I was nearly at page 500 of Jonathan Franzen's lauded new novel Freedom before I acknowledged the feeling. Every time I opened the book there was a buzzing in my ears, followed by a dull brain throb and sudden urge to unload the dishwasher or sign for the neighbour's FedEx. I knew this feeling since I'd encountered it before, mostly in airports and traffic jams - it was the unpleasant but not unfamiliar sensation of being slowly bored to death.
How was this possible, you might be forgiven for wondering? Freedom has been hailed as the novel of the year, if not the decade. It's been riding the international bestseller lists for months after garnering rave reviews from Oslo to Oprah. Franzen himself is enjoying what can only be described as a slathering response from adoring media. Exhibit A: A recent Time magazine cover featuring his geeky, handsome mug and the headline: Great American Novelist. Exhibit B: The recent International Festival of Authors in Toronto, where fans queued for hours to get their tattered copies signed. Exhibit C: Kissing and making up with Oprah.
I did finish Franzen's novel about the life of an average woman and her family - mostly in order to justify the extortionate hardcover price I'd paid. There were no revelations to be had - unless you count the crashing realization that banality, in the form of obsessive, pointless deconstructions of middle-class life, has become a central theme for many great artists of our time. From Stephen Frears's cinematic trifle Tamara Drewe to Lasse Hallstrom's talent-wasting Dear John to the excruciatingly dismal Greenberg (for which Ben Stiller is, mystifyingly, being touted for an Academy Award) - tedium is now masquerading as insight in an intellectual climate that worships the dull, the dim-witted and the just plain deadly.
Of course countless works of art have sprung from humble places (see anything painted by Peter Doig, written by Alice Munro or composed by Arcade Fire for details) but there is a difference between revealing the heartbreaking complications and ominous drama that hide in life's minutiae and simply droning on about nothing for 567 pages. Dull narratives about dull people leading dull lives were surely not what Flaubert had in mind when he said he aspired to write "a book about nothing."
So many of the great narrative masters of our time seem intent on confining the scope of both their storytelling and insights to the suburban kitchen sink - there is clearly an artistic trend at work, but why?
I put it down to sheer laziness, on the part of both artists and culture consumers. Coming up with actual plots and genuine revelations is exhausting work, you see. (Ask anyone who's written a novel and they'll tell you.) Why would clever, busy guys Jonathan Franzen or Noah Baumbach (who wrote Greenberg, but also the excellent The Squid and the Whale), bother with the hard work of originality and insight when they are critically lauded and publicly venerated for faxing it in?
If they are the naked emperors then we, the deluded public, are guilty of cheering them on. Because here's the weird thing: Dullness is addictive. When we see a movie or read a book in which nothing much happens and nary an insight springs, we are left unchallenged, unmoved and safe in the knowledge that what we have just survived is a vaguely unpleasant yet seemingly character-building ordeal. Enduring banality makes us smug. This is also the reason why boring people are often so pleased with themselves; their lack of imagination builds an unwholesome moral confidence.
Books like Freedom and movies like Greenberg teach us nothing yet allow us to feel good about ourselves, not unlike a Monday night trip to the gym. I lost a dozen precious hours of my life reading Freedom and now I want them back. At least if I'd spent them at the gym I'd have burned some calories. If that sounds boring and superficial, you can go ahead and hail me as a genius.