Jonathan Franzen and the Fear of the '90s

It's easy to see why much of American culture is currently in the thrall of '90s revivalism (beyond the standard cycle of generational nostalgia): compared to the 21st-century, the '90s seem like a time of peace and posterity.  After all, it was post-Cold War and pre-9/11; America was the world's sole, undisputed super-power; we were at peace with every major nation; our wars were minor and the stakes (for us at least) were low; the economy was robust, the middle-class large, the stock market seemed invincibly bullish, and the Star Wars prequels hadn't been made yet.

Compared to our contemporary America of terrorist threats, torture, PATRIOT ACTS, and interminable Mid-Eastern wars; of chronic insecurity, poor health-care coverage, unemployment and underemployment; of ballooning Federal deficits, student loan debt, and gas prices; of repeated environmental cataclysms, and polarizing politics, the '90s must seem downright idealic.

Except it wasn't, it really wasn't!  The moment you begin to remember the '90s as something other than the decade of Jurassic Park, Nickelodeon, and Gigapets, you remember how there was this great cultural dread of some coming "New World Order" entangled in vast governmental conspiracies, as shown by the immense popularity of The X-Files; you remember the exploding AIDS epidemic and how the alarm bells for Global Warming were already tolling; you remember the ascension of Nirvana and "Grunge" and "Alternative" and other music genres notable for their bubbling anxieties; and you remember how at the end of the '90s, Jonathan Franzen had a best-seller called The Corrections that mined deep wells of anxiety out of the collapse of the first tech bubble, of all things!

When I finally got around to reading The Corrections over a year ago, that's what most struck me: the ever-pervading sense of sheer dread contained in the pages of a book that was written pre-9/11!  The book famously (or infamously, depending on who you ask) became a best-seller in part because it was released just 10 days before 9/11, and the standard narrative is that Americans rushed to buy this book that could remind them of the very recent "good times" they had just barely lost so irrevocably.

Which narrative has always confused me, because The Corrections is just such an unbearably anxious book!  Right on the first page, we are assured that "something terrible is about to happen."  Franzen of course didn't know that 9/11 was going to be it, but he still nevertheless nails the zeitgeist just right!  Franzen remembers correctly how in 2001, just barely past the '90s, there was just this all pervading fear that something terrible would happen, there was just an inevitability about it.  That's what the '90s were, one vast feeling of dread, of dancing in the eye of the hurricane, of waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Much has been made about how much more divided America has been since 9/11.   But as The Corrections demonstrate, 9/11 didn't cause the breaks in America, no, it revealed them!