The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, with Rob Harvilla

21:38Which we want to do. We got to. But Rebecca, let's do a, okay. Rob knew it was important. Maybe that's all we need to really say, honestly, for this. But talk us through where it came out, what's happened since, what's been a long life of the corrections by Jonathan Fenn.

21:52Jeff:When it came out in 2001, one of the blurbs is, this is the first great book of the 21st century. So it lands with that back cover covered in blurbs, and that's a big one. It won the National Book Award. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Penn Faulkner that year. Richard Russo won the Pulitzer for Empire Falls instead. And I'm not sure how I feel about that decision 25 years later. That's a great nugget, Rebecca. I didn't think to go who won the Pulitzer. I think there's a way of reading the corrections as being a correction to the way Richard Russo is writing about these old industrial towns in the Northeast, right?

22:31Like it's sort of, you know, that's the end of something. And Franzen sees that as part of a continuum of something. Yes, these people working in these paper mills are getting fired and retiring and dying, but they have children. And the great continuity of life, right, is that life continues even beyond this thing. And Franzen, thinking of a way, this is not the end. We're not going to sort of bury our heads in the sand and be sad forever. Other things will happen. And Russo's a very funny writer, but Franzen's response to this sort of end of something is to find the ridiculous and find the satire and then suggest there is a futurity to these empire fallings.

23:12Like the ruins remain. What are we going to do in the ruins? And I've said this about Pynchon, which is going to be a specter that haunts the whole thing, is that the postmodern and maybe post-postmodern is the jester dancing through the ruins and finding something to talk about and finding something to make art out of. I think it's a fascinating twin. And I'm so glad you found that nugget there.

23:32Jeff:Yeah, it's such an interesting just moment in like great American fiction by older white guys. Yes. And it has endured this number five on the New York Times list of the best books of the century so far. We were talking about the Oprah of it all. But just for folks who don't know, Oprah selected this for her book club in 2001. And then there was a huge deal because Jonathan Franzen declined to appear on her show. And then in book events he was doing at bookstores right after he declined, people asked him questions about it that he made the mistake of answering in good faith. And those quotes got taken out of context and circulated around the early internet.

24:12Jeff:Admittedly, they don't sound great. He didn't really think that going on Oprah was in line with the, quote, high art literary tradition. He was concerned that the Oprah sticker on the book was going to turn off male readers. He talked about some of her past pics as being schmaltzy and one-dimensional, which like by 2001, Oprah had picked some Toni Morrison's and some Faulkner's, but she had also picked some schmaltzy one-dimensional books. So like he's kind of the real sin was that he said the quiet thing out loud. They did ultimately resolve things. She selected his 2010 novel, Freedom, for her book club.

24:48Jeff:He went on the show. They sort of, you know, like kissed and made up a little bit, but that's a clip worth revisiting if you're interested. And it sold really well for this kind of literary fiction. More than 400 ,000 copies in the first year split between the regular version and the Oprah version. Huge numbers. Estimated at more than 1.6 million copies by 2018. So we're probably close to 2 million in circulation now. And it really, this is the book that established him as a serious player, which the Oprah controversy becomes a symbol again in 2010 when Freedom came out. And the New York Times did two reviews of it, which is very rare.

25:29Jeff:You only get two reviews in the New York Times if you are top-level elite. And there were women writers, led namely by Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Pico, who were really upset basically about the institutional sexism that exists in book coverage. But Jonathan Franzen became a pretty convenient scapegoat for it. And they started what became known as Franzenfreude, where it was like, fuck this guy, because these institutions are giving all of the attention to literary men. Women's books should be reviewed too. And of course they should. Whether Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult are writing the kinds of books that merit two reviews in the New York Times is a different question.

26:08Jeff:And Franzen at this point was already completely out of the internet game. I think he learned his lesson the first time around. But he has like Vox has an explainer about the many scandals of Jonathan Franzen. Like he just is a lightning rod and he's not trying to be. I think that is so fast. I remember this happening at the time. And I think Rob, you and I may be exactly the same age. I was like 23, my first year or two in grad school, when this is coming out, living in New York and being a little, but being both sympathetic and not to this critique, because the work itself doesn't really fall into what they're talking about.

26:46You know, the Weiner-Picot of the world, like he's doing something that's in a tradition of, you know, the DeLillos, the David Foster Wallaces, and certainly the, you know, the people that would come a little bit after and later. This is one where I think everyone is sort of right. I guess it's where I've come down to in 20 years of thinking about this. I think Oprah was wise to pick him. I think he was brave of her to pick him. I think he probably should have been allowed to be like, that's not for me. Maybe the reasons he thought it wasn't for me were wrongheaded. I think in hindsight, they really were.

27:16But I'm also glad that they came together for freedom later, because even as he was continuing to do publicity for this book, I watched an interview he did on Charlie Rose where he's very sort of sheepish and feels bad about how he deployed whatever he was going to say about his concern about Oprah and not sure being that's the right fit. I think he didn't know what he was talking about. And Oprah was very graceful in not really disinviting him, just sort of saying, let's not do this. And they both come back together. And I think they came from a very similar place, but a fascinating tempest, not really in a teapot.

27:46I don't want to minimize it because it was about something. But it was a weird lightning rod for this lightning to strike. I think the lightning needed to strike somewhere to talk about bias and talk about inclusion. But Franzen was an unfortunate, I think, lightning rod at this particular moment. Because part of the story here, Rebecca, is he was not Jonathan Franzen when this book came out. Like he had two books. That's where we're going to get into who wrote it. Rob is a real ghoul we're going to talk about who needs to read all of the books in order. So maybe Rob, I'm going to throw it here in a second.

28:16Because he had written these two books before. Rob, what were those books like? I have not read those. I have not read Purity. I have read Crossroads and I read Freedom. So just to get my own bona fides or lack thereof on the table. But you're a real one, Rob. What is your sense of the first two books that came before Corrections? Because this book is a correction of his own artistic sensibility, which is like a meta thing to say. But is that your own experience of reading these books, Rob, up to and including the Corrections? I need you to talk me out of this thing that I'm doing where I decide to read an author because that's what I do with music right like it makes sense because you can do that even like the rolling stones catalog you can listen to chronologically while you do the dishes or whatever like that's an attainable goal but for me to be like I need to read all the Jonathan I need to read all the Percival Everett's you know like just starting from the beginning you're You're reading several, you know, or several dozen books, you know, that are not so much part of the public narrative before you get to the book that's part of it.

29:19It's an insane thing to do. I don't know if a real one is the way I would describe this impulse I have. You start an author's work from the beginning. I wish I didn't do this, but I am glad that I did it in this case. I've indeed read the first two Jonathan Franzen books. I don't think it's even worth saying. Like, the corrections is a huge upgrade. Nobody is going to try and talk you in to his earlier stuff. He's not the Velvet Underground, right? They're both these books. Rock credit jokes. It's all I got. The 27th City and Strong Motion. These are both 500-plus page, very Don DeLillo feeling, like dysfunctional families beset by some larger conspiracy.

30:05There's a lot of pension in it as well, right? The 27th city, the plot of the 27th city is that it's St. Louis. It's actually St. Louis, Missouri. There's no St. Jude, like, fake Midwest. It's St. Louis, Missouri. And the new police chief is an Indian woman. She's from Bombay. And she starts a grand conspiracy where Indian people take over St. Louis. Like, the institutions of St. Louis. It's wild. It's like a take, like, all the bad guys are Indian and all the Indians are bad guys. And it's like, take it or leave it. You don't want to be a woman in this book either while we're on this subject.

30:40Like this is a very, this is, but it's fascinating. But the problem with it is, is the conspiracy overwhelms the family. And like the characters, you don't really get a sense of the characters and there's like a cruelty. There's like a chess piece moving sort of cruelty, especially to the edge, right? Like I approached the corrections. I understood it was a novel about a family unraveling, but like i don't like stories about families unraveling like i don't the bleakness and the tragedy of it i'm not so into but you know in the 27th city like the end of that book is really like terrible things start happening to everyone because the book is over and that's what happens in a book like this like there's there's an intensity and a bleakness to that one strong motion is set in bolston there's like an evil petrochemical company like causing earthquakes They're like digging a huge hole into the earth and putting toxic waste into it.

31:35Forgive me, but like an evil corporation is fucking the earth. That's the plot of strong motion. And again, like there's dysfunctional family dynamics, but they're squashed by, you know, there's an anti-abortion subplot. There's all this stuff. There's all this societal stuff. And so I think what happens with the corrections, part of what makes it such a huge upgrade is that the family takes the foreground. you know like when we got when you get in the corrections to the correct all thing to the the drug i when i was when i was reading that even on rereading i had forgotten almost everything i was like oh here we go like here's the conspiracy that's now going to take over and the rest of this book is going to be about this wonder drug that doesn't work but he just he does that scene basically and then pushes that aside because he's more interested in the family like the family dynamics and the sympathy that he has for these characters and how lovingly they're drawn, even when there are elements of cruelty, like Gary.

32:34Gary just really upsets me. It's very upsetting.

32:37Jeff:Gary is really upsetting. He is very, very upsetting. And so he just got to mix right with the corrections between the political and the personal. And he sort of realized that he was far better at or more interested in or whatever. the personal, you know, and there's lots of outside forces on this family, but you never lose sight of the family and you never treat the family like they're just chess pieces, you know, are just cardboard cutouts to be blown away by a strong wind. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I think, Rebecca, that's as Midwesterners ourselves, we can attest to there is a dynamic at the core of a certain kind of Midwestern family that we're not going to totalize, but generally that the disaster is in the house.

33:23The disaster is the family dynamic. We do not need the corporation. And nobody's talking about it.

33:28Jeff:So it's more disasters than it has to be. And the silence of it is worthy of epic literary treatment. I think that's the insight that he had is this, there is something to be said here. And we're going to do a read-alikes later, but the interior life of a person, you know, Gertrude Stein and Henry James 100 years ago, or Virginia Woolf and Jacob's Reuben before that a little bit, is like, that is the stuff of serious work. And the written word, the novel is particularly maybe uniquely able to get inside these people's heads and to trace the connections between them and the awkwardness and the silences between them.

34:05And I do not need this grand overarching sort of the talk. I don't need a toxic airborne event to do that. Right. In the form of white noise. I do not need in the form of Steinbeck. I do not need the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl. it's the dust bowl of the heart that he's trying to figure out for us um in a lot of different ways Rebecca he is a Midwesterner can you take this because you are a fellow St. Louisian how do you what do you say just you're from St. Louis I'm kidding we're from the Midwest let's get our Midwest bona fides on the table before we connect because I grew up in Lawrence Kansas which is not a suburb of Kansas City.

34:47It's like a 30 minute drive from Kansas City. So it's a satellite. It's a college town. And that's where I grew up. Rebecca, where did you, what is your hometown situation?

34:55Jeff:I grew up in the suburbs outside Kansas City. And because Kansas City is weird in the way it is, I was in a suburb on the Kansas side, but it's a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. So deeply Midwestern. My husband grew up in St. Louis. There are some jokes and like references to specific neighborhoods of St. Louis. It's like, it was a fancy house in Ladue. And I was like, I know exactly what that means. Rob, how about you? Yeah. I was born in Cleveland. I spent most of my first 10 years in St. Louis in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. Shout out Eureka, Missouri. I kept waiting for the first book, 27 City, to mention Eureka.

35:34And finally it did. It was like, Yes, that's where they like stored the bomb parts or something. I was so excited. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in Eureka, Missouri. It was like a John Cougar Mellencamp song. It was pretty awesome. Then I moved to Cleveland. I am an Ohioan at heart. Born in Cleveland, raised in the Cleveland suburbs mostly. I'm living in Columbus now. Are we allowing Ohio into the Midwest? Is that just to clarify? Yeah, of course. That's a relief to me because I've been telling people. I've been explaining away my bizarre behavior as Midwestern my entire life, so I would have to construct an entirely new excuse now if I got kicked out of the Midwest.

36:12Jeff:It's a great moment of validation for me because I've been telling Jeff for years that Ohio counts spiritually as the Midwest. And so I'm just really glad that you're here to say that I'm right on the record. Jonathan Franzen, also from a suburb of St. Louis, born there. He was born in Illinois in 1965, so really interestingly, on the cusp, right between Gen X and the Baby Boomers, depending on what day you Google it, he can fall into either one. Then his family moves to a pretty tony suburb of St. Louis, spends the rest of his young adult life living there. Graduated from Swarthmore in 1981 with a degree in German, speaks fluent German, and somehow that just seems really right to me, that Jonathan Franzen speaks fluent German.

36:56Jeff:got married pretty young, 1982, fresh out of college, moved to Boston with his wife. And he worked at Harvard in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where he co-authored a couple dozen papers. Which is something a character in a Jonathan Franzen novel would do, which is so weird. To study German and Swarthord and write these. It's so weird, Rebecca. Yeah. And probably informs some of the Earth fucking of strong motion that Rob's talking about. Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

37:54Jeff:roots, but also this interest in what's happening overseas and in being sort of a worldly kind of guy, which was interesting and not available to a lot of people in their early 20s and the early 80s. One point of order. I think he was born in 1959 in Illinois. Oh, really? Correction. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. I had the late 50s. The reason it stuck in my brain is he's not that much younger than my own father. In terms of mapping myself onto generations, he's only eight years younger than my dad. So it's like he's actually writing more from my parents' generation towards their grandparents than from me.

38:30I think we'll talk about this because it doesn't feel that way necessarily. Like I think I can skip ahead one generation and feel a lot of the same dynamics going on at the same time. And he became a punching bag. And I guess as one of my hot texts I didn't write, we've said this between ourselves about Franzen. Franzen was right, Rebecca, about a lot of this stuff. Like he was just right. And, you know, an unashamed elitist, like maybe bring gatekeeping back is something we've been saying a little bit, maybe is a part of this show in a different, evolved, sort of more enlightened form. But what do you want to say about that, Rebecca?

39:01Jeff:In one of the Oprah interviews or in response to the Oprah stuff, he describes himself as an egalitarian Midwesterner. So I think he comes across as an unashamed elitist. There's an essay he wrote in 1996 describing a character in a Paula Fox novel. And the character is an unashamed elitist. David Kirkpatrick, who reviewed the corrections for The New York Times, pulls this out as like, maybe Franzen's also talking about himself here. But famously suspicious of screens and technology that comes up a lot, even in the corrections. In 2001, he's like, why is everybody just looking at the TV all the time?

39:41Jeff:Maybe you people should talk to each other. He was roasted on Twitter for being suspicious of Twitter. And he was not present on Twitter when all this was happening, when Freedom came out, which makes it even easier to be a punching bag. The guy's not there. but has taken a lot of hits. And then I think, as you were saying, been proven pretty right about the impacts of technology, the addictions to screens. And there's a bunch of subplots that are in, you know, in the corrections that are still really relevant today. People, you know, disengaging from what's happening in their lives with recreational drugs, with ill-advised affairs.

40:16Jeff:Like some of these are tale as old as time, but some of them are really the modern condition where you can escape into technology too. You can, and I can recommend and double down his essay collection, How to Be Alone, is quite tender and moving, right? I think to see that's like a parody of something that Jonathan Franzen writes, but it sort of goes beyond and comes back around to being really poignant at the same time. He wrote The Corrections during a period of great loneliness. He wrote these books that Rob has done, The Yeoman's Work of Reading. Thank you so much, Rob, for that. And he got good critical reviews, but he didn't sell any books.

40:50No one was reading his stuff, essentially is what's happening. And so there was a long dark of the soul because I think it's important to know about him. He wanted to be read, right? This makes me think of like Gerwig saying she wants to direct the big movies. She didn't want to just do Lady Bird. She wanted to do Barbie. She wants to do Narnia. Like there's a certain kind of aspiration. him. He wants to be thought alongside of the Faulkners and the Steinbecks and the Mailers and the DeLills, all the people we're into here. And I think whatever alchemy he came up with, I don't know that he knew it was going to work, but he knew what he wasn't doing was working.

41:26So he's trying something else at the same time. And he says he doesn't really have a major argument in his works after the corporations are bad. We can put on a fortune cookie versions of the earlier books, he wants readers to have an experience. In times of sadness, he wants them to be, if not comforted, he wants them to be recognized. In great happiness, he wants them also to feel like someone is there and seeing and having kind of the same thing happen to them at the same time.

41:51Jeff:I mean, he figured that out. I felt more seen than I would like to have been on this read of The Corrections. It's rough stuff. I heard a story at the time from someone that he would wrap a bandana around his eyes and types so as not to be distracted while writing. He had this studio up in Harlem. He didn't have much money. So he was in this little place with a bandana around his head in the dark typing. I read the Paris Review interview with him that says that he had this beautiful office at UC Santa Cruz that would have had an ocean view, except he had draped stuff all over it so he wouldn't be distracted by the ocean and so he could focus on his work at the same time.

42:31So that's a little insight into what he's dealing with as an artist and what he's trying to do. And I think the other thing, as Rob was alluding to here, is he's writing about his own family's experience, you know, askew, but his father had died, had had a long struggle with dementia and his own failure to recognize that. And he himself had gotten divorced. I think maybe the scariest thing, you're onto something, Rob. I think he's afraid of being Gary too. I think those of us who want, who want to be fathers of a certain kind and be considered a certain way, they do look at the Gary figure as being, I think I will project onto you, Robin, you can reflect to me back how well I've done.

43:10The thing that's so frightening about Gary is that he's kind of trying to try. Unlike Albert, the patriarch here, he is making the mixed grill, you know, but he doesn't know how to connect. He doesn't know what to give to his kids or to his wife. so he's sitting there unlike Albert he is not in the chair in the basement he's out there on the grill every night but making the same thing over and over again it's not working am I onto something what do you think about that you are definitely onto something okay this is long winded and I'm up okay the Oprah thing that's what we're here for man excellent the Oprah thing struck me as very 90s it struck me as Jonathan Franzen being concerned about selling out you know as like Jonathan Franzen and Kurt Cobain are not alike in many respects but in this one respect part of the deal that Kurt Cobain was dealing with was his audience suddenly blew up like seemingly overnight and he had all these new people listening to him now like he looks at the crowd and it's like the jocks who beat him up in high school like he just had this sense that his audience was not what he had imagined he comes from a tradition of underground music he feels very strongly about it.

44:24And he wants to speak to those people. He wants to make serious art for these serious people. And it freaks him out to be on MTV, Rolling Stone, yada, yada, yada. Like, I feel like the Oprah thing was Jonathan Franzen suddenly, like, I feel like artists of all kinds throughout history have the same kind of struggle. It's you suddenly become more famous than you thought you would be, more famous than you want to be, or more famous than you really probably ought to be. And I think the Oprah thing destabilized Jonathan Franzen. And he got, like, Dave Eggers is another figure, like a heartbreaking workist, a genius.

45:03Oh, great example. He does, there are Dave Eggers interviews where he's, like, sparring with college students about whether he's sold out or he's keeping it real. It's wild. Like, he's really sort of vibrant in his rage the suggestion that he's compromised his art or whatever. Like the Oprah thing feels so 90s to me. And so does Gary. Like it's very funny to me that Gary looks at Chip and at Denise and he keeps calling them alternative. Like he looks at Denise and he's like, I already have one alternative sibling. I do not need two. A professor and a chef.

45:43Jeff:Yeah, wild. Yes, exactly. These are not actual alternative people. But like Gary has sold out. Like Gary is making money. Like Gary's subplot is that he is benefiting from the stock options of the company that like took his dad's thing. Like he's making money in the background this whole time. And you're absolutely right that he's trying to be a good father and he's trying to not be the father that Alfred was. But it sort of leads him to this weird place where like the whole thing where he thinks he's depressed or his wife is trying to convince him he's depressed. and he's like painstakingly monitoring himself for signs of depression and he's like scrambling to make dinner for his family every night but his family doesn't give a shit.

46:24Like there's a combination of trying not to be your father but still he's selling out. Like in the reality bites sense, like he is Ben Stiller. Like he is the guy who has a job and a career and is trying to make money and that is bad. Like that marks him as, it's like, it strikes me that Gary at the end of the book is the least sympathetic character. When they finally all get together, Gary is a dick the entire time. As sympathetic as I felt for him in that moment, because again, his son isn't there. Like again, the thing of Jonah not going back with him was so heartbreaking to me legitimately.

47:00But like Gary is just a dick. The whole time and just yelling at everyone and he wants - Trying to get his mom to pay him back for five bucks. Five dollars. The whole time. The$4.98. And I love that Enid is like, my rebellion will be not paying you back the$4.98. Like that is a beautiful moment. But Gary does not get a redemptive moment the way Chip really does and Denise kind of does. And so I was trying to figure out what that says to me about how Jonathan Franzen thinks about like being like a stock market businessman, you know, profiting off the miseries of others or whatever. I was trying to figure out if Gary is the Jonathan Franzen, like, proxy figure or if Jonathan or if Gary is the enemy, the entire.

47:47And I can't quite work it out. And that's a beautiful thing in fiction that you don't quite know who this person is supposed to be. But like, he's so unsettled in whether you're supposed to sympathize with him or not. And that feels like a very 90s idea. Yeah. Well, and Rebecca, I think that can get us into how the structure is put together and what the big ideas are about. Because I think what Rob is onto is the structure, the medium is the message in sort of a McLuhan kind of way where these braided novellas with returning concerns and interleaved metaphors. He's trying to do something with that.

48:24What is your sense of, Rebecca, how the structure informs what he's trying to think through?

48:27Jeff:The structure really surprised me on the reread because my glossy, like, 25-year-old memory of the book is disastrous family holiday. But you get like you he introduces that scenario at the very beginning. The parents are coming to visit Chip in New York. They're on their way to get on this cruise. Dad is sick. All mom wants is for everyone to come together for one last Christmas. And then my memory is they get together for one last Christmas. It's a nightmare. But the way it actually unfolds is we get that moment of, OK, see you guys. Have a great cruise. And then we spend like 120 pages with Chip and about that long with Gary and about that long with Denise, seeing their individual nightmares with little bits sprinkled in of family history and interaction with their siblings, moments from their parents' past.

49:16Jeff:And then the one last Christmas is like 50 pages at the end of the book. and when I got there a couple mornings ago, I was reading before work and I turned, like finished the last of the big sections, I turned to see the like one last Christmas as the chapter heading. And I was like, I'm hyped. Let's go. Jeff is, I might like tell Jeff I'm not doing anything today until I read these 70 pages. But it's so genius to structure it that way because you get like not only this family's whole story and time to develop sympathy for the characters and feel the tension of, oh, my God, what's going to happen when they all get together?

49:57Jeff:And then by the time they do or they don't, as Rob was saying, most of them don't show up for that last Christmas or not, at least in the way that Enid wants them to. You have all this rich tension and rich feeling waiting to watch what's going to happen between them. And most of the books that have come after the corrections that try to do this make the event most of the book. It's like 300 pages of One Last Christmas. But there's so much payoff here because Franzen gives us like 450 pages of getting ready for what's going to happen. Like just waiting for the whole thing to explode and you know it's going to explode.

50:33Jeff:And then when it does, it's both what you thought it would be and not what you thought it would be. And I just found it to be so satisfying as a reading experience and such a really smart way to structure it. Yeah, and it's funny. I think, Rebecca, your note here that it's an ideal balance of literary ambition and skill with characters and a plot at the same time. I think there's a reason it maybe felt like it got attacked by all sides, but also then spoke to all sides because it is on the line of commercial fiction and experimental sort of avant-garde stuff or big-minded artistic writing. It is characters, but none of these characters would fit a – is there a likable character in here, right?

51:13I mean, is there someone that you're like, this is my point of view character and I'm pulling for them? It's not interested in that kind of debate at all. And it is, you are, you care about the plot and the plot is what's, how are they going to be together in a room for 72 hours? Like, that's the big question of this book, right? Is like, who's going to show up and then what's going to happen? And to spoil it, like what we do in the show, it is both worse and not as bad as they think. Like Enid's, how much emotional chips she's put in this pot of this one last Christmas versus their terror of going.

51:47No one gets what they want or expect. And that's kind of how the book ends, right? And as Rob said, like this book isn't saying you should be this way and not this way, except in sort of like oblique ways. And Rebecca, one thing we've talked about is the books that endure are ones that ask questions that remain relevant, right? If you just have an answer and this is how you should be, you become like a Horatio Alger kind of novels. Like, yeah, work hard. That's the answer to everything. It's important to us on this show and to a book like this. Like, Franzen, he's not saying, well, if you just are a dad this way or if you're a son or daughter this way, everything's fine.

52:21I don't think he knows. He has a suspicion that maybe you should talk to each other, Rebecca. But is that the message? Is that where it's like maybe not? Let's do this again.

52:30Jeff:I think it's very much a like, look at this. Like, look at these people. And what are we supposed to do about this? And if you are a person who has ever had a conversation with your aging parents about the fact that they are aging and the realities of that, all the complexities and difficult parts about aging and illness, the decisions that you have to make, the temptation to avoid them, all of that's on the table here. but so is just the difficulty of being a person in the world who has to figure out how to relate to your family, who don't seem to understand you, and no one knows how to talk to each other.

53:08Jeff:And everybody can find some kind of hook to that. There's a lot of Midwestern nice about these characters. At one point, somebody says something about, it's all subtexts and agendas. And I was like, that's it. Everything is subtexts and agendas. And Franzen, I just think, captures that really beautifully. What was it like for you, Rob, like 25 years out after the first read? I agree. The aging parents' effect of it, it's like just the heartbreaking nature of like people, no one is willing to face what's happening to Alfred and what has to be done, you know? And what has to be done is in its own way cruel.

53:49Like the book ends with everybody in a better place but Alfred, right? It ends with Alfred in a home, which he has, it had to be this way. Like it medically had to be this way. But it's Alfred sitting there thinking about all the times he could have killed himself to prevent this happening. It's awful, but that's what needs to happen for Enid to have this hopeful, like the last sentence of the book like really bowled me over. It's a beautiful, and her arc, her sort of redemptive, there was going to be some changes made. It's a better sentence than that. But to get Enid to that place, there's a sacrifice that happens.

54:28And the same with Chip. Chip just sort of finding a wife and kids in the span of a few pages. You can say that that's sort of overly idealistic and sort of out of place in a book like this. Jonathan Franzen, in my experience of having read the first two fucking books, is not in the habit of just giving people happy endings out of nowhere because he thinks he deserves them. But I think that's part of the sympathy that he shows there. But it's just, it's a very, I agree completely with the it's worse than you thought, but better than you feared sort of aspect. There's really beautiful, redemptive aspects of the ending, but there's terrible stuff too.

55:08Like one scene at the very end that really hit me hard now with kids in the Midwest is when they're driving through, I think it's called Christmas Land, where it's just like some suburban park. you know and he talks first of all about like how ugly the park looks usually and especially in daylight right now because it's just covered with wires you know and lights and it just looks downcast and industrial but at night it is christmas land right and you drive in your car through you know these wonderful christmas light displays and like you have all these stressful family dinners like i did that exact thing with my three kids right like we're all in the minivan and there's all sorts of microcurrents of like stress going on, but we're also looking at the pretty lights and the five-year-old especially is hopefully imprinting like the joy of this moment without everything else.

55:56Like that combination of like knowing how ugly this is in daylight and how sort of fraudulent and sad and decayed it is, but it's also beautiful. Like it's also Christmas land and like Enid especially responds so warmly to it. But that dichotomy between like this is devastatingly sad versus this is tentatively hopeful, like that's really hard, I think, to get right. And I think he really does get it right.

56:25Jeff:Today's episode is brought to you by Zest Books, an imprint of Lerner Publishing Group, publisher of Witness, poems to address the past, present and future of policing, written by Ari Tyson and Ty Chapman, illustrated by Damon Davis. This poetry anthology from a Minneapolis-based publisher springs from an invitation to share stories. With contributions from nearly 40 poets, including Adalie Moan, Jason Reynolds, Aaron Entrada-Kelly, Danes Smith, and Amanda Gorman, a multifaceted chorus of voices explores a range of experiences and emotions related to policing and over-policing by various law enforcement officers and agencies, touching on everything from the slave trade to ice-killing Renee Goode.

57:10Jeff:In this moving collection, Ari Tyson and Ty Chapman give readers an opportunity to reflect, to discuss, and above all, to witness. It's a powerful poetry anthology from an independent publisher exploring the effects of over-policing. Make sure to pick up Witness by Ari Tyson and Ty Chapman, illustrated by Damon Davis. And thanks again to Zest Books for sponsoring this episode.

57:40The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends, and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports.

58:27Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. Yeah.

58:34Jeff:I'm so glad you mentioned the end of the book. I think Jeff and I both just reached for ours at the same time, but like right as Alfred's dying, the one thing he never forgot was how to refuse. All of her correction had been for naught. He was as stubborn as the day she'd met him, and yet when he was dead, when she pressed her lips to his forehead and walked out with Denise and Gary into the warm spring night, she felt that nothing could kill her hope now. Nothing. She was 75, and she was going to make some changes in her life. So it's an amazing ending. And I have a hot take about Ian that I'll save towards the end.

59:12We're verging into straight thoughts. I'm looking at our notes here. We're not going to get to all these, but I want to hit a couple of things that you all have said before. but I'm going to do some English major bullshit right now, bridging on Rob's Christmas lights thing. Because I connected the Christmas lights too, but the first thing that got me was the scene of Alfred in the basement trying to untangle sort of the decades worth of Christmas tree lights, right? And nothing ever matches and half of them, like he's trying to repair them, but they're irreparable because they're so cheap. They're not meant to be repaired.

59:44Personal story. I don't care about a lot. I'm not persnickety about a lot of things, but our Christmas tree and Christmas lights, I am for reasons that you both would need advanced degrees to parse for me in a way that's helpful. And I had a scene a few years ago when I had a thousand lights that were all the color that I liked and it fit this giant tree that I get that I care about every year. But two of them went out and I didn't have enough to cover the tree. And I couldn't find any lights at any Home Depots that matched or anything. and there's this scene of me on the floor opening boxes of lights from Home Depot to plug them in to match the color temperature.

1:00:21Like a mania of needing to get this thing right. I really saw this in myself. And what he's trying to do in that scene is make sense and fix this mess that their family is. That's what that Christmas lights scene is about. But then the mirror scene of them driving through the lights together is the opposite of that. It's communal. like the community has come together to make this scene that people drive through right they do it together it's not alone in this basement so like franzen's really thinking about and i don't know if that's intentional or not and i don't care and if you don't like that kind of metaphor reading get your own pod but there's something that's happening around these lights because i think that's true three blocks away from me in peacock lane here in oregon don't be creepy they do a two-week-long thing where you walk through these amazing displays.

1:01:09But during the day, it looks like an electrical substation at the same time. So what is going on with that? I was blown. The Christmas lights thing really got me, Rob. I'm so glad you brought that up.

1:01:19Jeff:And just the basement, the basement in that house that is filled with things that were useful at one point that are no longer useful. Denise has that moment where she's throwing everything out and it's like jars of congealed, it was one time food and it's no longer food. And one ski from a pair of water skis or something like that. They're just like this accumulation of just like all the stuff of a life that's been lived and has passed its utility and there's no way to put it back together and make it useful again. But tossing it out is painful and is admitting something painful. So you just keep it because that's that avoidance of the hard things.

1:02:01Jeff:And then I like this English major moment you're having, Jeff, of like connecting it to, you know, something communally created. And that like this moment of hope at the end of the book only happens because whether they like it or not, they have all done some reality acceptance of like, this is the situation that we're in. It's terrible, but this is what we have to do for dad. Like these people who don't have any practice actually talking about anything or dealing with anything have to run up into it. And that comes for us all. And I think that's one of the things that like this book is so specific.

1:02:33Jeff:And one of the great, you know, guides, guideposts of art is make it specific in order to make it universal. What's wild is how many of the specifics are the same specifics, at least for me, like without telling too many tales out of school. I have had some of these conversations verbatim. And there was a point in the reading of this book where my husband was like, no more Jonathan Franzen quotes out loud. My soul can't take it. Like, it's too close to home. But just I think like that's when a book hits the way that this book hit and then it endures for 25 years. And I think we'll continue to endure.

1:03:12Jeff:We're talking about it, you know, as one of the best books of the century. It's because almost everyone who picks it up can see something of their experience. And it Franzen really tapped into a universal vein there. Yeah, one thing Rob has here is that did. Go ahead. Yeah, go. Go, Rob. Sorry. I think the Denise and Albert relationship really struck me. The sort of plot revelation of her having the brief affair with the married guy in the office, the machinations of what happens there are less important to me than the realization. I should have written it down, but it's something like how he loved you was to stay away.

1:03:50Yeah, I've got it. Yeah, that's it. And so that idea, and I guess that connects back to Gary, like trying to be this really sort of hyperactive, present father, you know, versus the passivity of Alfred, which feels like neglect, like abuse almost, but is actually Alfred's love language. is to, like, he keeps saying, like, even within his dementia, like, you were never supposed to get involved with this or something. Like, this is not your affair. Go live your life. Be careful. Like, that as a love language for a taciturn Midwestern father, like, that'll get you. You know, that's a universal feeling.

1:04:31Will it ever, yeah. Yeah, it's, like, just a moment

1:04:35Jeff:for the fact that, like, Rob referred to that quote and we both also knew what he was talking about. Like, within these 550-ish pages, there are some lines that like three different readers and I would guess 300 different readers will all light on, oh my God, that's the thing. And it's the odd truth about Alfred was that love for him was a matter not of approaching, but of keeping away. Yeah. I was thinking about him as his job. Like I'm trying to connect the idea of the railroad, right? Like the idea of a railroad, it's there to be used, but it doesn't have any needs. It just lays there and it's available for the train to run over when it needs it.

1:05:10But it's not really concerned with where the train is actually going. Its job is just to function as a conduit. And Albert seems to see himself as like, I've provided this house and I'm holding up my end of the deal and you all go do your thing and leave me alone. The original scene of that though, is to be in a house with another person for your whole life. I'm not sure we would call it emotional abuse today, but it does not for a happy home make when someone else is sort of, you lay in bed next to a track of railroads is not a fulfilling emotional life, right? And that's sort of the central tension is that this thing, this Albert's isolation, his want to be sort of Atlas holding up the world and being left alone and thinking of that as noble in its own way, then makes Enid, if not crazy, it makes her love starve and emotionally barren.

1:06:05And she over-indexes on other things that aren't helpful and that infiltrates all of her kids' relationship with her and her family. And that's the thing they're kind of trying to unwind is like, they don't know what a honest, loving, open-hearted, boundary-filled conversation looks like. And they're all spinning around looking for it. That's kind of what the book is doing. All right. So that was my take on that. Let's do stray thoughts. Let's each look at our O's. We have to pick a couple. Rob, I want you to talk about Dinner of Revenge. That's not in Straight Thoughts, but I marked this scene too.

1:06:40Would you talk about the Dinner of Revenge for us real quick? Well, the setup of the Dinner of Revenge, it's a flashback, right? And Denise is not born yet. So it's Gary and Chip as kids. And I think it's Alfred has come back from like a multi-week business trip. It is being a dick and is already hiding in the basement and being emotionally unavailable. And so Enid creates the dinner. it's like stuffed i forget exactly what it is but it's gross right liver and onions liver and onions and like there's something stuffed there's something stuffed that ought not be stuffed and it's just it's very gross food that chip i forget how old chip is supposed to be like let's say he's like not a teenage like eight to ten like i don't know about that sounds right yeah chip won't eat it chip is sitting so it's the classic you know archetype of the kid sitting at with a dinner plate in front of him and he won't eat it.

1:07:36And you're like, you have to have like five bites of this before you leave the table. And Chip will not leave the table. And so it's like a multi-page scene where like Darian eat and clean up their plates and Alfred goes down to the basement and Chip is just sitting there defiant until he falls asleep with like the grain of the placemat of the kitchen table in his forehead. And Alfred picks him up and carries him to bed and puts him to bed. and that's the scene and that you know i i've had similar you know not as horrific but like that as the parents this is another scene that as a parent it's you very differently and both like the awful tension of the standoff and not knowing how to resolve that and not knowing when to be firm and when to like let the kid go versus like the tenderness and the subliminal like chip doesn't realize he's being carried and put to bed like that i realized that the dinner of revenge scene is about like the the absurdity of how gross the food is but like that the emotional core of that was was pretty shattering to me yeah that i mean alfred can only or wants to that's him being the railroad there he's carrying him to his destination while he sleeps like he's just that's yeah we don't really know why he's like this i don't know if you had a sense of this.

1:08:58We did not get an origin story of Albert's distance. And I think it's better for it, right? Yeah.

1:09:04Jeff:There's like little nuggets of it. There's like, I'm so glad this book came out 25 years ago and not today in the internet of therapy speak as much as we are pro-therapy at Zero to Well Read. The book is better for these people not being analyzed. But there are mentions of Alfred's father. I think it's Alfred's father that someone says, well, he basically married a woman that he treated as functionally a servant. A slave, right. Yes. Yeah. There are generational dynamics at play here. And that Enid, she's also responsible for some of it. Alfred is not a great husband, but Enid enters into it with unrealistic expectations.

1:09:46Jeff:She meets him and he's quoting all this Schopenhauer stuff at her that's really sexist and awful, but he earns good money. And some of this, too, is the trap that women are in in America in the 1950s before you could get a credit card without a man's signature. So she makes the compromise like the Missouri compromise of Enid's life is let me marry this man who will be a good earner. And like, even though he has this sort of toxic philosophy, bro, Schopenhauer stuff going on, I'll just hope for his personality to change. And by the time the book opens, she's been waiting for his personality to change for 50 years, like waiting for him to take interest.

1:10:26Jeff:Yeah. Yeah. Waiting for him to take interest in her and the kids and that he worked all he toiled all his life and he finally retired. And now all he's doing is sitting in that goddamn blue leather chair. And like she's still holding on because it has to have been worth something. Right. Right. It's just like it's so heartbreaking. um Rebecca let's do straight thoughts or we can continue on here I really liked your idea of the wandering sections because oh yeah you have in your straight thoughts like with an editor today who is making I don't want to cast a spurs on anything but something that got to an agent or an editor earlier in the process like we talked on the main show we talked about this lessons in chemistry was like not cooked up in a lab but the agent was very involved on how to make it a bestseller, right?

1:11:14Someone doing something like this would have gotten rid of maybe the dinner of the revenge. They would have gotten rid of the turd, the talking racist turd, which is some version of Albert's id as we understand it. And maybe the correct doll. And maybe the whole Lithuania thing, right? Yes.

1:11:29Jeff:Yeah. Lithuania is really what made me think about it. But I don't think we want that, do we? What are those things doing for us, Rebecca? I mean, the book is so much weirder than the get the gang back together family disaster books that coming out today because it does have this like 50-page diversion into Lithuania. And you're watching Alfred have his hallucinations with the racist turd chasing him all over the place. And we go on, it's really wandering. Like, it's not hard to know where you are, but it does wander off of the main plot quite a few times. And it's long. It's almost 600 pages long.

1:12:02Jeff:But I think if he were pitching this today, you would be getting agents and editors who were like, cut it down to 350, get rid of all the weird Lithuania shit, like make it make it more accessible and more palatable. And then it would be the schmaltzy stuff that Oprah picks sometimes today. Like Oprah still got it sometimes, but sometimes it is a little lowest common denominator. And I'm glad that Franzen was allowed to fly his freak flag on this one. I also have to talk about the sex writing here. Yes. Rob has a good question. I'm glad you did. Rob, put it in there. Do you mind if I say that?

1:12:38And Rebecca, I'm so sorry. I'm about to do this. Can we please talk about the sentence, quote, the jismic grunting butt oink, end quote. Butt oink is hyphenated. I did that from memory. This sentence has stayed with me. I read it. I reread it this time. And I was like, Oprah, this red word. the jismic russing but oink I would love to know as hardcore book people if you find the sex writing in this book anomalous for 2001 how weird is the sex writing the sex writing in strong motion is not pleasant either and I'll just leave it at that what is this I find all sex writing unpleasant so I am not the right I don't want any of it that's an honorary midwestern approach fade to black close the door go out so rebecca i willingly and delightfully seed this territory to

1:13:42Jeff:you okay well we will put our social back in parasocial just one time because when i read the sentence jismic grunting butt oink i was like oh my god jonathan franzen and then i thought i really hope i get to hear rob say this in that like rob voice i will say it again if you need me to say it again yes or you can just no we can just go back 30 seconds rob we don't need to say it again. It's like a ringtone. Yeah. Yes. There you go. Yeah. Jismic grunting, but oink. Amazing shit. The more I think about this, the more I think the sex is bad, but the writing is good and the sex has to be bad that these people are having.

1:14:19Unbelievable formation, Rebecca. I think that's wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. I agree.

1:14:23Jeff:And I don't know how this stacks up against other sex writing from 2001. And I didn't go back and look. I should have. Franzen was probably nominated for the bad sex awards that The Guardian does every year for this. I think he's appeared in it before. Like, nobody's having a good time here. And definitely they're not having a time that they are anything other than humiliated by in the end. I think we get the jismic grunting butt oink happens after Chip has had that weird hotel room. It's his students. Right. This is not a good social dynamic. And she's been drugging him. She's giving him something like MDMA and he's having the time of his life and then finds out that she has not been taking the drug.

1:15:10Jeff:So it's like, oh, she had to drug me to make fucking me bearable. And then he's totally humiliated by it. Also, side note, a much better weird hotel sex weekend than Miranda July could ever dream of. Really? You should save that for your hot takes, Rebecca. Okay. Okay. But I think that's the core of it, that the writing is really good and the sex is really bad. And so it feels like it's bad sex writing, but it's actually not. Like, it's great because it conveys exactly what it's supposed to about the sex that people are having. Good writing about bad sex is a great form. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful way of putting it.

1:15:47Rebecca, I had something else you had here. The Bourdain of it all, because I was thinking about the night and not just the Bourdain of all, but like where we were in the 90s culturally, where Rob's kind of entree to thinking about selling out tells us about where we are in the 90s, where sort of hipster alternative culture was weirdly in the main and was wrestling with the truth of that. right because even at this moment chip is already a parody of himself as like having an affair of a student as like and being the professor of this abstruse domain consuming narratives is his denise is a bi-curious tattooed chef in like this generator shed making this kind of food and being profiled in this way that bourdain is sort of entering into i don't i think franzen was writing this long enough, it's hard to map a post or pre-Bourdain or a post or pre, well, certainly Cobain, like 93 or something, he would have known about that.

1:16:48But I think it's interesting as this being in reaction to the 90s and all the concerns the 90s were interested in, a correction to this sellout idea, the correction to this cool. He has a horrible disdain for cool. And Bourdain also does. So I'm curious what you thought. You brought Bourdain into it, Rebecca, so I'll throw it back to you. I was wrestling with this because I wasn't sure what to make of his relationship to Ascendant 90 culture and Bourdain being a figure of that, at least when it comes to food.

1:17:15Jeff:Well, my question about it wasn't quite that deep, but I'll try to wrestle with it. Just that Denise's origin story of spending a summer in the Hamptons, getting a job in a restaurant and that like it's that kind of rollicking environment in the kitchen where she feels alive and she feels in control and she connects with these people. It just felt so close to the early chapters of Kitchen Confidential where Bourdain is writing about that. And like, I think Franzen would have read the Bourdain piece that Don't Read This Before Eating comes out in - Sure, he's writing for The New Yorker, yeah. Yeah, in The New Yorker in 1999.

1:17:48Jeff:And then the book came out in 2000. So like that, it just felt a little too convenient to be accidental that like there would be some threads here. And I do think that now that you're talking about it, that there are some like spiritual similarities between Franzen and Bourdain. They're in the same generation. They're interested in trying to express something authentic through an artistic way of working and of trying to just say the thing instead of get caught up in the art of the thing, which we could do this for another three hours about what that actually looked like in their careers. But I just had this moment of like, this feels really close to Bourdain to me.

1:18:29Jeff:And of course, Jonathan Franzen would have been familiar with that essay and with the emerging idea of Tony Bourdain and maybe even the tension between how cool he appeared and how messed up he actually was. Like, it's not inconceivable that Anthony Bourdain would also have gotten fired for sleeping with both his boss and his boss's wife. Yes, totally. Yeah. The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends, and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment.

1:19:13Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts.

1:19:53Jeff:Why did I search the internet for answers to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic sores in various stages of ooze. I can clear my search history, but I can never unsee that. Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Healthcare just got less painful. Rob, I want to clear out for you. I did food for Rebecca. I want to clear out for you on music. Can you parse this sentence for me? Okay. Who knows much more about music than I do? Robin couldn't imagine that style had anything to do with happiness. Her musical taste ran to John Prine and Etta James, and so Brian played Prine and James at home and saved his Bartok and defunct and flaming lips and Mission of Burma for blasting on his boombox at high temp.

1:20:45I feel like I can sort of, if I squint my eyes, I feel that. Does this sentence make sense to you? Does this dynamic make sense to you of someone's musical taste and how they're sort of home and awaying it, what they're listening to? I don't think there's a crystal clear dynamic that you're not cool enough to get there. Like Robin's whole deal, right, is that she's like... You can stop talking now. That's all I needed. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, no, you're absolutely cool, Jeff, and you're not missing anything. That's all I ever want someone to say. Of course I notice any time a band name is dropped in a book like this.

1:21:19and I feel like Mission of Burma, like people, the cool kids are listening to like post-punk from England in like the 70s and 80s, like Gang of Four and stuff like, like Pavement I think has dropped at some point. But like, I don't have any idea what Etta James and John Prine are supposed to mean, especially if it's supposed to be a negative. Like, the radical thing is that she dresses horribly and she's not cool and she's just embarrassed that her husband made all this money. Like Robin is a weird sort of vacuum within this book. But I have to say, honestly, it does not really, I don't know what John Prine and Etta James are supposed to signify.

1:22:03And talking about either of them or let alone both of them at the same time is like uncool or uncultured is like insane. And so if that's supposed to be an insult, it is not an insult against Robin.

1:22:16Jeff:John Prine taking strays And like, no one. Yeah, John Prine. Talking about the Midwest, the singing mailman. Like, leave John Prine out of this dude. Yes. Leave John Prine out of it. Get his name out of your mouth, Jonathan Francis. Exactly. I wonder, because in this sentence, Robin is figured as the one that style matters. And Brian is sort of hiding his taste, I think. So maybe it's inverted to some degree. I couldn't make any sense out of it. But thank you that it's more complicated than I'm getting. Also for Rob, I think Moby was name-checked three times in this book. I think he was the musician that's name-checked the most.

1:22:55I think. I don't know if there's anything there, but talk to me about Moby. Moby is an interesting figure because he starts out in the late 90s as a really cool vegan electronic music guy. But then by 2001, I forget when the Play album came out. He's like a pop star and he licenses every song on that record to a different corporation. Like Moby is in every ad on television in the early 2000s. And it's a great record. And then Moby sort of spirals on a personal level in like a Natalie Portman kind of sense. I'm trying to remember the Moby references and I can't. But to Jonathan Franzen writing in the late 90s, I think Moby would be a cool underground dance club person for people who won't set foot in dance clubs.

1:23:50I want to go back now and see exactly how he's dropped. But again, I'm hyper attuned to any name drops of artists' albums, like what the characters are listening to. but when it happens i don't and myself having like some knowledge that nobody else has about what this is supposed to mean it just feels like authors dropping whatever cool names you know they're personally listening to or they just have a sense that this is what like an alternative person you know working at the generator in philadelphia like however it works like i again i don't know if there's a deeper moby theme there that we're developing because well that's that's I think your point that it's someone that maybe a character would know, but not actually be in the dance club is very interesting to me.

1:24:38Okay. Like that they're a liminal kind of figure that emerged out of one scene, but then eventually is doing collabs with Gwen Stefani and getting name checked on Eminem records as being a dick, right? That's a fascinating trajectory for a character to happen in here. All right. Let's do some more straight thoughts before we get on to that. But Rebecca, anything else you want to clear out of your decks that you can't live if we don't mention?

1:25:02Jeff:I just really wondered if the Oprah thing would have gotten so much traction if we hadn't all been desperate for distraction in the fall of 2001. The book comes out in June and now in present 2026, Oprah announces her book club picks basically right as the book is coming out. And publishers will even change publication dates to accommodate an Oprah selection. But that is not what was happening. in 2001. They did have advance notice. They printed like 500 ,000 extra copies of the book, I think. But that was after it had come out. And this is all happening in the fall. So a lot's in the air. And there's just a lot of angst and a lot of anger for very real reasons.

1:25:44Jeff:9-11 has just happened. But it's interesting to sort of look back on it. I remember just being vaguely aware it was happening. I was in my first two weeks of college when the Oprah Franzen thing was going on and being like, that seems wild and who cares? But it's pre-internet. So like the Today Show is doing segments on it. Just an unanswerable question. Can I yes and you, Rebecca? Of course. What if it would have been bigger if there was no 9-11? Oh, maybe. And that's all we were talking about. I don't know. Just like a how dare you come for Oprah? Yeah. Or maybe the Oprah thing would have gotten big enough that there would have been a little bit more, you don't have to say yes to this.

1:26:21Like it is not hegemony of the artist to be like, you have to kiss the ring. I'm not sure.

1:26:26Jeff:Yeah, I mean, it was really interesting going back and getting into the Oprah of it all because it does seem like Oprah was kind of like, well, if you don't want to come on, that's fine. Like, I don't really get it. She was cool. That's a great note. She was pretty cool about the whole thing. It's the people blow it up into how dare you and he must be some kind of elitist snob. And then they ask him questions that he answers that get pulled out of context. But it does seem that Oprah was just kind of maybe baffled by like, dude, I'm just trying to help you sell some books. But if you don't want to come on, cool.

1:26:56Jeff:And even in the 2010 interview, when he does finally go on, they start by trying to clear the air. And she asks him a question about it. And he answers it in third person. He's like, well, one might feel that way. And one could see blah blah. And then she kind of pushes him. And I was like, Jonathan Franzen, what are you doing? Come on. You got to know what you're getting into. I'm going to run through my junk drawer of straight thoughts. If you want to spend more than me saying this, either of you stop me, but I just need to get these out. Some version of the word correct appears more than 30 times.

1:27:27I love that you counted this. This is one advantage of reading on Apple Books I can do a search and find. I kept imagining Al as Archie Bunker. I was thinking of other representations as sort of the chair. And then the other one that struck me as weird is for the guy in the chair. remember in Frasier the big idea was like his dad was coming to live with them and he was only bringing this hideous chair I kept thinking about those I said about the I'm pretty sure this is where I first heard the terms Occam's razor which I then turned into O 'Neill's razor the very important misunderstood philosophy moment for me the cover of the first edition was this like Norman Rockwell like painting and then over half of it it has like a Thomas Pynchon cover like even looks like shadow ticket halfway over it that's not a bad visual summary of what this book is doing i already asked rob i think the book simultaneously anticipates and critiques quote unquote boundary culture this is gary coming back home saying these are the ground rules for the next few days i will do anything you want me to except deal with dad in situations he shouldn't be in so like he's like the one thing she needs help with he will not do and sort of this idea of like setting the ground rules as being a get out of jail free card for not engaging, I thought was very winning on France inside.

1:28:40The big question here to me is what, if anything, do children owe their parents? The line is that I'm going to quote directly is there's a Darwinian hardware genetic stake in their children's welfare, but children, it seems to me, have no corresponding debt to their parents. Some chimp saying that. I think he does. It's rough. and maybe you have to figure it out for yourself, right? And you have to agree to some degree. This is a little more humorous. Is giving yourself a clandestine enema while doing downward facing dog the single most humiliating thing that could have your children walk in and you're doing?

1:29:15This seems to me to be the nadir of the book. Denise walks in on Alfred. Everyone knows he needs help. So they can't really believe him when he says, don't come in, but she walks in and sees it. And that's -

1:29:29Jeff:I don't know if it's the nadir of the book, actually, though, because she sees him. She does it like, oh, shit, dad, sorry. She backs away. And then she's like, actually, I have to go in there. And she knocks on the door and does the like, dad, I'm so sorry, but I have to come in here. Like, she's the one who, you know, like crosses that line first. I mean, for Albert, for Albert. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for the book. This is like his nightmare came to life is that his kids would find him and need help in this. Yeah. And also like a hell of his own creation. if you insist on being in denial about what he calls my affliction.

1:30:02Jeff:Like the use of my affliction over and over is great that that's the only way he talks about Parkinson's that he is going to die of. But my affliction, and I seem to be having some trouble with my affliction, that like she has to force him to deal with it because he's created this for himself by insisting on not acknowledging it. This is what happens. Like you end up in the basement, you're shoving everything down and you end up in the basement and you're literally full of shit. Jars of urine. Yeah. Jars of urine, yeah. And surrounding him. And to do one more grace note of English major bullshit, right?

1:30:36Like his alter ego, the racist turd, is the thing that haunts him, this like psycho, misogynistic, white supremacist, whatever. And literally the thing he can't do is get turds out. Like he cannot get that thing out of him that's haunting him this whole time. And if he could only have asked or some figured a way out of it, maybe we wouldn't be in this position. um rob you were doing you were mapping not fraser or um archie bunker you were thinking about succession as your pop culture reference i'd reread yeah and i tried to stop myself because it's totally anachronistic right and it's not helpful but just the the the fail sons and daughters of of the intimidating patriarch like there's no enid figure first of all but just like I started, I couldn't get Alfred as Logan Roy out of my head.

1:31:25That's real. Especially like the very end of Logan Roy, like on the plane and everything. Right. I managed not to like put Kendall to, I guess, Gary. But like, you know, I tried not to do that very hard. You know, Shiv and Denise, like it doesn't really work. But like I have a habit of doing that in fiction where I start wanting to put a face to this name I'm reading all the time. and I just take a TV show with like very broadly similar dynamics. And now I've got all that TV show stuff in my head. Like, it's not helpful. Like, don't be like me. Don't be like me in various respects. Don't read the earlier books if you don't wanna and don't do that kind of either.

1:32:04I think, actually, Rob, I'll say if you want to do that, because I think it is helpful to have a face who can keep track of characters easier. But I think the cross comparison of other works can highlight things that maybe you didn't see on your first. I think this idea that there is no Enid in succession is actually a fascinating read of succession, thinking how it would be different in that regard at the same time. The one I was getting a little bit is King Lear, right, with the three ungrateful daughters of Lear and Lear sort of at the edge, trying to hold on at the end. And, you know, these works in which you get usually a father figure wanting at the end to connect and realizing it's too late.

1:32:43Like this goes back, you know, to Lear at least. And Logan Roy and some other people are involved in it. I think you've also identified a question we do want to adjudicate to some degree here, which is to quote you directly, Rob. Does Franz deserve his ultra grumpus red flag author reputation? And then subsequently, are all early 2000s literary giants doomed to be snarked out online now? Rebecca, I would not deign to answer this on my own. So I will ask you to be a co-sled dog to pull this because I think I know what you're going to say.

1:33:11Jeff:Yeah, I don't think he does. I love that we've introduced ultra grumpus into the lexicon here. And I'm going to. Important term to me. Yes, it is accurate. It does the work it needs to do here. I don't think that he does. And I think that the literary community is coming around to that. Like the moment we had around 2010 and Franz and Freude was a moment. Purity and Freedom were not perfect books. They were good books. But Crossroads, which came out in 2021, is very good. There's an excerpt of his new novel in progress in the New Yorker's fiction edition. Supplement, yeah. Supplement, whatever, that came out earlier this fall or earlier this summer.

1:33:52Jeff:And he's working still, and the work is good. And he's just not engaging in the discourse. And I think that's such a smart choice. He's just not participating. he's kind of pulling the Bartleby of like, I'm just going to be here and write my books and live in my house in Santa Cruz and drive my Honda Civic. And you people can be over there doing what you're doing, but he's not paying attention to it at all. So to the degree that any additional ultra grumpus reputational stuff happens, it's all just the internet looking for something to do, but it's not because Jonathan Franzen has done something.

1:34:25Jeff:And I think at this moment, we're all kind of like, yeah, that's right. It's our breath of fresh air to not be that plugged into the Matrix all the time. He's touching grass. Rob, is it? He is touching grass. And he's looking at birds. He's touching grass by covering up his beautiful ocean view. He's kind of the opposite of touching grass, which is so weird. But he is also like he's out there. He's a bird watcher. Everyone who goes to profile him. He loves bird watching. The boy loves a bird. Yeah. There's an incredible Taffy Broaddus or Acner profile of him, I think from 2018, maybe, where she's like, everyone goes birdwatching with him and I don't want to.

1:35:02Jeff:And they end up going birdwatching anyway because like all the other options run out. Let's play pool. Like, yeah, like you're not doing, he's not going to. He's not going to go on Hot Ones. Yeah, like. No, no. That's an amazing thought. Jonathan Franzen on Hot Ones would be incredible. Yeah. One would find this unpleasant. That's right. We're going to run through some notable quotes. I want to ask you, Rob, about your own reading process. Do you take notes? I mean, maybe this particular reading experience was unusual for you in that you were going to talk to a couple of nerds for looking like it's going to be a couple hours looking at the runtime now.

1:35:41But in your normal life, are you underlining things? Are you dog-earing? Are you relying upon your memory? How do you engage with the text when you want to keep something from it? Underliner. I'm like a severe serial underliner. I will underline a whole page. And I'll be sitting with my wife, and it's like, are you going to underline that entire thing? Is the entire thing that good you have to underline? It's like, yes, I do. This is important. This is my work. I underline things serially. There were three things from my first reading that I know hit me really hard, and I suppressed one of them.

1:36:16I remembered mixed grill with Gary. The thing that I suppressed and the thing that I underlined in full, even though it is several pages, is the woman who only paints guns when they're on the cruise ship. They're on the cruise ship and Enid has a good time with this woman and they drink some complimentary liquor and they play slots and she wins a little money and they're having a little girls' night out. And then the woman is like, my daughter was murdered. her murderer is being executed you know in pennsylvania in 48 hours and my husband won't deal with it and i deal with it by painting guns like she's like a midwest like art fair i think probably northeast like an art fair you know a little with the graphs of like cottages or whatever but now she will only paint guns and like people with guns in their mouths or whatever and i just it struck it hit me so hard both times the first time so hard that i made myself forget about it and succeeded until I reread it.

1:37:18But like, that would be an example of something that I just underline in full and then sometimes even like type back out for some reason. Don't get involved in my process, man. It's insane. But I, that, I, I underline all the time and that scene is the one that really, really got to me both.

1:37:35Jeff:And there's like so much research involved in the way you put together your show and you're writing like multi-thousand word essays that introduce your episodes of 60 songs that like I have I've wondered so many times driving around like what do the books look like and what's the source material so that's interesting to hear because like I'll get into the same hot water where I start underlining then it's like oh shit it's gonna be the whole page I'm like do I do you give up now and just like draw a bracket around the whole paragraph the bracket is cheating Rebecca the bracket it's it's you have to agree with you I can I can agree with you on that don't be a coward underline the whole thing okay You know, one of my teachers once said when I was reading Crime and Punishment, like, one thing you can do is, like, think of characters as versions of other characters as a thought experiment, just sort of cross-compare.

1:38:23And I remember the scene with Guns the first reading. This time I was thinking of that woman and her husband as being sort of grotesque of Enid and Al, right? Where his refusal to deal with life is not unlike this husband's refusal to acknowledge the reality. and that her drawing the guns, this sort of manic, obsessive drawing of guns is not unlike Enid's obsessive get everyone home for Christmas, just in a super exaggerated version of it. I thought that scene was remarkable at the same time. And the kind of thing, Rebecca, I think an editor would be like, do we need this? And the answer is no, but also totally need this at the same time.

1:38:59Jeff:No, but yes. Yeah. Okay. Quotes, Rebecca. We can do like two each here. This is a disaster. I'm already sweating about this. It is. Okay, early in the book, when Alfred and Enid have just landed to visit Chip in New York, they're at the airport. To anyone who saw them averting their eyes from the dark-haired New Yorkers careering past them, to anyone who caught a glimpse of Alfred's straw fedora looming at the height of Iowa corn on Labor Day or the yellow wool of the slacks stretching over Enid's outslung hip, it was obvious they were Midwestern and intimidated. But to Chip Lambert, who was waiting for them just beyond the security checkpoint, they were killers.

1:39:38God, that's unbelievable shit. That is the shit right there, right? All that sort of circling like a nautilus shell spinning around just to get to that clause of they were killers.

1:39:49Jeff:And you can picture them. The way Enid feels about her kids. Her children didn't match. They didn't want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends' children wanted. her children wanted radically, shamefully other things. And that's like right at the core of it. And then I'll go out on the most Midwestern of the many Midwestern foods in this book. Yes, yes. I'm so glad you pulled this. Enid mixed and refrigerated a ham loaf. What the fuck is a ham loaf? I don't know. But Enid mixed and refrigerated a ham loaf for later baking and assembled a salad of bananas, green grapes, canned pineapple, marshmallows, and lemon jello.

1:40:28It's great. Rob, is that something that you've encountered, something like that, the jello salad? That's something that I've seen on a cookout potluck display table and just sort of admired from an appreciable distance and then moved on to the Doritos. It's a wise move. I can confirm that that sort of substance exists, and I don't think I've ever consumed it myself, and I do not intend to. No offense. Rebecca and I are a veteran of many of our church potluck where we have seen that and it is a terror beyond all accounting for. I'll do a couple here. This is the one, I need your help with this one because this is the one where I'm like, oh my God, we're really in Arthur Miller territory.

1:41:09This is Enid saying, what is the reason you're so cold to me? She said, there are reasons, Alfred said, but I will not tell you. Why are you so unhappy? Why won't you tell me? I will go to the grave, but before I tell you, to the grave. does he does he just not know and so he's just saying i would tell you but i don't know what

1:41:29Jeff:no he knows we know the what he totally knows and he's not gonna say them it's that he's disappointed with how his life has turned out he can't look at it so you definitely can't say it because nobody says anything and and it would break her heart like she also knows but they can't like you can't acknowledge it that like we've been together for 50 years and this thing is a total mess. Yeah. And we split the ping pong table with your half of your shit and my half of mine. That's a beautiful image. The ping pong table is a very... To open the book, Rob. To open the book with the scene of the ping pong table.

1:42:06Jeff:I read some of that out loud to Bob and he was like, it's diabolical that the description of the basement is in terms of cardinal directions. It's like on the east end of the ping pong table. Yeah. Like just even that tells you something about it. But yeah, I think that scene with Alfred and Enid, which that was in my quotes too, was like, they just can't, it would break everything to say it. And it's cruel. He's cruel to her. He said something like that to Gary. He's arguing with Gary and he's like, I see your marriage. I see these things. You'll find out eventually. Like he runs the same sort of rap on him that I see the terrible things, but I will never tell you.

1:42:47You're just going to find out for yourself. You're just going to find out. I got two more. I'll move on. Here was a torture that the Greek inventors of the feast and the stone had admitted from their Hades. The blanket of self-deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything. And the nights were getting cold now. And this was the killer for me. This is from Alfred's point of view. Hadn't he with every question that he'd ever failed to ask her, her being Denise, earned the right to relief from any uncomfortable question she might want to ask him now, like, what's with the enema dad?

1:43:27Jeff:Ugh. Okay. Rob, I saw you reach for your book. Do you—I want to make sure you get to get your quotes out. What do you have, Rob? What do you have underlined? But this is actually not underlined. Okay, I don't know if I can do this. Like, this entire part is underlined right here, but the part I reach for is not underlined, and I'm going to have to remedy that immediately after we're done talking. This is the last paragraph. This is when he's fallen in the water. This is the ends of the entire cruise, which encompasses the racist herd, the woman who only draws guns and then him actually falling in the water.

1:44:02And so he's in the water and he says, it says, he was remembering the nights he'd sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from Black Beauty or the Chronicles of Narnia. Narnia comes up a lot. A lot of Narnia. His voice alone, its palpable resonance had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit. Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair, sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak certainty.

1:44:43they came to him now these forgotten counter examples because in the end when you were falling into water there was no solid thing to reach for but your children so fuck that man i didn't put that on because i wasn't be able i didn't put that in because i wasn't going to be able to get through it rob there's a reason i didn't have that i was just

1:45:06Jeff:thinking we've done this and nobody has cried so good job everyone wow having to need to edit it Okay. Rebecca, is it for you? Is it not for you? I mean, if you like a big, old-fashioned novel about ordinary, messy people in their ordinary messiness, but done in the most artful way, this is for you. And I think if you've only heard the discourse about Franzen, and it's time to find out for yourself. And you will be surprised by, I think, how good it is, by how unpretentious the fiction is, and how relatable. Maybe not if, I don't know, I'm hard-pressed on this one. Well, I mean, when we say that maybe not, we're not authorizing this, but if you need a likable character, right, there could be some stuff that you don't like.

1:45:50It's also pretty difficult to – it's not a page turner in a conventional sense. So different kinds of readers are going to have a different experience. But I think in terms of themes and ideas and then craft, there's not a whole lot to counterindicate reading it. rob do you have a sense of a kind of reader that might be especially good for or not good for um as our as our honorary civilian serious civilian reader i am a very serious civilian reader the 600 pages alone is sort of a daunting thing that unlikable character thing and again this is something if you find these people unlike and i wouldn't go back into his oeuvre but that is the question of snark narkiness or not of sarcasm like if you if you're put off by a tone of what you regard as elitism midwestern egalitarianism or something like part of that is the ultra grumpus reputation that franzen has but if if you if you don't like books where you feel like the author is looking down on their character.

1:46:57If you have a problem with that, I guess this is an extension of unlikable characters, but it's just, and again, I agree with Rebecca that his reputation often is really unfair, but there is, again, I go back to serious literature being in the blurb on the cover of this book. Like this is a book that just telegraphs in so many ways that this is the real shit. This isn't for Oprah. You know, this is for the real Eds. Like that is an attitude that is an aura that I completely understand might be off putting to people. You know, I think that's a great way of putting it, Rob. I think the I've come, maybe I've mellowed as I'm older.

1:47:34I think of Franzen is not as looking down on his characters so much as he's looking around. Right. I can say someone might not. It feels that way. It might feel that way. Yeah, it might feel that way. I think that's a great point.

1:47:46Jeff:On a really practical level, like some of this can hit really close to home. And I have there like there have been some popular novels in the last few years, like Sandwich by Katherine Newman is one that I have heard are great. And I believe they are great. And they are about dealing with your aging parents in disastrous, painful health crises. And I like I can't I can't do it. Franzen, like there's enough moving, as you're saying, Jeff, looking around like we're not just in that the whole time. And I think that's one of the things that makes this bearable. But like, if looking at that is just too much because you're living in it, like that's a good, maybe save Franzen for later.

1:48:26Yeah. These are the immortal questions that Art can ask. And the game we play are Witcher Primary here. Rob, I'm going to throw it to you here in just a second. You can think while I'm vamping, or not vamping, but I'm going through them. And then Rebecca can come to your aid or to your accolation if you do very well. I have faith in Rob. I'm not worried. These are the questions that we've extended our own list that I used to use as a way to ground discussions of texts that can seem far away from students or readers, right? I think this one is not the problem we ourselves having. This maybe is too close, if anything.

1:48:58These are the questions. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? And within that, who is my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? who am I and who are my people and what is the nature of justice? Rob, does your heart, soul, eyes draw to any of those as you think about the corrections? Which of these, or maybe you're curious about one of them and maybe being not. Ever you want to go, Rob, we'll follow for this. Okay, my knee-jerk impulse was how to deal with the certainty of death certainly seems primary because the whole thing is people not being able to deal with what's happening to Alfred, including himself, my affliction, et cetera.

1:49:45Like the Midwestern nice preventing people from dealing with cold, hard reality, et cetera. Is this all there is feels like a very core Jonathan Franzen conceit. Like all, it struck me. And again, this is more the earlier books than this one, but he wants to write the great American novel about how America kind of sucks. And like, it's just, there's a lot of driving around the suburbs and just dismayed at the environmental aspect, the deforestation and we killed all the Native Americans and the terrible soulless screens of it all. This is the society we've built. And that leads in the end, as you've been saying, to no one will talk to each other and just sit down and have a one-to-one sort of Christmasland experience.

1:50:31But it feels like is this all there is, is sort of the core, more so broadly of his work. but I do think it ends here as well. Because again, Gary to me, what's so terrifying to me about Gary is that Gary is the successful kid. He is the financially stable, married with three kids, like nuclear family sort of experience, but it's horrible and it's sort of soulless and it's turned against him. And it's kind of his fault, it kind of not his fault, but it's just, again, it's that 90s idea of like, this isn't what you want. You know, you don't want to settle down with a nuclear family in the suburbs and just work some bullshit job where you make money.

1:51:14Like, that idea permeates this book as well. And so I'm going to say I can talk myself and you could talk me into any of these. But I think is this all there is, is the one that I will gravitate toward and stick with. Yeah. I think I would yes end that, Rob. And there's another version of that. Is this the only way to be in relationship with people? Like, is this the only way? There has to be some other way that we could all want to come home for Christmas for two days. Doesn't that seem possible? That feels like it should be possible as a reader. But within the context of this book, there is no other way outside of this.

1:51:49They're all searching for ways to be in connection that are, I'm going to loan you money, but then feel guilty about it. Then we're going to have to do this like kabuki theater about I'm having to say it's good for me, for me to forget. Like, it's all a mess in that regard. Rebecca, what did you want to say? You want to double down on Rob or is another one? I'm going to double down.

1:52:08Jeff:I also think like what is the good life is deeply connected to the is this all there is of it. And for Gary especially, he's doing all the things that he thought would give him the good life. And it still hasn't worked. And that takes him into the is this all there is. But Chip is trying to figure it out for himself. Denise is trying to figure it out for herself. And Enid and Alfred are so tragic because they've done the things that they thought would give them a good life and they've ended up in this place of, you know, all the junk is in the basement and she's disappointed and needy and he's mean and now increasingly demented.

1:52:44Jeff:And their kids don't, their kids can't stand them. Like the tragedy of it is that, you know, that Gary's like, I can only be in your house for 48 hours and that that they haven't found a way to maintain those connections, but that the parents didn't create the foundation where that was possible. I do think it is ultimately the is this all there is. And like, if the answer is yes, then what do you do with that? Yeah, right, right. I might just add free will, real or no, because one thing I did track is a very ongoing concern with the reality that we are beings of chemistry, right, in the form of Aslan or Correct All or even his Parkinson's or dementia diagnosis, right?

1:53:29There is something at work in our bodies that is beyond just our free will or identity or our beautiful and unique and perfect soul. And could you correct? Is it is correcting your problems with drugs actually correcting them?

1:53:44Jeff:I mean, it seems to be a thoroughgoing question for the Franzen of it all that correct all, which is like in one place, the drug that is supposed to fix Parkinson's. But with a different spelling, correct all is an anti-constipation medication. And like, these are the two problems. Is this really about pooping is what you're saying? Is this whole thing about getting enough fiber? It's about literal shit as a metaphor for emotional shit. Yes. I like that. That's pretty good. Put that next to serious literature. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? I mean, Chip teaches a class called Consuming Narratives.

1:54:23So, yeah.

1:54:24Jeff:It's maybe more about the stories that we tell than it's about art and writing. per se, but like it's Jonathan Franzen. So on some level, it kind of always is. This is one of the more pregnant versions of that we need to answer in terms, could you get the most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation? I mean, I hope someday soon we will. There's a really fraught adaptation history going back to when the book came out in 2001. Scott Rudin got the rights to make a film. It stalled. And then in 2005, Robert Zemeckis had it in development, and that also stalled. And then in 2011, HBO announced that they were doing a series with Noah Baumbach to direct, which would have been incredible shit, with Anthony Hopkins playing Alfred, which is fascinating.

1:55:11Jeff:and then they made a pilot. The pilot never aired. I would pay a billion dollars to watch that pilot and it was never picked up for series. And then earlier this year, Netflix ordered a limited series adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Cord Jefferson, who adapted Percival Everett's erasure into American fiction and won an Oscar for it, is attached to direct. It's like, I need that in my veins. If this one doesn't happen, I don't know what I'm going to do. Why do we keep trying to make this? Just because it's good? And it's going to be so much fun to watch on TV. The, I mean, the turd hallucinations are going to be potentially.

1:55:52Do you think they're going to do that? They're going to put that on television? They're going to do Rob's gun lady's drawing on television?

1:55:58Jeff:You're going to have to edit some. She's not your gun lady, Rob. Not the gun lady. It's, I do not want to own that, but I guess I have to. They got to do the turd. It is artistic. They have to. I don't want to see the turd, but you have to do the turd. I don't know what you're doing if you don't do the turd. Okay. Yeah, you have to do the turd. And there's got to be an episode of them on the cruise. And that's just such a rich place to set a wild kind of scene. Good bottle episode. Yes, a good bottle episode. And I think people recognize this is a great story. And the characters, there's a lot to, these will be great roles.

1:56:33Jeff:There's a lot to do for an actor here. And like the fact that Meryl Streep says yes to something like this also points back to that. Like this is really rich stuff that you could do a lot with on screen. Like they may have to cut down, I don't know, some of the Lithuania stuff or like maybe they're updating. Maybe it's like it's kind of a timeless situation these people are in. So it could be a 2001 period piece, but they could set it present day. I want to see this like this is just good to prestige TV. Yeah, I look forward to Rob watching the adaptation with his family and his kids wondering why he's crying when Gary's overcooking bratwurst for the third time.

1:57:12What's wrong, Dad? Yeah, what's wrong, Dad? You have no idea. I'll never tell you. I could tell you, but I'm never going to tell you. You'll find out. The most terrifying thing your parent can say to you about a hard question. If we were to choose for ourselves, Rebecca, a movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets, what are we choosing here?

1:57:32Jeff:I mean, I think a TV series is right for the structure, but I really want to do the exercise of casting the Muppets. So the conceit with this is there can only be one real human, and who would that be? And then which Muppet would be which character? Take it away, Rob. Rob, I'm going to at least tell you that a Muppet cannot be giving itself an enema on screen to me, so that is your only, your stricture here. I don't know how we're going to do this, but I think you have to work with that. Okay, let's make Alfred the real character. Yeah. Enid by default has to be Miss Piggy? This is not mapping very well for me.

1:58:14We have found that the dearth of female identifying Muppets is a problem for this. Janice from the band. Janice doesn't have it. Are you sure you guys just came home for Christmas? There we go. the other way to do it is to do Sam the Eagle as Alfred and just sort of bypass let's bypass the enema excuse me Sam the Eagle as Alfred that's it Fozzie is Chip I think that's right yeah Fozzie's Chip yeah I don't want to do this anymore I'm sorry Piggy then is Enid we could have piggy this is a deranged exercise it really is this is really and I think I think Kermit as Gary plays because he's the most straight ahead Muppet I think so

1:59:04Jeff:I think it's Kermit yeah that was great thank you for that I'm glad that was worth the whole show Rob thank you so much you can cut that no no that's like cutting the turd from the adaptation you have to there we go alright that was the turd of the podcast there we go miscellaneous trivia adaptations rumors misretrieve quotes etc there's not a whole lot I'm surprised Rebecca I don't know if you research. I didn't find a whole lot. Well, Franzen's, he's not really out there, which good for him. But at one point, it no longer does. But at one point, the URL, ciswhitemail.com redirected to Jonathan Franzen's Facebook page, which had to be the work of someone around 2010.

1:59:43That's a real early, yeah, early Internet kind of vibe at the same time. Mine was that Franz's watch was still so bright that eight years later when Freedom came out, it got into meaningful inclusion in Parks and Rec. Leslie asked Anne to read Freedom because she wants to talk about Patty.

1:59:59Jeff:Oh, I don't remember that. That is wild to do a bit later. And you already had the thing about there is a 15 part BBC radio series in which each episode is 15 minutes featuring apparently Richard Schiff. this is the strangest thing that English people have done since blood sausage as far as that's a wild thing to do to an adaptation the only like 30 seconds of it and it was the turd thing there's a podcast called oh no there's a podcast called mr difficult where they read every frantic novel and talk about it at the very end of the corrections episode they play like 20 seconds of the turd i'm not positive about this but it felt like the turd had like a new jersey accent I'm probably projecting that onto the turd but I can confirm that the BBC has aired a talking racist turd amazing menacing Alfred it was a beautiful moment I need to see that be adapted also so that I can rewrite my imagining of the turd scenes because I am ashamed to admit it but I just keep seeing Mr.

2:01:06Jeff:Hankey the Christmas Pooh from South Park of course Of course. Classic. I had a little bit more dancey baby from Ally McBeal. That's kind of like, I don't know. That's what I was. All just like uncanny valley stuff. Yeah. All the way down. Okay. Time for hot takes, Rob. I don't see you have anything here, but if something comes to mind, shout up anytime. Rebecca, blast off. Tolstoy was wrong. Unhappy families are all alike too. And that's, it's all the dad's fault. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously. No, I mean, Enid's on the hook here. I also think that Goodreads should not be allowed to have quotes pages for some books, and this is one of them.

2:01:42Jeff:Oh, we didn't do the number one Goodreads quote. There's a reason for that. I looked, and I looked at the page just like with my hands over my face of like, this is not good for my soul. You have to say it now. Do you know? I don't know. I don't remember. I just remember looking at it being like, Goodreads, we're not doing this. So those are mine. But mostly Tolstoy was wrong. This is a hot take. Like the hype, mostly the bad kind would not be, would have been less if his author photo was not so dishy. He was not really a dishy guy, but the photo, I don't know if you've seen this. The dude is a smoke show.

2:02:14Can you see on my camera here? Like they really did him up. Jonathan Franzen is a smoke show. That's a really hot take. That is a flaming hot take. But he himself, like you see him talk. He's a smart, not an, but that is like, I don't know. That's really, they really did some work with him. You're accusing him of yassifying his own author photo and that affecting quality of this. No, I think his publicist, I mean, they did what they needed to do, but I just say it didn't help that. Like, that's what we were doing at the back cover there. Enid Lambert should be up there with Willie Loman and Jay Gatsby as one of the great American figures of pathos.

2:02:47Like, I think it really is, should be thought of in the same terms. My other hot take is this is way, way harder than it looks. Oh, yes. And that being what Jonathan Franzen is doing here, I do not think it's reasonable. This is not a, it would be called chick lit if it was written by a woman. I'm sorry. I just don't think that's true. It's doing something different. It may have gotten its own biases thrown in, but I don't think people would mistake this for. Again, at the time we were calling this chick lit. Now we just call it commercial fiction, but it's not really operating at the same level.

2:03:18There might be other candidates for it, but it's not this book.

2:03:21Jeff:Yeah. There are women who write in this way on this level, of course, but Jennifer Weiner is not one of them. Don't come for me. Rob, do you have one? do you have one you need to squeeze out here for us while we're in the defecation metaphor please don't please don't ever say that to me again but yeah okay maybe i do are you familiar with the meme of the worst person you know just made a great point have you seen that online okay i think about him with that a lot because the environmentalism right like going back to strong motion that book is about corporations ruining the environment like the bird watching I know annoys people, but it's rooted in like this concern for the environment that was very ahead of its time.

2:04:00As you noted, this is a book that's railing against screens before the internet really exists as we know it certainly before phones, et cetera. Like there's, if you come to this book with the John, what, and what you know about Jonathan Franzen is like, he's the Oprah guy. He's the Oprah antagonist, you know, in like the Gawker era, he was the snarky, like white male like red flag if you see this book on a dude's bookshelf like run away just the internet has really poisoned the way that we think about this guy without him engaging with it at all which is very frustrating like he seems like a pretty sour and pretty elitist guy in a lot of respects like i'm not saying he's like a barrel of monkeys or whatever but there is you have to try you either have to filter out what the internet in 2026 is going to tell you about this person or you have to lean all the way into that and you need to let him sort of cook as like the guy who's like really annoying but also like right about a lot of this stuff whether you want to admit it or not there's the scene in Plato's symposium um where Alcibiades is getting real

2:05:11Jeff:getting really of course let's do Plato now well he's getting really annoyed with Socrates because he's like, won't shut up, but he's making good points. And that's where we get the phrase gadfly comes from that scene of like, I know, could you just shut up? You're right, but just shut up at the same time. And that's very much, I think, maybe what Rob is cluing into there. Rita likes Rebecca. You have some, I have some, and then Rob has always chime in here. But where did you think people should go if they're looking for Rita likes Rebecca? I mean, Crossroads, Franzen's 2021 novel, is excellent and in a similar mode of excavating stuff from a Midwestern family.

2:05:47Jeff:We've all name checked Don DeLillo and the airborne toxic event, White Noise, is weirder than The Corrections is, but is dealing in the same vein and is certainly, I think, an inspiration for Franzen. And then on a contemporary level, Taffy Broaddus or Ackner is not just one of the great profilers of celebrities and celebrity writers, but she's a great writer herself. And I think Fleischmann is in Trouble is a kind of East Coast version of these stories, as is her novel Long Island Compromise, which has a little more of that like Franzinian wandering, a field and into strange things. But I really enjoyed both of those.

2:06:23Jeff:There's also The Most Fun We Ever Had. Ooh, what is her name? I cannot remember that author's name right now, but another good, my adult children are all a mess and I don't know where I went wrong kind of novel. Claire Lombardo, that's her name. Claire Lombardo, thank you. I've got a few here. I was, I mentioned some of them before, but authors that were interested in exploring the complexity of the interior lives of some scene or setting or group of people, right? And I went to Henry James, who really, you know, ushered in modern, like pre-modern modernism, where he was taking these romances or family kind of melodramas, but being experimental, but also getting inside people's head and what they're thinking and feeling.

2:07:02and I was looking around for the one and I think the ambassadors is the one I would pick and I didn't know how prescient or like lucky I should say would be. These are people trying to see how much bigger the world is getting outside of their narrow constrictures and things happening and God damn it if their last name of the main characters isn't Lambert in that fucking thing. It blew my mind when I saw that.

2:07:21Jeff:Maybe that's not accidental. I don't know that it's accidental. It could be, but it's pretty specific. The only other Lambert I know is Adam Lambert which I'm sure is on Rob's Spotify wrapped at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Rob strikes. He was a big Adam Lambert guy. big Amber. Oh, I love queen, queen, anything. A lot of queen covers. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And then audition by Katie Kitamura, not, not operating at the same kind of register, but she is also very interested in people and families playing roles and those roles eventually becoming, I don't know, stultifying straight jackets.

2:07:58And then she imagines an alternative that blew my mind. And I've talked about Ad Nauseam in other places. I won't believe it here.

2:08:04Jeff:Any excuse for you to talk about auditioning? I know. I'm really looking like, how can I shoehorn audition by Katie Kimura? And then we did a little bit of the fish to monkey to man that gets from Pinchon to DeLillo to Franzen. But I wanted to go one beyond like, okay, if you're doing Franzen, what's after? I'm really looking at Ben Lerner and then the Topeka Station, also a Midwesterner. This particular book is set around the same time. It's autofiction. Ben Lerner was a national debate champion. The main character is a national debate champion, but it's Midwestern. It's interested in relationships and families.

2:08:40His mother is a writer and a psychologist who works at something called The Institute, which I believe is based on managers in Topeka. Rob and Rebecca, you may know that as Midwesterners, which is like a psychiatric institution and research facility. again not exactly like franzen but you can see a lineage at the same time so that would be there rebecca other titles we've rob again i don't want to i don't want to put you on the spot nor do i want to lie to any anything that you think of when you think of the corrections any books that come to mind for you i thought of white teeth of zanys smith just that was around this time right i think

2:09:12Jeff:that was early 2000s as well and just yeah it's 2000 you know family dead dynamics with like a density and like a coolness to it you know i think i get a way less like cynicism and snarkiness and like all the sort of red flag stuff is is less apparent but just in terms of like a big thick you know ideas filled dense book with family dynamics i always thought of white teeth like i i'm looking right now at my copy of martyr kamehameha and i that strikes me like there's you know parental dynamics in there and it goes in sort of a weird direction but martyr strikes me as like the chip lambert story like sort of stretched out to like an absurd degree like just just the fuck up kid you know making his way back to his family but like in a really sort of painfully circuitous way like i maybe that's a stretch but that's that's what i initially thought those are great there are no stretches here i like the white teeth especially because it was around the same time.

2:10:15And a phrase that was lowered at Zadie Smith, I think it was Dale Peck who coined the term hyperrealism, which was sort of a dismissive term at the time. It seems super applicable to the register of Franzen in his writing at this particular moment. I think there's a lot there. Hysterical realism or something. Yeah, yeah. I think hyperrealism.

2:10:35Jeff:Justice for Zadie, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But notably, I think maybe to the earlier point, she did not get dismissed as chiclet. that she was taken quote unquote seriously in multiple profiles and that kind of thing at the same time. So that's an interesting one. Rebecca, what tendrils does this one reach out to connect to above the titles we've covered so far? The most obvious one for me, and there were no really obvious ones, was Gone Girl, which we just read and also really skewers Midwestern personalities and stereotypes in different ways. But there's some really sharp observation about the Midwest there.

2:11:13Jeff:You've got the Rushdie and the Pension. We've talked about Midnight's Children and Vineland. Go Tell It on the Mountain was on your list, and I was waiting to hear you talk about that. Well, I think structurally and not thematically necessarily, but remember, it has big chunks from different family members' point of view, right? And I thought that looking at—it's using the same prism to reflect the light of looking at a family and where someone came from. This one is so much looking backward. And the main character of Go Tell on the Mountain is going forth, but doing some similar structural things.

2:11:46I also think about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for this reason and this reason alone. I read the quote about, you know, there's a question that he said. If Chip were here, I could ask him the question and he would know the answer if I could only remember what the question was. And that got me thinking of 42 in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the Earth is just this one big mistake to answer the question. but people don't know what the question is. And I thought there was something to that at the same time. It's not, it's just kind of a small, it made me think of, anytime there's an unanswered question, I'm now thinking of 42 and like we don't know what the question is exactly.

2:12:22Rebecca, cocktail party crib sheet. I think Rob actually had the best one of like, you've got to scrub your mind of the internet to look this full on in the face. I wish I had thought of that, Rob, but I will insert you here and have some stolen valor for that. Rebecca, what else did you have for a cocktail party crib?

2:12:40Jeff:I mean, kind of talked about it earlier, but more people talking about more things, more of the time is good for life, but it's bad for fiction. And this is great fiction about how messy life can become when we're not talking about anything. And really real and much more interesting than a bunch of therapized characters talking to each other in that way. Yeah. I guess my version of Rob's take is It really is excellent and holds up beautifully. It does. The thing that's around that is you've got to slough off or hold in abeyance the discourse, the received wisdom and conversation about it. Yeah, it feels really fresh.

2:13:18And related to that, Franzen was not a titan when this book came out, as Rob can attest, in the 500 pages of page-turning bestsellerdom that he waded through. And a lot of the kerfuffle is that he did not have a sense of how bright the lights were. I think that's right. And, you know, I think some things he said he probably believed and were untoward, but we're not coming from a place of like, he didn't have the knives out.

2:13:44Jeff:Yeah, it sounds like some of those Q &A sessions he had at book events right after he turned down the Oprah thing were just situations that were impossible to navigate, where people asked him about it. And when he gave what his honest answer was, answers were taken out of context and quoted. But there were also people, there was a faction that were like, yeah, why would you go on Oprah? Your book says serious fiction on the cover. And so there wasn't a right answer he could have given that would have made everyone happy. And we really know that now living on the internet. Jonathan Franzen got an early taste of it, I think.

2:14:21yeah a final beat our zero to well read score each one gets a score from one to ten with ten being the highest rob from your long work in music you know this is never fraught to score uh cultural artifacts of any kind and no one everyone is right and no one has fun about it yeah it's fun and it's just kind of a guidepost and these aren't really meant to be better or worse these are just kind of orienting ourselves and the many vectors that make a book last and interesting to consider over time they are historical importance readability current relevance of Central Questions. Book nerd read cred in Oh Damn Factor.

2:14:51Rebecca, and I will read in host, but maybe Rob and Rebecca, you can hash out yourself between the two of you what number you're comfortable with. Let's start with historical importance. Rebecca, how do you want to frame that? I mean, I think it's high for modern fiction, like 21st century fiction.

2:15:10Jeff:It's hard to know where he's going to land in the big, big picture of things. We've talked about books that are are 100 years old, 200 years old, older than that, like a seven or an eight? What do you think, Rob? I was thinking eight, because I do think if you think of turn of the century or early 2000s, like serious fiction, like you're going to go to this, you're going to go to Infinite Jest or whatever. I do think that the Oprah thing helps in the sense that it really stakes the corrections to 2001, you know, and it became a flashpoint for this article about serious fiction versus book clubs, you know, like all of these things.

2:15:52I do think that that, unhappily for him, I imagine, like helps with making this historically important. Like this book became about more than the book itself. And eight sounds good to me.

2:16:06Jeff:Yeah, I'm so glad you phrased it that way because Jeff and I have been talking about the big gossipy event of Emily Wilson panning Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey. We've been trying to think of what are the other big gossipy events. I think this is the last one. It's been 25 years. It was Oprah and Franzen in 2001. And then Emily Wilson pans The Odyssey, just in terms of literary criticism adjacent stuff. Unless you want to say the Oprah stuff, unless you want to talk about A Million Little Pieces. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I know what you're saying. Yeah. I can easily imagine, like, if Klosterman wrote a sequel to the 90s called The 2000s, I could imagine him writing a section on this.

2:16:53Totally. I can imagine that being something. Yes, all the way back to Spin. I think I agree with 8. I think it's about as high as you can get for something that's 25 years old, honestly.

2:17:04Jeff:Readability, I think. okay Rob start there why the laugh it is it's not as hard as you think it's going to be like it's not like Thomas Pynchon who I love but I need a Reddit thread open you know that's leading me chapter by I don't need that and even like infinite jest as daunting as it is just as a physical and metaphysical object like it's not that it's hard to read from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph, but there is a daunting density to it. And again, like there's a tone, you know, the elitist tone, again, I think might turn you off if you're hyper attuned to the internet of it all.

2:17:50Is it rude to say like a five or six that it just, this is a little bit more of a commitment that you're making?

2:17:59Jeff:I think I would go to like six, six and a half, maybe. Sure. Yeah, yeah. The parts that are, yeah, the plot stuff with the family is super readable. But then there is the tone and there's also the wandering into like obscure details of Lithuanian diplomacy. That like the sentences are not hard, but it can be kind of attentionally hard of like, why do I care about this? There's a lot of that. Yeah. It's not a page turn. Alfred falls into the ocean and then he is abandoned functionally for like a hundred pages. It just starts talking about Denise and Robin. And it's like you can't. This is not a thriller in the sense that your questions are answered.

2:18:41Jeff:Absolutely not. I think one thing that maybe augurs for it being a little higher than five is just that the emotional core is so tractable. Like, you know, it's about this family. whereas with a Pynchon or even a David Foster Wallace, sometimes you can get lost of what is this even about? At this, I never really felt like I was lost from what the whole thing is about, even in the little mini cul-de-sacs of diversions. Seven? Yeah, six and a half, seven in there is fine. Current relevance of central questions, this presupposes always and already that we know what those questions are. I think for us personally here, this is 11 out of 10, but I don't know how that tracks onto other people.

2:19:21you had mentioned i we could do an adaptation of this a tv show or whatever that's current day like i would prefer that we not do that i think this book needs to be pre-internet i think any rendering of this as a movie a tv show i think it's important that he's really worried about mass media but what he means by that is like cnn and cd rom games that gary's kids have like it has to feel archaic and you have to have the feeling that he and these characters to an extent are very concerned about the perniciousness of what they perceive as mass media but they have no fucking idea what's actually coming for them like i just the notion of this book with everybody being on their phones you know 75 of the time like i think but what i think i think that actually makes it more impressive that still the central questions are so central it's still relevant to today even if the media environment it depicts and worries about is nothing like the current media environment like as you say like he's worried about screens he's worried about people not talking to each other he's worried about touching grass in an extent like he got it in its broad parameters, even if he could have no idea of its specificity.

2:20:41That it was just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. The tip of the melting iceberg. Yeah.

2:20:45Jeff:So we've agreed that it's an 11? Is that where we are? No, I'm 11 or 10. I think it's a 10. I think it's a 10. Yeah. Yeah. I think your point, Rob, that there's something about the specificity of the technology of the day would make it creepier than if they were just texting to each other. The estrangement from our current use of technology as like this was even before it got real bad and it was still bad. I think I think it serves as a heightener. Yeah. Well, and even just like in the text of the book, there are the emails between Denise and Chip about, are you going to come home for Christmas?

2:21:21Jeff:I would really like you to come home for Christmas. It would make mom really happy. And the distance and like the time between those emails makes it work as well, where today they would just be texting each other. and I don't want to read those text exchanges. Yeah, texting is bad art. Makes for bad art. That is true at the same time. Book nerd read cred. This is a fraught one because everyone knows this book who maybe would be listening to this show, but I'm guessing a lot of people haven't cracked it for the patina of stank of the Oprah kerfluffle and everything that happened. So I'm having a hard time orienting myself.

2:21:55Help me out with that, guys.

2:21:56Jeff:I think I'm leaning to the 7-8 space Because there is, I think there are people who read this in 2001 who have like denounced Jonathan Franzen and might be very surprised by the reality of what they find here and how good it is at kind of overcoming the internet Jonathan Franzen of it all. And then there are people who have never read Jonathan Franzen because they came online since 2010 and the Franzenfreude stuff and have just thought like, fuck that guy. Why would I ever read his books? So I think it's relatively high here. eight? I'll go with seven or eight, but I have to say strong motion and the 27th city are both tens to me.

2:22:38It's you're really cool. Oh, that was I see what you did there. You did your homework. And I will allow it. You know, I wasn't going to say it. You should have waited for me to say it, but I was going to say something like that.

2:22:48Jeff:Is this a homework assignment we unknowingly sent you on? No, this is the whole point. This is the thing I did in my head. this is entirely me you did not suggest to me that i do this you would have advised against it i imagine if i had told you this is the thing that i feel that i have to do right it's part of my cross to bear okay yeah that's you that's you in the basement sorting out the christmas lights that's right yeah that's gonna go in the car anyway mysterious jars surrounding me yeah i think that eight makes sense to me because like you know we ping out tens at the crying of lot 49 or Ulysses or, you know, Ducks Newsburyport, but this isn't quite that, but it's still pretty high.

2:23:31I think we're also wrestling with our own reaction to the pieces that really hit. The oh damn factor is our catch-all for dang, look what this person can do with a sentence and isn't art grand. I'm also having a hard time, my soul is having a hard time sinking lower than eight, Rebecca. What do you think about that?

2:23:48Jeff:I mean, the oh damn factor was so high that I I was asked in my household to stop quoting it. That's pretty damn. That's a very old damn. Yeah, that's pretty damn. I was going to say nine, and I would go at 10. Yeah, let's go nine. It's pretty, yeah. Let's go nine. I think nine is reasonable. We're Midwestern. We don't need to get too excited about it. 10 is reserved for Shakespeare. You know, I have a hard time doing that myself. But there's a part of me that has as much reaction to this as any line. Yeah, well, Twilight, cool. It's clearly a nine. Rob, you made it to the end. That's it. You made it to the end with me.

2:24:26Is this the longest episode of this show you've ever done?

2:24:29Jeff:Yeah, it is. It is, I think. Yeah, I didn't even ask if you had an out, but too bad. Likewise. We did two hours on the secret history and we did two hours on the Constitution. So two and a half on Jonathan Franzen. There we go. That's a weird trick. It all checks out. There's something weird. It really is. Yeah. if you want to join our patreon patreon.com for guided read-alongs and other membership options including you can make this by shorter by getting an ad-free version as a patreon episode all of you over there you can follow us on the socials at Zero to Well Read podcast is again always interested in your emails Zero to Well Read at BookRad.com if you're listening to this I would be especially interested if you have you were you're a younger person than the three of us here I'm sorry Rebecca I'm aging you up because at some point we're all in the same bucket.

2:25:19Jeff:The gray hair's on the screen, man. The same bucket. If you're 27 or younger or 35 or younger, even I would say, what is your sense of this figure, this book at all? I really don't have any idea. I would love to hear this. I'd love to know. Thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. And Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. You can go listen to... You have a new season coming out, Rob, right? I just saw soon? I do. I don't know when this is coming out, but I have a new season coming out as we sit here like a week and a half so i unless you're gonna be out by the time i will be there yes no no awesome and that new season is what well it's just the 2000 now this show is called 60 songs that explain the 90s colon the 2000s which is hilarious to me but it's out we're dealing with songs from the aughts from 2000 to 2009 so we're we're right in the the corrections zone i don't think the book has come up yet but i will do i will remedy that as soon there's always time.

2:26:16The register Rob works at over there is different the year, but I think there's a fellow traveler of like trying to understand what this song was and contextualizing. I think if you like this show, this show, spiritually there's something to over there if you haven't checked that out. Probably a lot of people already have, but I really liked that episode. I was listening to recently, because I think I remember you did one where you were reading Bright Lights, Big City, but I don't remember what the song was. That was listening to Moby. I don't even remember what episode that was. That's why I went to look at it.

2:26:46Because what did Rob have to say about Moby? Because I was trying to figure it out. I read that book at one sitting while listening to Moby. And I went over and cried while sitting with my girlfriend. And then we went on a cruise together. And then it didn't work out. Oh, same girlfriend. Same girl. Is that true, Rob? Is that really in the timeline? That's the core timeline?

2:27:05Jeff:This is an incredible lore drop for you today. Wow. We have to end the show there. Rob, thank you so much for joining us. a real delight to have you. Thanks, everybody.