Jonathan
Franzen now lives in a humble, perfectly nice two-story house in Santa
Cruz, Calif., on a street that looks exactly like a lot of other streets
in America and that, save for a few cosmetic choices, looks exactly
like every other house on the block. Santa Cruz, he says, is a “little
pocket of the ’70s that persisted.” Inside his house, there is art of
birds — paintings and drawings and figurines. Outside, in the back,
there are actual birds, and a small patio, with a four-person
wrought-iron dining set, and beyond that, a shock: a vast, deep ravine,
which you would never guess existed behind the homes on such a
same-looking street, but there it is. There is so much depth and flora
to it, so much nature, so many birds — whose species Franzen names as
they whiz by our faces — that you almost don’t notice the ocean beyond.
He
had been reluctant to move here. He played a game of chicken with the
woman he calls his “spouse equivalent” (“I hate the word ‘partner’ so
much”), the writer Kathryn Chetkovich, telling her that he would never
live here and that she should instead move to New York, where he was
living in the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side. He still keeps
an apartment there. He doesn’t miss Yorkville, which he calls the “last
middle-class neighborhood in Manhattan,” though he’s pretty sure the new
Second Avenue subway will change all that. Things were changing so fast
as it was. The stores he loved kept closing. His favorite produce
market, owned by a nice Greek couple, had been supplanted by a bank, and
the Food Emporium he reluctantly shopped at became a Gristedes that
resembled a Soviet-era rations market. But where are you going to live?
The Upper West Side? Best of luck. Each east-west block is nearly a
quarter of a mile. “You need to bring a pup tent if you’re walking
between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. It’s like, ‘Bring
supplies!’ ”
It’s a different world
here in Santa Cruz, an easier place to seclude yourself, to find some
anonymity. You can interact on your own terms. Franzen and Chetkovich
play mixed doubles with their friends and host game nights. They work
out with a trainer named Jason twice a week, who was in a truly open
adoption in the 1980s, a time when that was almost unheard-of in this
country, which Franzen finds very interesting. Jason administers a
workout that is “terrible,” though Franzen, who is 58, has grown to love
it: push presses, 400-meter flat-out rowing. He likes to fool around on
the guitar that sits in a cradle in the living room, “a better guitar
than my advanced beginner status deserves,” trying to learn Chuck Berry
and Neil Young songs from YouTube demos. ... [mehr] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/magazine/jonathan-franzen-is-fine-with-all-of-it.html
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