Unpredictable Inevitability

I had lunch with my 88-year-old Aunt Jo the other day. She's always been a tell-it-like-it-is old gal, as quick to tell you what she thinks of you as to share a dirty joke...if only to get a rise out of others, like my mother. Don't get me wrong. I love the old gray mare. But whenever I go visit her, I always check my suit of armor to be sure it's on just right. And I thought it was, on Wednesday. But even at her advanced age, she's still got the ability to find the weak spot and attack.

This time she started railing on another family member. We'd just ordered our lunch at a nice Italian restaurant that of course didn't serve lasagne even though that was the only thing that sounded good to her. The bread had just arrived, without butter but with extra virgin olive oil, and she regaled us with her disgust for the way her nephew slathers olive oil on fresh bread, how the very sight of it makes her want to vomit. I went with dry bread that day.

But he wasn't the relative in trouble. It was my brother. She ranted about how he hadn't visited her enough over the last few years, and then the last few months, and how if he had visited her he'd remember the painting that she's offered to him for keeps but that he hasn't bothered to retrieve, and now the estate sale is only weeks away and the painting will have to practically be given away. I looked around her new apartment at the assisted living home. She had all sorts of knick knacks and cross stitch wall hangings and photographs here and there. She probably could have made room for the painting herself, but instead she'd chosen to bequeath it to him, and in her eyes he'd committed a mortal sin by not accepting it hungrily.

My mother and I tried to cover for him, how busy he was, he had a job and a family after all. And he'd spent the better part of the last four years taking care of another sick aunt and my mother too. In the eyes of most people I know, he's a kind soul who gives way too much of himself to others. The fact that she'd gone off about someone was completely predictable, but the fact that he was her target was the thing that threw me for a loop. And yet again, if I'd bothered to spend the time looking at her life, piecing together all the puzzle pieces of her loneliness and grief and his proximity to her, and the notion that he was in fact such a giving person to everyone else...I might have seen it coming. And so I guess, in hindsight, it was inevitable too.

One of my MFA instructors, David Long, used to preach on the need for unpredictable inevitability in our writing. But it's a lot easier said than done.

Like my aunt, I'm going to pick on someone. Today I'm going to pick on Jonathan Franzen and his latest big hit, Freedom. The breakdown of the mother-son relationship was both predictable and inevitable, and I know a lot of parents who say their rebel children eventually do turn around and come back home, and they'd say Joey's turnaround was also predictable and inevitable.

But I'm cynical. Maybe my cynicism stems from the fact that I'm still waiting for a certain person in my life to make that about face and come back to me. But I also think Joey's epiphany and search for redemption was premature. Maybe that's what made it unpredictable, but to me it was not credible. It came too fast; he was too young. He'd gotten involved in some pretty high level corruption at an early age (that part was believable) but the self awareness and repentance was much too early for a boy with a history of problems like that. So the unpredictability, if that's what Jonathan was going after, didn't work.

And as for inevitability: I didn't buy it either. It felt to me like someone told the author he had to wrap things up nicely for Joey. He couldn't leave the son out there hanging. He had to reel him back in and clean up the kitty litter mess and make him a good guy before the novel ended, because after all freedom is all about experimentation and then coming back to what's right, right? He'd pursued his life and liberty and happiness and now had to get real and responsible, right?

Sorry, Jonathan. It didn't work for me. Even with hindsight, even after putting together all the pieces of your novel's puzzle. See, the thing is, writing about life is even harder than being right in it sometimes. Even when you write about something that really did happen, it doesn't always come out in a way that satisfies the reader.

But don't get me wrong, Jonathan. It was a great story and well written to boot, as you know by all the acclaim and money in your bank and that nice little writeup about you in the latest Time 100. But it just didn't quite pass the unpredictable yet inevitable test for me, although maybe I'm not your normal reader. After all, I learned from my Aunt Jo.