I am the great American novel

Never Done: Shadow post (Something too private to write about publicly)
Never Done: Started Jonathan Franzen's novel, Freedom

I've never had a martini. I've never tried tequila. Nor absynthe. When I was in high school, I spent two years drinking far too much, and then lost interest in drinking soon after. I am pretty sure it's true that I haven't been drunk since the night of my high school graduation, 29 1/2 years ago. I have had plenty of drinks since then -- but not more than 1/2 or 1 at a time, and usually with weeks if not months in between them. The one time I had a gin drink, (one Gin Sour about ten years ago) I ended up in bed with someone when it was really their housemate I was interested in. Gin is strong.

I don't bring this up because I've tried a new drink, although both Drink a Martini, and Try Absynthe are on my list. I bring it up because last night, I considered stopping at the bar near my house for a Martini to dull the sensations of a tough day and a tougher evening, but ended up going home and eating a late dinner of yogurt and blueberries instead -- such is the kind of person I am. I also bring it up because I have started Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, in which alcohol is practically its own character. (But I'm not going to tell you how, because I don't like spoilers.)

I had forgotten what it felt like to read a Franzen novel. It's like being absorbed into the heart of the American experience -- at once completely separate from, and the same as, my own. His description of the gentrification of a St. Paul neighborhood is like holding middle class America up to a mirror: "In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else's children's sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it. There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries? How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood? Was it true that the glaze of old Fiestaware contained dangerous amounts of lead? How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be? Did your 240 sometimes not go into overdrive when you pushed the overdrive button? Was it better to offer panhandlers food, or nothing? Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy, brilliant kids while working full time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning? Had anyone in the history of St. Paul ever had a positive experience with a roofer? What about a good Volvo mechanic? Did your 240 have that problem with the sticky parking brake cable? And that enigmatically labeled dashboard switch that made such a satisfying Swedish click but seemed not to be connected to anything: what was that?"

When I lived in Portland, I learned to deal with feral cats shitting in my garden, and a heroin junkie living next door with his school teacher sister, and disappearing car parts when he was around, which I tried to interest the cops in, and any number of other skills that my parents had fled beyond the suburbs to specifically to unlearn. No cloth diapers or schools for me, but there could have been, and there still might be. No matter how counter-culture I think I am, I could be one of Franzen's characters: middle aged, middle class white queer Jewish woman, partnered with a man, who never got it together to have a kid but still really wants to be a parent who is considering adopting someone now. Raised in rural New England, migrated somehow to Brooklyn, a little lost, a little found -- I am the America Franzen describes; I am the great American novel.