海角大神

Way down south in Antarctica, Jonathan Franzen trains his binoculars on the crumpled ice and snow and, lo, discovers a rare Emperor Penguin. Although he is not on a birding cruise, Franzen becomes an instant celebrity. The captain of the cruise ship even changes course to get a glimpse of this good fortune, and Franzen gets a special table at that evening鈥檚 dinner.

鈥淔or forty years, in large social groups, I鈥檇 accustomed myself to feeling like the problem,鈥� as he already had been a couple of times on the cruise. 鈥淭o be a group鈥檚 game-winning hero, if only for a day, was a complete, disorienting novelty. I wondered if, all my life, in my refusal to be a joiner, I鈥檇 missed out on some essential human thing.鈥� You want to weep.

There are plenty of opportunities to weep in The End of the End of the Earth 鈥� mostly for the birds 鈥� a collection of crystalline thought pieces and nonfiction stories. Even when you find yourself wagging your head in disagreement, you have to admire the work that went into the writing, as there is much at stake for Franzen. 鈥淥ur identities consist of the stories we tell about ourselves, it makes sense that we should get a strong hit of personal substance from the labor of writing and the pleasure of reading.鈥�

Franzen ranges far and wide here, sometimes leaving skid marks between pieces. A longish item on the character of Edith Wharton as seen in the mirror of her work 鈥� and that sparked a groundswell of sexist allegations on Franzen鈥檚 part because of his emphasis on her looks 鈥� is followed by a one-page set of ten rules for a novelist, of which number 3 is 鈥淣ever use the word then as a conjunction 鈥� we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer鈥檚 non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.鈥�

There is a touching piece on his near-puppyish friendship with the writer William Vollmann, sitting cheek by jowl with pitch-perfect stories of living in New York and traveling in East Africa, or consideration of Sarah Stolfa鈥檚 photographic portraits that 鈥渆vade our everyday aesthetic judgments and restore the subjects to a natural world in which everything is interesting, everything incites sympathy and wonder, everything is worth a careful second look. She鈥檚 a classical short-storyist of the camera.鈥�

It will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with Franzen鈥檚 nonfiction work that birds will command much of the page space in the collection. They are the most intimate of what he considers these works to be: essays. 鈥淪omething essayed 鈥� something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author鈥檚 personal experience and subjectivity.鈥� Though versed in birding, he makes no claims on being an expert: He makes mistakes, he maintains a life list, something a higher sort of birder would consider d茅class茅.

But he is a high enough birder to feel the meaningful elementalness of the birding experience. 鈥淲hat bird populations do usefully indicate the health of is our ethical values. One reason that wild birds matter 鈥� ought to matter 鈥� is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding.鈥� He finds the dire predicament of, say, seabirds, to be an infinitely more compelling canary-in-the-mine indication of the state of the environment than, say, climate change.

Climate change is Franzen鈥檚 b锚te noir, not because he denies it 鈥� he considers it one of the great environmental disasters at work. But he also sees it as a bully on the environmental stage, a problem that we can all feel guilty about and whip out the checkbook to assuage that guilt. It has been made the problem before all other problems, problems that the everyday Joe and Jane can do something about, such as the plight of songbirds and seabirds, which are menaced by everything from trapping to plastic rubbish to gill-netting, all human threats that could be addressed today. And, yes, Franzen also considers climate change another of the problems birds face.

Franzen writes elegant essays without being prim because he is too idiosyncratic and opinionated for that, and his opinions are the kind that inevitably will ruffle feathers, which are the best kind.