Freedom v. Kapitoil
presented by
OPENING ROUND
Freedom
v. Kapitoil
Judged by Sarah Manguso
Sarah Manguso’s most recent books include The Two Kinds of Decay and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape. Honors for her writing include a Hodder Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. Her next book, The Guardians, a prose elegy, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “Lionel Shriver interviewed me onstage at the Southbank Centre in London; Gary Shteyngart and I sat through a few faculty meetings together at Columbia.”
Teddy Wayne’s Kapitoil’s most appealing quality is its pacing—even Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom, said so last year in The Daily Beast: “Though the storytelling is conventional, it is satisfyingly so.” Throughout his first novel, Wayne divulges the information of his plot at a rate perfectly calibrated to entertain.
If Karim Issar, Kapitoil’s Qatari narrator, isn’t identified as clinically autistic, he’s at least what we now call “on the spectrum”; he’s a software programmer who has half-learned English from financial magazines and writes a diary because “I have a robust memory for some details, but it is complex to continue acquiring data and archive them all, and even I now am forgetting some older memories, as if my brain is a hard drive and time is a magnet.”
The book begins during Karim’s plane trip to New York, where he’ll work as a software developer for Schrub Equities. Composed wholly of written diary entries, the tale of his adventures depicts the moral quandary of the corporate employee. In both speech and writing, Karim tends to misuse corporate-speak outside the corporate milieu; I counted 24 recurring terms. But his fluency improves cumulatively as the book progresses; in fact each diary entry includes a list of vocabulary words used in that entry’s reported dialogue, and future entries record Karim studiously attempting to use some of his newly learned words.
FROM OUR SPONSOR
To sum up: The book uses the emotional conceit of an apparently autistic narrator, the formal conceit of the diary form, the lexical conceit of a narrator with limited fluency, the second lexical conceit of consistent usage errors, and the narrative conceit of cumulative fluency. That’s five conceits.
I wouldn’t strike down a novel for employing conceits, but without them Kapitoil is left with its characters: one male coworker who is always a jerk while the other is always kind; a female coworker who is always moody; Karim’s mother, a dead saint; Karim’s friend the cabbie, behind whose rough demeanor is a heart of gold, and Karim’s sister, his ideal woman, their relationship forever untainted by sex.
Kapitoil is about a young man’s discovery of New York, and at times it reads like a young man’s rush to imitate his older brothers. Among them are Joshua Ferris and Ed Park, who more vividly portray the contemporary office setting as a theater of the absurd; Jonathan Safran Foer and Gary Shteyngart, whose nonnative narrators ruin their English more unexpectedly and hilariously; and most of all, Mark Haddon. The 15-year-old protagonist of Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time describes himself as “a mathematician with some behavioral difficulties,” dodging the word “autism” as Karim does while managing sufficiently to suggest it. Though Haddon’s protagonist is the younger of the two, he is forced to make a choice that requires a life-altering sacrifice, while Karim is allowed at the end of Kapitoil to return to the perfect moral clarity of childhood.
Set in America’s suburban Midwest, Freedom follows the moral development of its two protagonists, Patty and Walter Berglund, through late adolescence and into middle age. Walter commands much of the book’s close third-person perspective; Patty’s diaries, written perversely in her own close third-person, provide two long interruptions. Other chapters belong to minor characters.
The book depicts various types of suburban failures. “Like so many people who become politicians, [Patty’s mother] was not a whole person,” Walter muses. But neither is Patty a whole person, nor her children, nor her husband. Every character lacks something—Walter settles for a disinterested wife; Patty possesses no great love, human or otherwise; Walter’s best friend serially betrays those he loves most; Patty’s sister remains delusionally convinced her art career precludes adult development; and so on. With increasing freedom from responsibility, the characters become more prone to self-pity and more basically miserable: “There was a more general freedom that [Patty] could see was killing her but she was nonetheless unable to let go of.” On the other hand, the characters’ commitments often, but not always, improve their lives.
Against this background of comfortable misery Walter acts out his tragic hero’s quest to save an endangered species of songbird.
No one is exempt from the narrators’ relentless perception. Walter’s best friend “was more of a showman then than he came to be later, when it seemed clear that he was never going to be a star and so it was better to be an anti-star.” His daughter-in-law “was like an imaginary friend who happened to be visible.” Patty’s sisters “were too eccentric and/or entitled-feeling to sustain a long-tem relationship, and still accepting parental subsidies while struggling to achieve an artistic success that they were made to believe was their special destiny.”
It isn’t merely out of cruelty that the narrators state things as they are; Franzen has them refute the world’s lies as a kindness to his readers… and to his characters, for with these cruel judgments he prepares them for their absolution.
Postmodernism seems to have let the blood out of half of the bad contemporary American novels, and sentiment masquerades as depth of feeling in the other half—in a naughty moment, Patty and Walter’s son refers to the latter sort of book’s reliance on “descriptions of rooms and plantings.” Franzen gets away with that crack, though, for what Freedom attempts is more ambitious than mere sentiment or mere intellection. It asks us to empathize with its lily-white characters, despite their Volvos and organic gardens and upper-body workouts, despite their chosen confinement in such banal surroundings. And since the book manages to render suburban St. Paul a viable setting for the full range of human emotional experience, I felt its characters’ pains and joys. With firm control of its dense and rigorous sentences, Freedom hits all its marks. Despite erratic pacing and an endpoint that seems somewhat arbitrary—why not 300 more pages, or 300 less?—the book satisfies its worthy ambitions.
Freedom’s final disclosure is more devastating than Kapitoil’s, and not just because it uses almost twice as many pages to achieve its effect. It is more devastating because Kapitoil focuses on a lightly sketched adolescent who returns to his lightly sketched father, while Freedom focuses on two fully human adults who, despite their history of betrayals, return to each other. When Patty and Walter drive away from the lake house, they complete the book’s convincing depiction of a mature marriage—one that survives serious conflicts and requires serious mercies. It isn’t nostalgia for Walter’s affair that broke my heart; it’s Patty’s forgiveness, and Walter’s forgiveness of her own betrayal, and the reminder that such forgiveness is possible.
Advancing:
Freedom
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John: My objectivity is compromised here. I’ve worked with Teddy Wayne extensively in my editorial capacity at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He even thanks me in the acknowledgements in the back of his book. It isn’t too far off to say that in some sense, I made Teddy Wayne, particularly because I formed his body out of clay and then breathed life into him.
Plus, Jonathan Franzen once insulted my dog.
OK, only some of the above is true, but what I can say is that I’m a fan of both of these books, as is Jonathan Franzen, since he wrote one and blurbed the other:
[Karim]’s a type—the nerdy and needy young immigrant—that we’re all familiar with but that no other writer, as far as I know, has invented such a funny and compelling voice and story for…it does what novels can do better than any other art form: Show us a familiar world through unfamiliar eyes.
Freedom is a polarizing book, with more one-star than five-star reviews at Amazon, with many of the one-star reviews declaring that it “doesn’t live up to the hype.” Having hype for one’s book to not live up to is what you might call a “high-class problem,” since most books disappear without ever having the chance to be hated.
Kevin: A few years back I saw a review for a book (not even a massively hyped book like Freedom) in which the critic said all sorts of kind things about the story and the characters and the writing. Then in the last sentence he summed up with, “So while [title] might not be the greatest book ever written, it’s well worth your time.” And I remember laughing out loud—is this really the standard we’re supposed to apply to every novel? Does this reviewer sign off every review that way? Even now I sometimes wonder if he ever found the book he was looking for.
But especially since the Time magazine cover, you really feel like this is exactly what Jonathan Franzen is up against. If a person feels inclined to give her opinion about this novel, it’s not enough to say that she liked it because, well, why bother? So many people had shoveled so many superlatives at Freedom before it was even published that your amateur opinion maker either has to confirm for you that it’s the Great American Novel or tell you why it fails to be the Great American Novel. G.A.N. or meh. Those are the options available to your typical Amazon reviewer.
John: I think the polarizing nature of Freedom and the big Time magazine/Oprah Book Club-sized target on its back makes it a dubious bet to make it all the way to the prize. Clearly, though, Sarah Manguso was won over, giving it a comfortable margin over Kapitoil.
I do think she correctly identifies Kapitoil’s chief virtue, which is its pace. Sometimes I feel like “plot” is a dirty word in literary fiction, but I dig it, and I think most readers do too, considering how many of our finalists this year rocket along at a good clip without sacrificing the pleasures of language and character, and I definitely include Kapitoil in this bunch.
Manguso identifies what she feels is an over-reliance on conceits in Kapitoil, or at least not enough working well other than the conceits, but I’m going to take issue from the booth with one of the conceits she says she identifies, Karim’s so-called place on the autism spectrum. He is a geek, no doubt, but at no point does he seem to shy away or misunderstand human emotional connections and interactions for anything other than reasons of cultural difference.
And really, is there a novel with more conceits than Freedom? Patty’s “autobiography” is perhaps the biggest one, and in terms of the internal integrity of the book, it’s problematic, given that it’s clearly written in Franzen’s, rather than Patty’s, voice.
Kevin: Patty’s telling of her own story does seem entirely unnecessary until the actual stack of paper that makes up her autobiography makes an appearance in the novel. That was well done. And frankly Patty is the best thing in the book for my 28 bucks. If we’re going to pick at Freedom’s weakness I’d say it’s Walter, a character the book keeps telling us is beloved by everyone even though he possesses no belove-able characteristics whatsoever. The amount of time in the last act the reader spends with Walter and Lalitha—an exotic, intelligent, loyal, pathologically submissive, and enormously large-breasted male fantasy object who, like everyone else in the novel, is inexplicably obsessed with what Walter thinks of her—is fairly exasperating. But Freedom is a big book and big novels are messy (all novels are messy but big ones especially so) and I much enjoyed it. Franzen creates a very big world here and there is great pleasure in entering a fictional universe that large. This is unmistakably realism, but because Franzen observes everything so closely the world of the novel is some heightened version of our own, and the pleasure of reading is somehow distantly related to the pleasures of reading a fantasy epic. There’s an escapist element to it.
John: Patty was also my favorite character, and in fact, she’s written with far more sensitivity than any of the male cast. I could maybe make some kind of observation about Franzen’s self-loathing as occasionally displayed in his essays being worked out in his male characters, but I don’t want to get all Freudian so early in the tourney.
At his heart, Franzen is indeed a realist of the oldest school, which is one of the reasons why the book is so pleasurable once we can get past the hype baggage. Franzen’s solution to the problem of post-modernism is to kind of pretend it doesn’t exist, asking us to overlook things like Lalitha’s “perfection” or Patty’s unlikely skill with prose. And for the most part, it works great, but every so often, there’s some moment of tension between the world Franzen’s trying to conjure, and the world as it is (or appears to be), and I was pulled out from under its spell. Lalitha is a great example, a character stretched almost to cartoon, that makes sense in a book that wears its knowingness on its sleeve, where there’s a wink and a nudge from the author that he’s playing with the older man/younger woman, high-achieving immigrant, big bra’d clichés, but Freedom wants us to take her at face value, and well, I forgive it for that because of its other virtues, but I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
As involved as I was with Freedom while reading it, some months later, I’m hard-pressed to recall anything about it. It’s strange to think about the experience of such a big book being fleeting, but that’s how it felt for me.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Like you say, not every book is the greatest novel ever written. In the end, though, Karim Issar has lingered much longer than anyone from Franzen’s novel.
Kevin: I shouldn’t let this match go without saying that I also enjoyed Kapitoil much more than Judge Manguso did. I found Karim to be a really enjoyable companion, and I laughed a lot at his context-less MBA-speak. The pages flew by. Some conceits just work on me, and this one did. It’s a very assured and funny novel.
Taken as a whole, in fact, this is probably the funniest group of novels we’ve ever had in the ToB. At least five of them could probably be described as outright “comic novels” and many others, including Freedom, can be quite funny. And here’s where I’m tempted to dash off some thoughts about Freedom and a favorite topic of yours and mine, irony, but maybe we’ll save that discussion for the quarterfinals.
Reader comments