In the sticks

Jonathan Franzen

Walter Berglund and his assistant Lalitha (introduced last Friday in the "Think globally, act locally" excerpt from Jonathan Franzen's 2010 novel, Freedom) are in West Virginia, where they have just presented documents needed to commence demolition to open up fourteen thousand acres of future warbler preserve. They've celebrated at a steakhouse down the road from the Day's Inn by Walter's having the very first drink of his life (he claims), a beer, and Lalitha's getting drunk on three gin martinis. They've talked perhaps a bit too loudly for rural West Virginia, and Walter has been verbally accosted in the men's room by a guy "an exact match of Walter's profile of the kind of driver who didn't believe in turn signals."
    "Like the dark meat, do you?" the guy says.
    "She's Asian," Walter protests.
    "Candy's dandy but liquor's quicker, ain't that right, pal?"
    Made better aware of where they've been conversing, Walter thinks they should leave and take their food back to their rooms.
    Lalitha topples over as soon as she is deposited on her bed and Walter tells her he's going to his room to eat.
    "No, don't," she says. "Stay and watch TV. I'll sober up and we can eat together."

In this, too, he indulged her, locating PBS on cable and watching the tail end of the NewsHour—some discussion of John Kerry's war record [it's 2004]....
    He himself had been under tremendous pressure....Walter now needed to...start work in earnest on his anti-population crusade—needed to get the intern program up and running before the nation's most liberal college kids all finalized their summer plans and went to work for the Kerry campaign instead.
    In the two and a half weeks since his meeting in Manhattan with Richard, the world population had increased by 7,500,000. A net gain of seven million human beings—the equivalent of New York City's population—to clear-cut forests and befoul streams and pave over grasslands and throw plastic garbage into the Pacific Ocean and burn gasoline and coal and exterminate other species and obey the fucking pope and pop out families of twelve. In Walter's view, there was no greater force for evil in the world, no more compelling cause for despair about humanity and the amazing planet it had been given, than the Catholic Church, although, admittedly, the Siamese-twin fundamentalisms of Bush and bin Laden were running a close second these days. He couldn't see a church or a real men love jesus sign or a fish symbol on a car without his chest tightening with anger. In a place like West Virginia, this meant that he got angry pretty much every time he ventured into daylight, which no doubt contributed to his road rage. And it wasn't just religion, and it wasn't just the jumbo everything to which his fellow Americans seemed to feel uniquely entitled, it wasn't just the Walmarts and the buckets of corn syrup and the high-clearance monster trucks; it was the feeling that nobody else in the country was giving even five seconds' thought to what it meant to be packing another 13,000,000 large primates onto the world's limited surface every month. The unclouded serenity of his countrymen's indifference made him wild with anger.
    Patty [his wife] had recently suggested, as an antidote to road rage, that he distract himself with radio whenever he was driving a car, but to Walter the message of every single radio station was that nobody else in America was thinking about the planet's ruination. The God stations and the country stations and the Limbaugh stations were all, of course, actively cheering the ruination; the classic-rock and news-network stations continually made much ado about absolutely nothing; and National Public Radio was, for Walter, even worse. Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion: literally fiddling while the planet burned! And worst of all were Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The NPR news unit, once upon a time fairly liberal, had become just another voice of center-right free-market ideology, describing even the slightest slowing of the nation's economic growth rate as "bad news" and deliberately wasting precious minutes of airtime every morning and evening—minutes that could have been devoted to raising the alarm about overpopulation and mass extinctions—on fatuously earnest reviews of literary novels and quirky musical acts....
    And TV: TV was like radio, only ten times worse. The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it.
    He was aware, of course, that it was wrong to feel this way—if only because, for almost twenty years, in St. Paul, he hadn't. He was aware of the intimate connection between anger and depression, aware that it was mentally unhealthy to be so exclusively obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios.... [beginning at 12 hours, 14 minutes, 37 seconds in the digital recording, pp. 313-315]

I hadn't thought until the present chapter how much like Walter I might be, if not myself so comprehensively angry and sometimes depressed as this fictional character seems to be (and as his creator, perhaps, might be)....

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