Without a Care in the World: Jonathan Franzen in St. Louis

Jonathan Franzen | The Twenty-Seventh City | FSG | 1988 | 517 Pages

Jonathan Franzen grew up in Webster Groves, St. Louis. In his memoirs, The Discomfort Zone (2006), Franzen explains how a CBS documentary shot in the late Sixties depicted his childhood haunts as a “nightmare of mind control and soulless materialism.” Residents were angry. Because the documentary inspired so many complaints, CBS returned showing “conciliatory footage of soshies watching their previous broadcast clutching their heads at pompous things they’d said on camera.” Apparently, the presenter, Charles Kuralt, went as “far as saying sorry without actually saying sorry,” but the follow-up for Franzen at least demonstrated that “children who grew up in safe environments might still become adventurers as adults.”

Where his other novels and essays traverse the globe, Franzen’s debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), is set in his home town of St. Louis. Franzen is attuned to how a city’s life mirrors that of a novel: like St. Louis, a city known to be in perpetual tussle over city and county boundaries, Franzen’s novel seems to be engaged in a battle of its own limits. Summarizing the history of St. Louis, a city that was once America’s “fourth”, he writes:

Only New York, Philadelphia and Brooklyn had larger populations…[A]ll cities are ideas ultimately. They create themselves, and it’s up to the world to apprehend them or ignore them as it chooses.

By setting it up as a choice to either apprehend or ignore the city, Franzen seems to suggest it’s not a natural or contiguous relationship between the self-determinacy of a citizen's psychology and the idea of a city. After he repeats the equation several pages later – “cities are ideas…imagine readers of the the New York Times in 1984 trying to get a sense of St. Louis” – we see how the city, like an idea, needs to take up space to fulfill itself; space that is either filled in land or pages.

Whether you consider that a misgiving of The Twenty-Seventh City (there are several well-documented misgivings to this novel, in fairness, which you can seek out), Franzen’s Dickensian propensity to illustrate the city’s various organizations and strata, seems inspired by the necessity to be expansive or, indeed, adventurous. Some four-hundred pages in , when Jammu has wrought a large-scale, invasive surveillance program on Martin Probst – the man who appears to not only have built the Gateway Arch, but built St. Louis into his soul (and lives in Webster Groves) – Franzen asks, “[h]ow could you have thought the world might care what became of you?” That singular pronoun is St. Louis, and it makes us ask what care  means when it comes fulfilling an idea, like a novel.

Why the question of care seems more pertinent here than it does in, say, the fictional St. Jude of the The Corrections (2001), or St. Paul of Freedom (2010), is because asking how the world cares about you sounds like a question you might begin asking yourself at home. Certainly, there’s a degree of transference in how Franzen occupies his own vision with what he thinks he knows about the relationship between his home and world, and also what he doesn’t know that he actually knows (because it's hidden or repressed) about the relationship between his home and the world. By using St. Louis as the setting of The Twenty-Seventh City, it allows him to pointedly ask who cares about his adventures in this city. And how, when we negotiate the world outside our homes, ‘adventuring’, do we decide what we then care about enough to adventure further?

We know now that Franzen really cares about birds (Franzen goes as far as stating outright identification with them in The Discomfort Zone). Yet, as much as he’s concerned with plight Franzen is concerned with flight, and the sense of elevation he gives himself as a narrator does not necessarily result in clarity or dominion over his narrative. In The Twenty-Seventh City, you notice the birds in scenes like “deader downtown” with its “wealth of parking spaces” as “sparrows bickered” and “pigeons ate” which presents us with an anomaly: in The Discomfort Zone Franzen tells us that he goes bird-watching for the first time when his mother dies, in 1999: The Twenty-Seventh City was published in 1988. Unlike Freedom and plenty of his essays, birds are not his subject, but it’s almost as though we see a fictional progenitor of the bird-watching guise we will see in later essays and novels through Luisa Probst, Martin’s daughter (otherwise, Franzen is pretty dismal when he writes about women). She makes “psh-psh-psh” noises whilst her boyfriend Duane wonders what she’s doing:

“What birds?”
“All birds. They get curious. They wonder what it is. Look!’ She pointed to a red-and-white flash in the willow grove.”

Duane then asks:

 “How many species do you know?” Duane whispered.

 “I’ve seen a hundred twelve this year. I’ve got about a hundred and fifty on my lifetime list. Which isn’t very many, really.”
 “It sounds like a lot.”

Bird-watching sits alongside other kinds of watching or viewing in a novel that suggests that what we care about is a choice between apprehending and ignoring what we see. He doesn’t appear to have stopped caring either. In his essay, “Invisible Losses”, from From the End of the End of the Earth (2018), Franzen is on the lookout for seabirds:

[..]the world of seabirds, which encompasses two-thirds of our planet but is mostly invisible to us. Until recently, invisibility was a disadvantage for seabirds, a cloak of protection. But now, as they disappear from the oceans, they need people to protect them; and it’s difficult to care about animals you can’t see.

Out of sight out of mind goes the parlance, and whilst this might be a symptom of our modern, consuming world, despite humans being creatures compelled by spectacle, we get a sense of how care is related to what we cannot see as much as what we can. Our narrow, young minds begin to choose what they see, what they care about as they adventure into the world, but we also learn how to not be occupied by our cares. So when Franzen says in ‘Why Birds Matter’, “if you could see every bird, you could see the whole world”, it’s here that you realize how exhausting caring can be.

 What’s interesting about bird-watching is that you have to be out-of-sight so that the birds don’t suspect your presence and scatter. Contrast this with numerous scenes of surveillance in The Twenty-Seventh City, and can see, when we decide to seek what concerns us, how blurry the lines of benevolence and furtiveness become .There is a way that Franzen seems to distinguish spectating from surveillance however. Notice how Luisa has created a list of the birds she’s seen: “about” 150 different species she claims before dampening her achievement.T he list is important, though, despite her embarrassment. In “Missing” Franzen talks about his own list:

I’d seen eighteen endemics – so many that I’d begun to review them in my mind, consciously connecting each species with the place where I’d seen it. My friend Todd Newberry, author of The Ardent Birder, believes...if there’s a bird on your list with no memory attached to it, you have to remove it. I personally am not so radical….but I do believe, with Todd, that birding should be a way of experiencing the place you’re in, not just an exercise in making marks on a checklist.

In this trip to Jamaica, even Franzen’s experienced bird-guide, Ricardo, “guiltily confesses” to listing birds that he’s seen, and this is what the list represents: a way to locate his place in the world. Like the novel, the list is also a way of putting oneself in the minds and sights of others, a way of saying “I was there”. Whether anybody cares or not is a question the young novelist will inevitably ask themselves, but it’s no wonder Franzen started by asking this with a novel set in a place he might call “home.”