Antrim + Franzen at the 92nd Street Y

On Monday night, old friends Donald Antrim and Jonathan Franzen shared the stage for the first time. Antrim gave a rousing reading of new work titled "Must I Now Read All of Wittgenstein." Then Franzen carefully read the first few pages of "The Discomfort Zone." After that, they answered questions from the audience.

Antrim, looking a little like a young Andrew Sullivan, clearly relished the chance to perform his fiction, fully inhabiting his kind-of-crazy first-person narrator, who has decided to write "a son’s criticism of his father's critical studies of critics," especially T. S. Eliot. But this father, H. T. Antrim, didn't just write scholarly tomes about the limits of language and modernist poetry--he also ran a do-it-yourself lumberyard, developed orthopedic shoes to help cure alcoholism, and dealt with his wife, who suffered from a psychosomatic clubfoot. It was as silly and postmodern and hilarious as it sounds.

Franzen, looking a little like a young Stephen King, really, really loved the audience’s attention. His need for affection made him clumsy, as when he knocked over a water glass, and awkward, as when he took off his jacket and put it on the floor (I couldn’t help but wonder why he even bothered to wear it on stage, since it came off within 30 seconds). There’s no denying that Franzen’s an incredible writer—his ability to weave disparate themes into a coherent whole is incredible (c.f. “My Bird Problem,” the last essay in “The Discomfort Zone”). His line about a real estate agent who “totally got why I lived in New York” got a big laugh, but, in general, the short piece he read about trying to sell his childhood home wasn’t nearly as performative—or entertaining—as Antrim’s work.

And then there were the questions. For some reason, the 92nd St. Y didn’t include chairs for the men to sit on as they answered, so they had to awkwardly alternate standing at the podium. Antrim played the straight man to Franzen’s goofy self: Antrim sternly stared at the floor, arms hugging his chest, as Franzen spoke; as Antrim spoke, Franzen made faces and fidgeted. A great question about whether it’s harder to empathize with characters in memoir (both writers just published memoirs) than with characters in fiction (both writers are successful novelists) caused Franzen to reflect on some of the negative reviews he’s been getting: he said he was shocked to discover that so many critics felt he wasn’t empathetic toward the characters (his family, his friends) in “The Discomfort Zone.” He thought his empathy would be implied by the very fact that he was writing about people he loved; that he wrote about them (mostly) unsympathetically was only his way of showing that flaws are interesting.

Another question asked about the importance of writer friends. Antrim and Franzen have been friends for years, and Antrim spoke movingly about how hard it is to “stay up with” writing and how much his friends have helped him to do so. He concluded by saying how much he has enjoyed the programs at the 92nd St. Y, and how flattered he was to have been asked to read there. Both writers are worth reading, but Antrim especially came off as worth knowing as well.