The end of the end of the earth Essays

Review by New York Times Review

WHEN SOMETHING REALLY captures his interest, Jonathan Franzen is an engaged and engaging reporter. Which is to say, two essays in his new collection, "The End of the End of the Earth," truly expand one's knowledge of the world. In the first, "May Your Life Be Ruined," he describes the post-Communist surge in Albanian bird hunting, an ongoing cannonade that has turned the country into a "giant sinkhole for eastern European migratory biomass: Millions of birds fly in and very few get out alive." He talks to hunters, to game wardens, to a confused urbanite who explains the euphoria of being allowed to own a gun: "It was like when summer comes and you feel like jumping in the ocean." The other essay, "Invisible Losses," is similar: an account of efforts to protect "the world of seabirds, which encompasses two-thirds of our planet but is mostly invisible to us." He visits breeding grounds and talks with scientists eradicating rodents; he tracks down the conservationists who have forced through regulations to dramatically reduce the number of albatross snared on fishing hooks. The piece is the product of curiosity - he's turning over rocks along the shore and finding noteworthy details beneath. That makes it more the shame that he usually opts for something much easier. Most of the pieces in this book fall into the loose category of personal essay. Some are travelogues, mostly about his high-end and self-consciously "compulsive" pursuit of adding species to his many lists of the birds he's encountered. (It seems to be all about knowing which guides to hire to take you to the locations of rare "endemics" unique to whatever island or jungle you've visited, though there is a moment of triumph when Franzen discovers an emperor penguin that no one else on his Lindblad Antarctic cruise has noticed.) If you are a bird lister, you may find this thrilling; in literary terms, though, Kenn Kaufman's account in "Kingbird Highway" was a good deal more picaresque, mostly because he was making his voyages without any money. But if Franzen's travel writing is unexceptional, it's better than his political essays, which suffer from being underthought and over-emoted, the chief feeling often being a kind of self-absorbed peevishness. The key example here is a piece called "Save What You Love." As he tells the story, he was "already not in a good mood" when he read a news release from the Audubon Society explaining that climate change was "the greatest threat" to America's birds. That statement deepened his tetchy ill humor, because he believed that it might distract bird lovers from what he considered the more immediate work of protecting habitat. "I felt bullied by its dominance," he writes of global warming, and so he conceived of the essay, which turns into an extended whine about environmental groups for focusing so heavily on carbon emissions. The obvious response, of course, is that one could work on both climate and conservation, which Audubon does (and not Audubon alone; to cite the example closest at hand, I've spent much of my life organizing around climate justice, but also found time to serve for many years on the board of the Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy as it saved hundreds of thousands of acres). But even this misses the point, which is that there are in fact enormous villains in the climate story, but they don't work at environmental groups. Franzen's only mention of the oil industry is to dismiss its influence: "The reason the American political system can't deliver action isn't simply that fossil-fuel corporations sponsor denialists and buy elections." In fact, that is the biggest single reason. In 2015, the same year the essay here titled "Save What You Love" was published in The New Yorker, a team of journalists conducting exhaustive interviews with whistle-blowers and digging in archives uncovered that oil companies had known all about climate change since the early 1980s and engaged in a massive cover-up that led to our withdrawal from the Paris climate accords. If you sit down to write about climate change and end up concentrating your fire on the Audubon Society, you've lost the plot. It's unseemly to take digs at those who are trying to actually do something about the problem. Franzen includes a little jab at the writer and activist Naomi Klein for arguing that "the time is right" for societies to tackle climate change. But over the last decade a vast climate-justice campaign, of which Klein is a part, has actually won significant victories: keeping Shell from opening the Arctic to oil-drilling, blocking pipelines, banning fracking across many territories including Franzen's former home state, New York, and pushing his current residence, California, to pledge it will convert to 100 percent renewable energy. One reason Franzen wants to concentrate on immediate conservation tasks is that he's more or less given up on fighting climate change. He's convinced himself that the "most likely rise in temperature this century is on the order of six degrees." That's actually an overstatement, an eventuality only if we don't make a powerful attempt to change our ways. If we do, the damage will be bad enough (the one degree Celsius we've so far raised the temperature has caused plenty of havoc already), but perhaps we will stop short of wiping out the base for our civilization (and with it much of the rest of the planet's DNA, avian as well as primate). As he points out, individual action at this point will not amount to much; all the more reason for thought leaders like Franzen to join in building movements to prevent the worst outcomes. Bitching about those who are making the attempt seems a sad waste of precious time. BILL MCKIBBEN is the founder of 350.org, the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury and the author of the forthcoming "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?"

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

Franzen (Purity , 2015) begins his fourth collection of personal essays with praise for how the form invites honest self-examination and sustained engagement with ideas, qualities he masterfully demonstrates in 16 thought-provoking narratives in which he flies against the prevailing winds of common assumptions and expectations. A birder, Franzen travels the world to add to his life list, a mission that enmeshes him in environmental conundrums as he celebrates the wondrous variety and beauty of avian species and seeks to understand the myriad threats against them. Franzen recounts journeys to Peru, Ghana, Egypt, Albania, and the Caribbean, and profiles the people he meets who are trying to protect birds and their habitats by thinking and acting locally, an infinitely more productive approach, he argues, than idealistic attempts to address climate change. Franzen displays his literary-criticism chops in an intriguing reconsideration of Edith Wharton, while in the intricately affecting title essay he candidly reports on a voyage to Antarctica and shares a bit of family history. Another essay title neatly states Franzen's reverberating core theme: Save What You Love. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A compulsive need to find order, and a love of birding, represent two of the central threads of this stimulating collection of previously published essays from novelist Franzen (Purity). In the opening essay, "The Essay in Dark Times," Franzen self-identifies as "what people in the world of birding call a lister," which makes him "morally inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it." Throughout the essays that follow, Franzen muses about writing, Edith Wharton, climate change, Antarctica, the photographs of Sarah Stolfa, and birds, always birds. Some of his opinions have already stoked controversy: In "A Rooting Interest," he comments on Wharton's privileged position amid New York City's social elite, and observes she had "one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't pretty." In "Save What You Love," he takes the Audubon Society to task for naming climate change as the greatest threat to birds, when "no individual bird death can be definitively attributed" to it, while statistics indicate that picture windows and outdoor cats kill three billion birds annually. Whether observing the eerie beauty of Antarctica ("far from having melted," he reports) or dispensing "Ten Rules for the Novelist," Franzen makes for an entertaining, sometimes prickly, but always quotable companion. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

As the ambiguous title of the latest work from National Book Award winner Franzen (The Corrections) suggests, the essays in this collection contemplate our uncertain future in the face of climate change. But rather than a rallying cry to rescue the world from destruction, Franzen concedes that it's already too late. Yet despite this gloomy position, he does not yield to defeatism either. Rather, he focuses on what can be saved: a view, a bird, a memory. An avid birdwatcher, Franzen mostly focuses on birding adventures in faraway places-Africa, Jamaica, Antarctica. Reading them one after another, his obsession builds to reveal what is, to the author, imperative: paying attention. These fleeting, winged creatures appear to remind readers to witness, to see what is left to be seen, and to notice life before it disappears forever. Carbon dioxide is not to blame for our planet's ruin so much as our failure to observe-our relationships and interconnectedness. VERDICT This book is a Silent Spring for today, but instead of challenging readers to change the world, it pushes them to change themselves. [See Prepub Alert, 5/14/18.]-Meagan Lacy, -Guttman Community Coll., CUNY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A new collection of personal essays from a self-proclaimed "depressive pessimist" and "angry, bird-loving misfit."Franzen's (Purity, 2015, etc.) third collection of recently published essays and speeches sparkles with intelligent and insightful forays into a limited range of subjects. The opening piece, "The Essay in Dark Times," could function as a primer for the book. We might be "living in an essayistic golden age," while the personal essay "is in eclipse." After recounting lessons learned while working on an essay with a wise New Yorker editor, the author jumps to bashing a "short-fingered vulgarian" and his "lying, bullying tweets," concluding with his bird obsession and global warming, the "biggest issue in all of human history." In "Why Birds Matter," Franzen lovingly describes falcons, roadrunners, and albatrosses, among others. "Wild birds matter," Franzen writes, because "they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding." In another piece, the author describes his visit to South America to observe the beleaguered Amazon Conservation Association in action. In "May Your Life Be Ruined," he chronicles his travels to Egypt to painfully watch migratory bird-killing with Bedouin falcon trappers. There's literature here, too. In the expected writer-to-writers advice essay, he offers up one page of 10 pithy, odd dos and don'tse.g., "You see more sitting still than chasing after." Franzen resuscitates Edith Wharton, praising her "most generously realized" The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, in which she "embraces her new-fashioned divorce plot as zestfully as Nabokov embraces pedophilia in Lolita." There's also the affectionate "A Friendship," in which the author praises William Vollmann's work ethic, vast projects, fine style, and "hunger for beautiful form." The last, titular essay about a voyage to Antarctica is worth the cover price.Witty, reflective, opinionated essays from a writer with the ability to "laugh in dark times." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Manhattan 1981 My girlfriend, V, and I were finishing college, with a summer to burn before the next thing, and New York beckoned. V went up to the city and signed a three-month lease on the apartment of a Columbia student, Bobby Atkins, who may have been the son of the creator of the Atkins Diet, or maybe we just enjoyed imagining that he was. His place, on the southwest corner of 110th Street and Amsterdam, had two small bedrooms and was irremediably filthy. We arrived in June with a fifth of Tanqueray, a carton of Marlboro Lights, and Marcella Hazan's Italian cookbook. Someone had left behind a spineless black plush-toy panther, manufactured in Korea, which we liberated and made ours. We were living on a margin. Before full-scale gentrification, before mass incarceration, the city seemed starkly drawn in black and white. When a young Harlem humorist on the uptown 3 train performed the "magic" act of making every white passen­ger disappear at Ninety-sixth Street, I felt tried and found guilty of whiteness. Our friend Jon Justice, who that summer had Thomas Pynchon's V stuffed into the back pocket of his cordu­roys, was mugged at Grant's Tomb, where he shouldn't have been. I was aesthetically attracted to cities but morbidly afraid of being shot. In New York, Amsterdam Avenue was a sharp divid­ing line, and I stood on the east side of it only once, when I made the mistake of riding a C train to 110th and walking home from there. It was late afternoon and nobody paid attention to me, but I was light-headed with fear. Deepening my impression of men­ace were the heavy, light-blocking security gates on our windows and the police lock in our entry hall, its steel rod anchored to the floor and angling up to a slot on the front door. I associated it with our next-door neighbor, an elderly white man with raging senile dementia. He would pound on our door or stand on the landing, wearing only pajama bottoms, and asseverate, over and over, using a vile epithet, that his wife was having relations with black men. I was afraid of him, too, and I hated him for naming a racial division we liberal kids accepted in silence. In theory, V and I were trying to write fiction, but I was op­pressed by the summer heat and by the penitentiary gloom of the Atkins place, the cockroaches, the wandering neighbor. V and I fought, wept, made up, and played with our black panther. We practiced cooking and semiotic criticism and ventured out--always going west--to the Thalia, and Hunan Balcony, and Papyrus Books, where I bought the latest issue of Semiotext(e) and dense volumes of theory by Derrida and Kenneth Burke. I don't remember how I had any money at all. Conceivably my parents, despite their disapproval of New York and of my cohabitation with V, had given me some hundreds of dollars. I do remember sending letters to various magazines, inquiring about paid intern­ships, and being told that I needed to have applied six months earlier. Luckily, my brother Tom was in New York that summer, doing a loft conversion for the hotshot young photographer Gregory Heisler. Tom, who was then based in Chicago, had come east with a Chicago friend of Heisler's who wanted to start a renovation business and hoped to pick up some skills from my brother and split the profits. But Heisler could see that Tom had all the know-how. Before long, the friend was sent back to Chicago, leaving Tom without a laborer. This became my job. Heisler was a portraitist, eventually best known for his double-exposed image of George H. W. Bush on the cover of Time . His loft was at the corner of Broadway and Houston, on the top floor of the Cable Building, then a den of sweatshops, later the home of the Angelika theater. The building was zoned for commercial use, and Tom and Heisler hadn't bothered with city permits, and so for me, at least, there was a frisson of illegal­ity to the hidden apartment that Tom was building behind the photo studio's south wall. Heisler wanted every surface in the apartment covered with a trendy gray plastic laminate whose little raised dots made edging it with a router a nightmare. I spent long afternoons in a cloud of acetone fumes, cleaning rubber cement off the laminate, while Tom, in another room, cursed the raised dots. My main job was to fetch things. Every morning, Tom gave me a shopping list of construction staples and exotica, and I made the rounds of supply stores on the Bowery and Canal Street. East of the Bowery were the dangerous alphabet streets and the proj­ects, a zone of no-go on my mental map of the island. But in the rest of lower Manhattan I found the aesthetic experience I'd been looking for. SoHo's transformation was still larval, its streets quiet, its iron pillars peeling. Lower Broadway was peopled with garment workers, and the city below Canal seemed hungover from the seventies, as if the buildings were surprised to find themselves still standing. On the Fourth of July weekend, V and Jon Justice and I got up onto the old West Side Elevated High­way (closed but not yet demolished) and went walking under the new World Trade Center towers (brutalist but not yet tragic) and didn't see another person, white or black, in any direction. Romantically deserted vistas were what I wanted in a city when I was twenty-one.     On the evening of the Fourth, when Morningside Heights be­gan to sound like wartime Beirut, V and I went over to East End Avenue to watch the official fireworks from our friend Lisa Albert's family's apartment. I was astonished when her building's elevator opened directly into the apartment's front hall. Her family's cook asked me if I'd like a sandwich, and I said yes, please. It had never occurred to me that my background and Albert's weren't more or less the same. I hadn't imagined that an apartment like hers existed, or that a person only five years older than I was, Greg Heisler, could have a team of assistants at his disposal. He also had a willowy and dumbstrikingly beautiful wife, Pru, who came from Australia and wore airy white summer dresses that made me think of Daisy Buchanan. The city's dividing line of wealth was not unrelated to the other dividing line, but it was less distinctly geographical and easier for me to cross. Under the spell of my elite college educa­tion, I envisioned overthrowing the capitalist political economy in the near future, through the application of literary theory, but in the meantime my education enabled me to feel at ease on the wealth side of the line. At the formal midtown restaurant where V's visiting grandmother took the two of us to lunch one day, I was given a blue blazer to wear with my black jeans, and this was all it took for me to pass. I was too idealistic to want more money than I needed to sub­sist, too arrogant to envy Heisler, and so to me the rich were mainly a curiosity, interesting for the conspicuousness of both their consumption and their thrift. When V and I visited her other grandparents, at their country estate outside the city, they showed me the little paintings by Renoir and Cézanne in their living room and served us stale store-bought cookies. At Tavern on the Green, where we were taken to dinner by my brother Bob's in-laws, a pair of psychoanalysts who had an apartment not a lot smaller than Albert's, I was appalled to learn that if you wanted a vegetable with your steak you had to pay extra for it. The money seemed of no consequence to Bob's father-in-law, but we noticed that one of the mother-in-law's shoes was held together with elec­trical tape. Heisler, too, was given to grand gestures, like flying Tom's soon-to-be wife out from Chicago for a weekend. But he paid Tom $12,500 for the loft conversion, approximately one- eighth of what it would have cost with a New York contractor. It was people like Tom and me who didn't recognize the value of what they had in hand. Tom realized too late that he could easily have charged Heisler two or three times as much, and I left Manhattan, in mid-August, owing $225 to St. Luke's Hos­pital. To celebrate the end of the summer and also, I think, our engagement to be married, V and I had gone to dinner at a Cuban restaurant on Columbus Avenue, Victor's, which her for­mer boyfriend, a Cuban, had frequented. I started with black bean soup and was a few spoonfuls into it when the beans seemed to come alive on my tongue, churning with a kind of malevolent aggression. I reached into my mouth and pulled out a narrow shard of glass. V flagged down our server and complained to him. The server summoned the manager, who apologized, exam­ined the piece of glass, disappeared with it, and then came back to hustle us out of the restaurant. I was pressing a napkin to my tongue to stanch the bleeding. At the front door, I asked if it was okay for me to keep the napkin. "Yes, yes," the manager said, shutting the door behind us. V and I hailed our only cab of the summer and went directly to St. Luke's, our neighborhood hos­pital. Eventually a doctor told me that my cut would heal quickly and did not require stitches, but I had to wait a couple of hours to receive this information and a tetanus shot. Directly across from me, in one of the corridors where I waited, a young African-American woman was lying on a gurney with a gunshot wound in her bared abdomen. The wound was leaking pinkish fluid but was evidently not life-threatening. I can still see it vividly, a .22-caliber-size hole, the thing I'd walked in fear of. Fifteen years later, after being married and divorced, I built a work studio in a loft on 125th Street, following Tom's example and hanging my own drywall, wiring my own outlets. I'd got­ten smarter about money, and I was able to jump on a cheap space in Harlem because I wasn't scared of the city anymore. I had a personal connection with the Harlemites in my building, and after work I could go downtown and safely walk with my friends on the alphabet streets, which were being colonized by young white people. In time, on the strength of the sales of the book I'd written in Harlem, I bought my own Upper East Side co-op and became a person who took younger friends and relatives to dinner at places they couldn't have afforded. The city's dividing line had become more permeable, at least in one direction. White power had reasserted itself through the pressure of real-estate prices and police action. In hindsight, the era of white fear seems most remarkable for having lasted as long as it did. Of all my mistakes as a twenty-one-year-old in the city, the one I now regret the most was my failure to imagine that the black New Yorkers I was afraid of might be even more afraid than I was. On my last full day in Manhattan that summer, I got a check from Greg Heisler for my last four weeks of work. To cash it, I had to go to the European American Bank, a strange little hex­agonal building that sat on a bite of dismal parkland taken out of SoHo's southeast flank. I don't remember how many hundred-dollar bills I was given there--maybe it was six, maybe nine--but it seemed to me a dangerous amount of cash to carry in my wallet. Before I left the bank, I discreetly slipped the bills into one of my socks. Outside, it was one of those bright August mornings when a cold front flushes the badness from the city's sky. I headed straight to the nearest subway, anxious about my wealth, hoping I could pass as poor to someone who wanted the money in my sock more than I did.   Excerpted from The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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