OK so this is probably my fault. I love the writing of Jonathan Franzen and rate every novel 5 stars, so when I heard he had a book out about climate change I couldn't wait. I should have done. This isn't strictly a book. It is a pamphlet with a hard cover. One quarter of the pamphlet is the foreword. Another quarter is the text of an interview with Wieland Freund. This leaves around 3,000 words for the meat of Franzen's rant. That is about ten pages of a normal Franzen novel. Was this really worth a book? Should I have saved the carbon burned in printing this book and delivering it to my door? I think perhaps I should. I don't disagree with Franzen's arguments by the way. He is a persuasive writer after all. He seeks to convince us that the battle to save the planet from climate change is lost. He's probably right. He believes that our strident campaigns to cut carbon emissions are doomed to failure, and are anyway too late. We need to manage our expectations, he says, for a world that is basically screwed. He argues for hope while dashing our hopes. But hey, carry on cutting carbon, he tells us, it can't hurt.
So there we have it. This is the kind of rant you might have heard from a man in the pub. Pithy. Well written. But it's an opinion piece - not a book. Franzen could have helped the planet by sending this out as a free email. Meanwhile I'm still waiting for the next novel. Oh well. I still love The Corrections.
What If We Stopped Pretending?
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