<nettime> Sarah Crown: The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen review (Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/09/the-end-of-the-end-of-the-earth-by-jonathan-franzen-review-hope-in-an-age-of-crisis


The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen review – hope in an 
age of crisis
A writer at the top of his game considers climate change, what we can do 
and what keeps him from despair
By Sarah Crown, The Guardian Friday 9 Nov 2018



How is it possible to live with despair? If, in the wake of last month’s 
horrifying UN report on global warming, you’ve been asking yourself this 
question, take some solace (or at least solidarity) from the knowledge 
that you’re not alone. Jonathan Franzen has been grappling with it for 
years, and as the final-countdown title of his new volume of essays 
suggests, his despair at the state of the planet and our absolute 
inability (“political, psychological, ethical, economic”) to save it is, 
if anything, deepening. “I don’t have any hope that we can stop the 
change from coming,” he says bluntly at the conclusion of his opening 
essay, and nothing in the following pages suggests he is anywhere close 
to changing his mind.
But by refusing to hope for the impossible, Franzen, improbably, manages 
to produce a volume that feels, if not hopeful, then at least not 
hopeless. There’s nothing he can do – there’s probably nothing any of us 
can do – to avert or even alleviate the coming catastrophe. But for now, 
he’s here and he’s alive, and over the course of these essays he offers 
us a series of partial, tentative answers to the question he poses 
himself at the beginning: “How do we find meaning in our actions when 
the world seems to be coming to an end?”
This is not a collection that wastes time attempting to persuade us of 
the reality of the climate crisis; frankly, we’re way past that. 
“Drastic planetary overheating,” Franzen assures us, “is a done deal” – 
and by the way, we need to revise significantly upward our definition of 
what “drastic” means. The notional two-degree figure widely cited by 
politicians as the upper limit of what we, and the planet, could 
possibly accommodate is a line we’re on course to gallop past in just a 
few years’ time. By 2100, we may well be looking at a five or six-degree 
temperature rise, and even then there’s a possibility we’re being 
lowballed. “The scientist who confidently predicts a five-degree warming 
by the end of the century,” Franzen suggests, towards the end of the 
collection, “might tell you in private, over beers, that she really 
expects it to be nine.” It’s a body blow moment in a book that declines 
to pull its punches, and Franzen acknowledges that many of his readers – 
“the people for whom the prospect of a hot, calamity-filled future is 
unbearably sad and frightening” – might be “forgiven for not wanting to 
think about it”. But over the course of these essays, he succeeds in 
demonstrating that resignation brings with it a curious intellectual 
freedom. His acknowledgment that the macro problem is beyond him allows 
him to start thinking more creatively about micro solutions: what can be 
achieved here, now, today.
Naturally, there’s another way to read his position. Viewed through the 
other end of the telescope, Franzen’s acceptance of the coming crisis 
could be seen as an abnegation of responsibility: resignation in terms 
of action, rather than comprehension; a ducking of the issue that’s just 
a left-liberal version of the US president’s fatuous claim that the 
climate will “change back”. It’s an accusation to which Franzen is 
acutely sensitive, not least because it has been levelled at him before. 
In the collection’s opening piece, “The Essay in Dark Times”, published 
as “Is it too Late to Save the World?”, what begins as a fascinating 
consideration of the role of the essay at a moment of objective peril 
evolves, via a circuitous route that takes in quitting smoking, 
birdwatching in Ghana and Trump’s election, into a critical rereading of 
another essay (“Save What You Love”, also collected here) that he wrote 
for the New Yorker, some two-and-a-half years earlier. That one was 
triggered by his fury at the actions of the National Audubon Society, 
the US’s foremost organisation for bird conservation.
Franzen’s passion for birdwatching is almost as well known as his 
novels, so to say the Audubon Society was an unlikely target is an 
understatement. But it was precisely “as a bird-lover” that it attracted 
his ire. In 2014, the Society had, “with much fanfare”, thrown all its 
resources into the climate change fight, declaring that global warming 
was “the number-one threat to the birds of North America”. There’s no 
question that climate change poses an existential threat in the 
medium-term, however, “in 2014, the most serious threats to American 
birds were habitat loss and outdoor cats”. In Franzen’s view, the 
society’s position was both “narrowly dishonest” and potentially 
harmful, in that it might discourage people “from tackling solvable 
environmental problems in the here and now”. He said as much in his 
essay, was duly denounced as a “climate-change denier”, and retreated in 
a mixture of shame and regret on the one hand, and injured 
self-justification on the other. The irony, of course, was that he 
wasn’t attempting to deny climate change at all: “In fact, I’m such a 
climate-science accepter that I don’t even bother having hope for the 
ice caps.” Rather, he was denying that our current piecemeal, unserious 
attempts to mitigate it will have any consequential effect, and arguing 
that therefore we might better expend our efforts on conservation 
projects whose benefits “are immediate and tangible”.
Where Franzen perfectly strikes the balance between form, content and 
voice you know you’re in the presence of a master
It’s a complex position, both to articulate and to accept. But it is 
not, in the years since he first set it out, one that he has backed away 
from, because it represents the only hope he has left, and the central 
hope of this collection: that facing the future “honestly, however 
painful this may be, is better than denying it”. Rather, as these essays 
show, the conclusion he has come to is that it’s not his position that’s 
lacking, but his ability to put it across in a way that readers can 
accept. It’s a challenge to him as a writer: to think harder; to write 
more clearly and with more sympathy. It’s a question of what the essay, 
as a form and specifically in his hands, can do.
And it’s a challenge to which he rises. This isn’t a flawless 
collection: there are uneven moments, and occasional longueurs. There 
are also – and I say this as a bird-lover – a whole lot of birds. They 
are the animating spirits of the collection, flitting and rustling 
through the essays, and Franzen ably makes the case both for their hold 
over him and their symbolic significance (“If you could see every bird 
in the world, you’d see the whole world”). But as the pages turn and the 
feathers pile up, it becomes harder and harder to keep the murres, 
taikos and storm petrels straight in your head – or, finally, to invest 
too deeply in the differences. Yet there are essays in which the balance 
between form, content and voice is perfectly struck, and when you reach 
one of those, it’s clear that you’re in the presence of a master. The 
opening essay, in which the idea of the essay itself is held up to the 
light, is a thing of supple, compelling intelligence, and by placing 
“Save What You Love”, his piece on the Audubon Society, after his 
retrospective analysis of its weaknesses, he effectively contextualises 
it, and allows us to read it for what it is: a teasing-out of complex 
arguments that refuses to reach for satisfying but reductive 
conclusions.
Then there’s the title essay, which comes fittingly at the collection’s 
close, brings together all of its strands (climate change, humanity, 
thinking, writing, birds), and is simply a delight. In it, Franzen 
weaves together, lightly but tightly, two narrative threads: his 
expedition on a cruise ship to Antarctica, and the life of his uncle 
Walt, whose unlooked-for bequest paid for the trip. The timelines 
diverge wildly (the trip takes a couple of weeks; Walt lived to a ripe 
old age) but by combining them, Franzen expertly shows how they speak to 
each other. They’re both stories about death: Walt, we learn, “lost his 
daughter” (in a car crash in her 20s), “his war buddies, his wife, and 
my mother” before mortality caught up with him; the Antarctic is both a 
death zone, the literal and metaphorical end of the world, and, thanks 
to climate change, dying itself. But read on, and we find that the real 
resonance between the two tales is the urgent case they make for the 
worth and beauty of life. Walt survived his tragedies, kept faith with 
the world, and “never stopped improvising”; in Antarctica, Franzen comes 
face to face with a king penguin in the wild, and finds that it “seemed 
to me, in itself, sufficient reason not only to have made the journey; 
it seemed reason enough to have been born on this planet”. It’s the work 
of a writer at the top of his game – limber and lovely, delivering deep 
insights with delicacy and grace – and it poignantly makes the only case 
for climate action that has any chance of succeeding: simply, that there 
is so much worth living for. “Even in a world of dying,” Franzen 
concludes, “new loves continue to be born.”
• The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen (4th Estate, 
£16.99).
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