Discorrections

Just when you were wondering Why Woolcott Matters, the unhygienic misanthrope comes through with this this scabrous back-alley abortion of Jonathan Franzen and his new essay book I Vant to Be Alone:

He is very picky about how he is perceived by all those strangers whom he is ducking. Although he chain-smokes as he types (or did at the time he was writing "Sifting the Ashes"), he doesn't want to be lumped in with his fellow wheezers, stating for the record that "I don't consider myself a smoker, don't identify with the forty-six million Americans who have the habit." Unlike the millions of nicotine fiends who first lit up out of peer pressure or misguided glamour, Franzen the smoking non-smoker cracked open his first pack in a defiant act of political defeatism. "I took up smoking as a student in Germany in the dark years of the early eighties. Ronald Reagan had recently made his 'evil empire' speech, and Jonathan Schell was publishing The Fate of the Earth." He figured that if the superpowers were racing to erase the planet in a nuclear puff, he might as well launch a pre-emptive strike on the lungs. "Indeed, there was something invitingly apocalyptic about cigarettes. The nightmare of nuclear proliferation had a counterpart in the way cigarettes–anonymous, death-bearing, missilelike cylinders–proliferated in my life…. The fear of a global nuclear holocaust was thus functionally identical to my private fear of death." Older now, less in love with easeful death, Franzen has to reconcile thanatos and eros ("Smoking may not look sexy to me anymore, but it still feels sexy"), which is no easy trick. Arriving right on cue is one of those convenient last-paragraph vignette-ish epiphanies that has him spotting a woman leaning against the windowsash of a Tribeca apartment and blowing cigarette smoke into the sultry air. "I fell in love at first sight as she stood there, both inside and outside, inhaling contradiction and breathing out ambivalence."

Woolcott lays on his signature quotation-followed-by-zinger-aside tactic a little thick, but there are some pretty funny ones:

In "Books in Bed," a roundup of sexual how-to guides that elicits the coy admission "I have no objection to a nice bra, still less to being invited to remove one" (down, tiger)…

Takeaway line: "Jonathan Franzen must be stopped, and yet he can't be stopped, because the catapulting success of The Corrections has granted him a lifetime permit to pontificate–a license to preen."