Farther Away / Jonathan Franzen 321 pp.

A collection of essays and long book reviews from 2005-ish until publication in 2012. Most notably there are Franzen's eulogy for David Foster Wallace and a long essay he wrote about grieving his friend which involved a trip to a remote Chilean island. I gather that some thought Franzen may have been too honest in his assessment of his friend, or insufficiently hagiographic. Not knowing a great deal about DFW but being well-acquainted with loving a sick and self-destructive human being, I would say that Franzen was extremely generous. And in general I noticed in this collection how frequently he writes about love: of parents, siblings, and friends, in addition to the kind between partners. Given that the long novel Freedom was, to my view, an examination of how human beings can do the work of loving one another, I find this focus beautifully old-fashioned in a way that compensates for some of the grumpier pieces, on technology, for example. The book reviews have expanded my to-read list: Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, Paula Fox's Desperate Characters, and The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim.