Jonathan Franzen transforms disdain for others and cringing at his own shortcomings into restless, morally-probing novels. His new, avian-focused essay collection, “The End of the End of the Earth,” makes the most of this complex, contradictory gift.
Book review
Jonathan Franzen is for the birds. Every other entry in his new essay collection, “The End of the End of the Earth,” focuses on the ornithological world and the threats posed to it by humankind. That focus gets the sharp-eyed Franzen out of the house to locales ranging from East Africa and the Caribbean to Egypt and Antarctica … which means he delivers some top-notch travel writing while he’s at it.
Franzen loves birds – obsessively, rhapsodically, methodically — and for some years now, he’s been on a list-keeping crusade, recording all the far-flung avian specimens he’s sighted. “If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world,” he writes. “Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else. Gray Gulls raise their chicks in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth. Emperor Penguins incubate their eggs in Antarctica in winter. Goshawks nest in the Berlin cemetery where Marlene Dietrich is buried, sparrows in Manhattan traffic lights, swifts in sea caves, vultures on Himalayan cliffs, chaffinches in Chernobyl. The only forms of life more widely distributed than birds are microscopic.”
In a few places — the fisheries of South Africa, New Zealand’s Chatham Island — Franzen finds folks who are going out of the way to preserve their local bird life. But the general outlook isn’t good. The global seabird population, for example, has dropped roughly 70 percent in the last 60 years. “Of the world’s 350 or so seabirds, a larger percentage is listed as endangered or threatened than of any comparable group of birds,” Franzen writes.
Why should we care? Franzen presents one reason. He believes that birds “usefully indicate the health of … our ethical values.” He sees them as “our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They’re the most vivid and widespread representatives of Earth as it was before people arrived on it.”
They’re also endangered. The latest threats to birds include “mist nets” (“ultrafine nylon netting, all but invisible to birds”) and “playback technology” (“high-quality recordings of a hundred different bird sounds” that lure birds to their doom). As ever, an apparently unstoppable masculine urge to kill any creature that can be killed takes its toll. In an Egyptian oasis, for instance, Franzen hangs out with young Bedouins who shoot every songbird that comes their way “regardless of its size or species or conservation status.”
To be fair, the collection does include some nonavian subject matter. Opener “Essay in Dark Times” takes a flailing swing at all the ills of the moment we inhabit. “Capitalism in Overdrive” examines the fallout from our “growing preference for the virtual over the real.” “A Friendship” presents the insanely prolific writer William T. Vollmann as someone who “not only can read five hundred pages in an afternoon but retains a near-photographic memory of them.”
The book’s title essay offers a warm, rueful portrait of Franzen’s uncle, who left him an inheritance that allowed Franzen to travel to Antarctica. Between penguin sightings on the Antarctic Peninsula, Franzen delves into memories of his uncle’s strained family life, striking complex notes of appreciation, regret and belated family revelations that are as eloquent as anything he’s ever written.
The book also offers an incidental self-portrait of the author, rather an odd bird himself. Franzen has a habit of questioning the structure of his entire personality. At one moment he’s confessing that in bars he becomes “miserable with self-consciousness and thrift and shame and shyness and etiquette anxiety, unless I’m part of a group.” Fifty pages later, he writes: “I wondered if, all my life, in my refusal to be a joiner, I’d missed out on some essential thing.”
It may be these contradictions of character that let him write the big, restless, morally-wrangling novels that he does. As he swings from disdain for others to cringing at his own shortcomings, he makes a gift of his foibles — at least on the page. “The End of the End of the Earth” makes the most of them.
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“The End of the End of the Earth” by Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 230 pp., $26
The author reads at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 19, Pigott Auditorium, Seattle University, 901 12th Ave, Seattle; free, spl.org.