"Farther Away"

"Farther Away" is the new collection of essays by Jonathan Franzen, author of "The Corrections" and "Freedom", darling of the literary world, and friend of David Foster Wallace.  DFW is the best essay writer ever (yes, I said it), and because I miss him so much I often find myself reading lesser writers who might vaguely fall into the same milieu:  George Saunders, Chuck Klosterman, and Franzen.

Of course everyone always falls short of DFW, but Franzen falls the least short, which means he's pretty good.  His commentary is sharp, but the real pleasure is when he gets on a descriptive roll, crystalizing something you always though but could never say the right way.  He did it for me with this description of the emptiness of the American suburbs:

"Building-size pieces of earth-moving equipment were scraping it all bare.  Reshaping the very contours of the land--creating these cute little fake dells and fake wrinkles for hideous houses to be sold to sentimentalists so enraged with the world they had to inform it, in writing, on a road sign, that they love their children.  Clouds of diesel exhaust, broken full-grown oak tries piled up like little sticks, birds whizzing around in a panic.  I could see the whole gray and lukewarm future.  No urban.  No rural.  The entire country just a wasteland of shittily built neither-nor."