The joy of being a snob
As part of my current turn toward being Extremely Offline, I recently went back and read the best piece of writing about the high priest of internet rejection: Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s profile of Jonathan Franzen. I happen to greatly enjoy Franzen’s own writing (this is a favorite), but this article isn’t about his work. Like all the best profiles, it’s about his public persona and if/how it intersects with his actual personality (to the extent a journalist visiting for a day can determine anyone’s actual personality). Franzen’s persona, which he has fostered by stubbornly refusing to accept that he has or needs a persona at all, is as a smart but out-of-touch curmudgeon, a look that these days is inextricably intertwined with being a privileged white guy. It’s also a look that routinely pisses off media and book Twitter.
Franzen’s response to being made a stand-in for all the smart, out-of-touch, privileged, white curmudgeons out there? It’s not that he doesn’t care, exactly—reading the article’s foray into his Angry Young Man phase, I couldn’t help thinking that if he had been born a few decades later, teenage Franzen could have easily become a 4chan troll—he just has many better things to do and, more importantly, many better things to think about. Who you think he is isn’t his problem, and making it his problem would quickly take over his life. So he doesn’t let that stuff in. And owing to his aforementioned status as a privileged white guy, he doesn’t need to.
In that aggressive detachment from the pressure to sand off his prickly edges to make himself more palatable to strangers, Franzen (or the character the article creates) reminded me of another person Brodesser-Akner famously profiled: Gwyneth Paltrow. Going back to these pieces, I realized that they were published a month apart, and they have a lot in common. They are both about celebrities who are beloved and reviled in equal measure, and often the reasons we hate them are exactly the same reasons we love them. Both pieces interrogate the question of how to feel fulfilled in a world that demands too much of everyone. And both Franzen and Paltrow are both aspirational figures who don’t particularly care if what you are aspiring to can actually be obtained by anyone who isn’t them. The difference, of course, is that Paltrow built a wellness empire by selling you those unobtainable aspirations, whereas Franzen just wants you to take up bird watching because he thinks you’d really like it. Which is precisely the kind of anti-persona persona that makes someone like me covet his existence even more. At one point Brodesser-Akner writes, “Right at that minute, I wanted what he had so badly that I would have drunk his blood right there in the arboretum to get it.” Me too. Me too.
One of Brodesser-Akner’s great themes, in these profiles and 100 times more so in her novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble, is the seemingly small but fundamentally unbridgeable gap between the very-upper-middle class and the truly wealthy. And a conclusion you can reach reading these profiles—but not the only conclusion, I think—is that in the late 2010s, fulfillment is only possible if you are already rich, famous, and stratospherically privileged. Paltrow can gracefully cook an elegant adult meal because someone else is right there in her kitchen, cooking a separate meal for her kids. She can smoke a single cigarette with Brodesser-Akner and never crave another because her money creates a stress-free life. Franzen’s life isn’t nearly as rarified, but only an artist whose fortune and legacy are secure—not to mention a person who has never been forced to doubt that his opinions mattered—could openly refuse to make himself consumable by the internet to the extent that he has.
The twist of these pieces, I guess you could call it, is that Brodesser-Akner isn’t skewering unwitting elitist snobs for living in ridiculous bubbles they can no longer even see. That’s the low-hanging fruit a lesser writer would have gone after, and they would have watched the likes and retweets roll in. Instead, Brodesser-Akner’s Franzen and Paltrow characters (and probably the real versions of them too) totally know they’re elitist snobs. In fact, being elitist snobs is the key to their happiness. Maybe more people should consider being elitist snobs! Personally, I don’t disagree. It looks great over there, on the other side of that unbridgeable gap. Only when someone is genuinely beckoning you across, with their chic clam sauce and their tranquil birdwatching, can you see all the ways the world is built to make sure that you will never, ever get there.