Granted, nonentities are people too, and a good storyteller can interest us in just about anybody, as Madame Bovary demonstrates. But although the narrator of Freedom tells us on the first page, “There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds,” one need read only that the local school “sucked” and that Patty was “very into” her teenage son, who in turn was “fucking” the girl next door, to know that whatever is wrong with these people does not matter. The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen. Madame Bovary’s marriagesucked, Heathcliff was into Catherine: these words fail the context not just because they are of our own time. There is no import in things that “suck,” no drama in someone’s being “into” someone else. As for the F word, Anthony Burgess once criticized the notion that to use it in matter-of-fact prose is to hark back to “a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour”; the word was taboo from the start, because it stands for brutal or at best impersonal sex. “A man can fuck a whore but, unless his wife is a whore, he cannot fuck his wife … There is no love in it.” A writer like Franzen, who describes two lovers as “fucking,” trivializes their relationship accordingly. The result is boredom.This is the criticism of a someone who has had the sincere misfortune of not having enough inspired cursing in his life. I jest, kind of. I think it's relatively problematic to dismiss common-place language across the board, given that what may spring from educated ennui may be the poetic vernacular of folks from another class. You don't have to be Anthony Burgess to be eloquent. And I think more importantly, sure, our contemporary slang does sometimes demonstrate a shallowness and inability to judge emotional scale. But if we're experiencing that as a nation, isn't it kind of...important?
Why Do I Have a Feeling...
That B.R. Myers, who writes a scathing (and for all I know, I've been reading genre fiction lately, deserved) review of Freedom in this month's Atlantic has never seen The Wire. Take this paragraph, on language: