Book Review: The Kraus Project

The Kraus Projectby Jonathan Franzen, et alFarrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013The 'Kraus' referred to in the title of Jonathan Franzen's latest book is Karl Kraus, a fin de siecle Viennese satirist who used his own money and ego to single-handedly put out the gadfly periodical Die Fackel, which intrigued the city's intelligentsia until Kraus stopped publishing it. Kraus died in 1936, and in 2010 Time magazine dubbed Franzen a (perhaps the) "Great American Novelist," and the weird confluence of those two things has caused a mad stampede to Wikipedia by book-reviewers who really ought to know better, looking up "Karl Kraus" and studying his entry - not because they'd ever heard much more than his name in all their lifetime's reading (they hadn't, because Kraus is strictly a marginal figure, not some neglected giant - think Louis Untermeyer, not H. L. Mencken), but because if the Great American Novelist produces a whole book about Subject X, every critic in Manhattan must bone up on Subject X before they can once again show their face in their favorite Brooklyn kale bar. If Jonathan Franzen creates a whole 'project' about Karl Kraus, Karl Kraus must be worth studying.Though there are parts of it that are interesting (if trivial), nothing about this 'project' is honest. The title is "The Kraus Project," but the book has much less to do with Kraus' writings than it does with Franzen's rantings. The book is billed as "translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen," but his 'annotations' barely mention Kraus, and it's just possible to suspect that his ultimate contributions to the translations presented here were, shall we say, modest (his dragooned experts - Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann - did 98 percent of the final work, though, as Franzen almost proudly notes, their names are not on the book's cover)(and inside they're listed, hilariously, as providing "supplementary notes"). The serial stand-up comedy riffing Franzen does in his footnotes makes some feints at calling Kraus' writing "more relevant than ever" to the 21st century, but this isn't true either, is never believable, and is abandoned after about a hundred pages. Even the alleged origin of the 'project' - impassioned student work done in a seedy Somerville apartment out of inspiration imparted by a beloved teacher - is true neither in its pathos nor its particulars.The only thing that's true about this book - the only thing any reader needs to know in order to give it the wide berth it warrants - is that it's from first to last an expression of monstrous vanity. It isn't meant to revive Kraus; it isn't meant to honor some inspirational teacher. It's meant only to shine a light on how terrific Jonathan Franzen is - how steep a scholar, how recondite a reader, how trenchant a social critic ... how deep he is. The book is only secondarily a collection of the essays of Karl Kraus in English translation with facing-page German and plenty of explanatory notes; it's primarily that little meta-level in the title: not "The Essays of Karl Kraus" but "The Kraus Project" - it's not a book about Kraus; it's a book about Jonathan Franzen deigning to notice Kraus, in passing, while he onanizes about whatever topic happened to be uppermost in his mind when he sat at his laptop to blurt some more "notes." These riffs bounce all over the spectrum of brainless griping:

I could point to the transformation of Canada's boreal forest into a toxic lake of tar-sand by-products, the leveling of Asia's remaining forests for Chinese-made ultra-low-cost porch furniture at Home Depot, the damming of the Amazon and the endgame clear-cutting of its forests for beef and mineral production, the whole mind-set of "Screw the consequences, we want to buy a lot of crap and we want to buy it cheap, with overnight free shipping," and the direct connection between this American mind-set and a new Chinese prosperity that - in a classic Krausian collision of old values with new valuables - funds the slaughter of millions of old values with new valuables - funds the slaughter of millions of Pacific sharks for the luxury of their fins and tens of thousands of African elephants for their ivory. And meanwhile the overheating of the atmosphere, meanwhile the calamitous overuse of antibiotics by agribusiness, meanwhile the widespread tinkering with cell nucleii, which may well prove to be as disastrous as tinkering with atomic nucleii. And, yes, the thermonuclear warheads are still in their silos and subs.

And the transparent absurdity of the grunting little insertion of "a classic Krausian collision" not only misrepresents the putative subject of the book, it actively insults him by taking no trouble to hide the fact that he's little more than an afterthought.Little more than an afterthought for the spotlight-hog at center stage, that is. Whenever Reitter or Kehlmann are able to get a footnote in edgewise, they're alway immensely worth reading. Their actual clarifications and discussions of Kraus' work and time give painful little glimpses into the kind of volume this could have been, if it weren't the 'project' of an egotistical blockhead; their lively and intensely interesting explanations of "Krausian" diction and concerns are always just gathering steam when they're interrupted and flattened by the multi-millionaire running the show, popping up in the middle of serious scholarly work to blare: "Who has time to read literature when there are so many blogs to keep up with, so many food fights to follow on Twitter?"Franzen mentions that "the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker may be how early and clearly he recognized the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress." But Franzen isn't interested in what Kraus has to say on this or any other subject. He's just waiting until the poor stooge pauses at the end of a sentence so he can elbow him aside and start carping about the merits of Macs vs. PCs (a TV commercial is alluded to as though it were as well-known as the contours of Mount Rushmore, and in such allusions we're given a clear and pathetic glimpse into the world of the Great American Novelist at work: glaze-eyed, TV remote in hand, shirt-front sprinkled with Cheez-It crumbs), or shark-finning, or, as often comes up, the evils of Amazon's book-business:

In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the Antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the Four Horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world ... But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer - I'm thinking of Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, Adam Haslett's You Are Not a Stranger Here, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Ms. Hempel Chronicles, Clancy Martin's How to Sell - Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, laboring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they're the only business hiring.

There are doubtless some readers (fewer and fewer? We can only hope) who might find this kind of flailing entertaining, a 54-year-old man ventriloquizing Grampa Simpson for page after page, but disjointed complaining wears thin mighty quick. "Yakking" and tweeting aren't any more or less intolerably shallow than their practitioners make them, after all, and I doubt any of the authors Franzen anoints would be willing to delete their positive Amazon reviews in order to lower the decibel levels on their careers. And what can be said about the immensity, the enormity, of Jonathan Franzen railing against bragging? In The Kraus Project he takes bragging to such adolescent extremes that when he talks about how "writing is the strangest social/antisocial art," you can almost predict - in a sick, horrified way - what's coming next:

When you finally become good enough at it to participate in the community of past writers to which you were drawn as a solitary reader, the pleasure is a weirdly social one; and yet the kind of person who is so keen to engage with that community that he or she submits to years of grueling apprenticeship is liable to be hungry for engagement with a community of the living, too.

See the humanity of the Great American Novelist! Yes, he regularly participates in the community of past writers he now equals - yes, he can commune with Twain and Dickens and Tolstoy while watching DVR'd episodes of "Homeland," but sometimes, dammit, he gets hungry for the community of the living, too - hell, even of grubby, ordinary people like you!And of course the main past writer being communed with here - on terms of complete equality, recall - is poor old Karl Kraus, whose literary corpse is exhumed and gavotted around stage for the duration of The Franzen Project and then forgotten again while the great man of letters (Viennese intellectuals!) clips on a microphone in order to whine about Twitter to Anderson Cooper.The mixture of deceit, egotism, and rhetorical necrophilia on display in The Kraus Project is arresting even for this most overrated and irritating of novelists (whose nonfiction consistently manages to be even worse than his fiction, perhaps because it's less diluted with the aping of his betters), who proudly admits he hasn't changed much from the arrogant, narcissistic little Somerville pedant who started this nonsense in the first place. The main difference the older Franzen enjoys is his audience, but as Kraus might tell him if he listened, that too can change.