "Lucky Girls" after the story that appeared in the New Yorker, is finally out, and the mainstream media is working itself into a similar lather. In addition to her appearances in Vogue and Elle, Entertainment Weekly has declared her "the summer's hottest young writer." (Hotter, presumably, than Tom Clancy who also has a new book out but has not yet appeared in E.W., as Freudenberger did, sitting on the floor against the wall, hair falling over one eye, next to a bowl of cherries.)
None of which makes hating Nell Freudenberger fair. It isn't fair. Most of the circumstances leading to the hatred happened through no fault of Freudenberger herself -- which is exactly the problem. As my friend R., a writer living outside Buffalo, wrote in a recent e-mail, "It just seems to have happened for Nell's career -- sitting at the desk, playing assistant, and then, oh? This old thing? This little story I wrote on a whim? And $500,000 worth of dominoes start falling into place." As J. puts it, "She didn't do what you're supposed to do -- she sat in 4 Times Square until [then New Yorker fiction editor] Bill Buford came to her."
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that four factors could lead to one young writer's becoming the object of other young writers' loathing. Let's say these factors are that the writer in question is thought to be attractive, thought not to have paid her dues, known to have gone to Harvard (horrors!), and believed to be without talent. The bad news for Freudenberger is that she represents the overlap of all these factors, thereby becoming emblematic to other 20-something aspiring literati of all that's unfair and demoralizing about publishing. It's not any single thing -- after all, I know several people who have gotten book deals comparable to the larger one Freudenberger supposedly turned down, and they don't elicit the contempt she does -- but rather it's everything. And, largely because of age (Freudenberger and I both graduated from college in 1997), she seems overly accessible; she's not different enough from the rest of us to be enjoying such different circumstances. To put it another way: I've never looked at Jonathan Franzen and thought, But that should be me!
The problem is, Freudenberger actually doesn't represent the overlap of the four hate-inviting factors; the exception is the last and most significant one. She's not without talent. In fact, her new collection is really good. The five stories are well-written, well-plotted, intelligent and surprising.
Believe me: I didn't want it to be this way. I came to the book eager to uncover its most damning aspects. For instance, the title -- didn't it cry out to be incorporated into headlines in a mocking comment on Freudenberger herself? For God's sake, it was like calling a really wretched novel "The Big Disaster." And how about allowing just five stories to constitute an entire collection? Wasn't that a bit thin?
I was pleased when, on Page 8, an older man says to the young American woman who is the first story's protagonist, "You're extremely pretty." Aha! I thought, licking my chops. This will be the kind of fiction where other characters are constantly telling the disingenuously self-effacing main character, clearly a stand-in for the author, how alluring she is. (Such fiction is only slightly less odious than fiction in which other characters are constantly telling the disingenuously self-effacing main character, clearly a stand-in for the author, how witty she is -- especially when there's nary a funny remark to be found.) But the older man's remark in the story is offset both by the thrill it gives the protagonist, who is unaccustomed to such compliments, and by the protagonist's own apparently ingenuous admission that she is, in fact, not extremely pretty.
I still wasn't won over, though. The stories are set occasionally in the United States but more often in India and Asia (both Thailand and Vietnam), and in the margins of Page 21, I noted that Nell Freudenberger was probably the kind of person who had, during college, returned from a year abroad pretending not to remember the English words for things. But then something happened. It started happening in the second story, as the evocative details and vivid images and casually realistic lines of dialogue accumulated -- I think it was somewhere soon after the description of "orange and white carp [gliding] just under the green surface, like pale, fat feet floating in a lake" -- and I found myself spending less time trying to be appalled and more time just, well, reading.
It was on Page 80 that Freudenberger got me, with a sentence uttered by a woman who is grievously depressed: "I thought of going to bed, but what I really wanted was to be inside the bed -- inside the mattress, where it was warm and dense and silent, with the stuffing packed around my arms and legs." What got me about the sentence was both how weird it was -- weird in a sincere rather than quirky way -- and how understandable. And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.
