A hit, a very palpable hit

Home » blogging » A hit, a very palpable hit

A hit, a very palpable hit

Friday, September 3rd, 2010 | blogging

Lizzie Skurnick reads Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom, and finds this nugget:

The collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn…like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job…There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? … And was it true you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts okay politically? How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood…Was it impossible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy brilliant kids while working full-time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning?

UPDATE: related, from Tyler Cowen:

In his new book Encounter, Milan Kundera writes:

I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liaasons. Not Tom Jones, Fielding’s most famous hero. Not Werther. All Stendhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s and Dostoyevsky’s and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil′s major characters…and Kafka’s protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason — to erase the infant from his life — that he flees to America and the novel can be born. This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists it is the spirit of the arc of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.

Toss in Melville and Conrad while you′re at it. What I find striking, however, is that contemporary writers seem more likely to give their protagonists children (Roth, Franzen, Updike, for a start, plus the rise of female authors helps this trend). And that is precisely at a time when more people are having no children at all. The decline of the heroic ideal in literature, and the decline of the journey of adventure, seem to be stronger forces in predicting fictional family size.