Jonathan Franzen’s book of essays, The End of the End of the Earth (2018) reflects the intersection of the type of books Destination: Books offers: gardening-sustainability, travel, and a touch of the literary.
Franzen is most well-known as the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Corrections, and somewhat as a pugilist with run-ins over the years with Oprah Winfrey and bestselling author Jodi Picoult. He was the keynote speaker at the 201o Decatur Book Festival with his less than memorable reading of his new novel Freedom. More about this in our companion blog The Book Shopper.
But in addition to being a novelist and a misanthrope, Franzen is also an essayist and an avid bird watcher, the latter which is one of the major themes of this collection.
“To my shame, I am in the world of birding call a lister. It’s not that I don’t like birds for their own sake. I go birding to their beauty and diversity, learn more about their behavior and the ecosystems they belong to, and take long attentive walks in new places. But I also keep way too many lists. I count not only the species I have seen worldwide, but the ones I have seen in every country and every U.S. state I have birded in. Also at various other sites, including my backyard, and in every calendar year since 2003. I can rationalize my compulsive counting as an extra little game I play within the context of my passion. But I really am compulsive. This makes me morally inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it.”
The quote above does a good job summing up the majority of these essays. Franzen— traveling around the world ( Ghana, Egypt, Jamaica, St. Lucia, islands off the coast of California, and Antarctica) — adding to his list of birds (African cuckoo-hawk, ringed plover, crested quail dove, black finch, Farrion murres, and the Emperor Penguin, —while commenting on the dire circumstances of shrinking habitats. He doesn’t blame everything on climate change (one criticism of book when it was first published was that he was a skeptic), but he can be witheringly critical of organizations and corporations. Fortunately, he reports on successful conservation stories as well.
As a misanthrope, Franzen does not spare himself while he investigates his own self-centeredness. In the book’s title essay while on a Lindblad cruise to Antarctica, it's Franzen, who first sees the elusive Emperor Penguin and alerts the staff naturalist, which allows others to see the reclusive “star” of the documentary March of the Penguins. At dinner that night the captain singles out Franzen for his efforts. The following day Franzen receives even more kudos. He writes:
“All day long passengers I hadn’t even met had stopped me in the hallway to thank me or cheer me for finding the penguin. I finally had an inkling of how it must feel to be a high school athlete and come to the school after scoring a season-saving touchdown. For forty years, in large social groups, I’d accustomed myself to feeling like the problem. To be a group’s game-winning hero, if only for a day was a complete, disorienting novelty. I wondered if, all my life, in my refusal to be a joiner, I’d missed out on some essential human thing.”
In the final two essays of the book (the last one was a response to early criticism that the hardback edition was too tolerant about climate change), Franzen addresses the question that lingers “How do we find meaning in our actions when the world seems to be coming to an end?” His answers are provocative, insightful, and not as dour as you might think. Pure Franzen.
Note: Destination: Books' next pop-up book stall will be at the Carter Center's Freedom Farmer's Market on Saturday morning, July 31st.