The Franchiser

There’s a reason airport bookshops favor thrillers: most literature isn’t meant to be read on a plane. I fly a lot and should know better. Still, I read two-thirds of The Franchiser on flights to and from Hong Kong. Despite enjoying the book, the unfortunate result is that I never quite connected with it.

A deal between Ben Flesh and his godfather lies at the heart of The Franchiser. In short, the godfather tries to make peace with himself for having cheated Ben’s father in business by offering Ben a deal on his deathbed: a lifetime guarantee to borrow money at the prime interest rate. The story then follows Ben as he attempts to buy and build a legacy through franchises.

Two parts of the book stuck with me. The first comes in the conversation just before Ben’s godfather offers him the prime rate. At length, the godfather tells Ben what a miracle it is that he exists. It starts like this:

“How crowded is the universe,” his godfather said and moved the plasma arm vaguely. “How stuffed to bursting with its cargo of crap.Consider, Ben. You could have been a pencil or the metal band that holds the eraser to the wood, the wire of lead that runs through it. The black N in ‘Number 2’ stamped along one of its six sides. Or one of its six sides. Or the thin paint on another. You might have been a vowel on a typewriter or a number on a telephone dial or a consonant in books. There are thousands of languages, millions of typewriters, billions of books. You might have been the oxygen I breathe or the air stirred by this sentence. It is a miracle that one is not one of these things, a miracle that one is not a thing at all, that one is animal rather than mineral or vegetable, and a higher animal rather than a lower. You could have been a dot on a die in a child’s Monopoly set. There are twenty-one dots on each die, forty-two in a pair. Good god, Ben, think of all the dice in the world. End to end they’d stretch to the sun. Then there are the rich, the blooded with their red heritage like a thoroughbred’s skills. You might have been a stitch in those skills, a stitch in any of the trillions of vestments, pennants, gloves, blankets, and flags that have existed till now. Let me ask you something. How many people live? Consider the size of their wardrobe over the years. A button you could be, a pocket in pans, a figure on print.”

The godfather goes on to talk about the miracle that those who came before Ben survived wars and plagues. That, and so much more, had to happen for Ben to exist at all. It’s deep and entertaining in equal measure. We all overlook the miracle of our lives. We really do.

The second part that stuck with me was a string of long-winded insults a hitchhiker hurls at Ben. Here, too, is part of the passage:

“I wish you honorable lusts and one or two close calls with one of your wife’s bridge pals or a buyer, perhaps, when you’re both a little tight. And guilt like a whopping down payment you can’t manage so you draw back at the last minute and jerk off on the toilet seat that night like everybody else. I wish you the hypochondrical concerns. May you find a lump you can’t figure at three o’clock in the morning and and may a cough make you suspicious. Examine your stills like a stamp collector for two weeks running and give to a charity when it all blows over. Take an interest in the Super Bowl. Think about lamps, a davenport, finishing the basement, and settle for reupholstering what you’ve already got.”

The ultimate low blow: “[I wish] that you live in the middle of the middle class the bull’s-eye life.”

I keep books I enjoyed and donate those I didn’t. The Franchiser falls somewhere in between. That has a lot more to do with me than with Stanley Elkin. I’ll keep this one for now and consider rereading it next year.