Jonathan Franzen - "Freedom"
Before reading Freedom, I was somewhat ambivalent about Jonathan Franzen. His “dis”- invitation from the Oprah Book Club made him my hero for a few days, but The Corrections itself, his actual work, impressed me less. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see the brilliance in his writing: I could. It’s just that I didn’t enjoy it. There was something depressing about The Corrections, something that made it an unpleasant reading experience. Maybe it was just where I was emotionally at the time. Maybe I didn’t give it the thought and attention such a large-themed novel requires. Regardless, on the subject of The Corrections, one of the most polarizing novels in recent history, I was somewhere in the middle, leaning towards those who thought it wasn’t all that.
I cannot say the same of Franzen’s new novel, Freedom.
Like The Corrections, Freedom chronicles a dysfunctional family: the Berglunds of Minnesota, which include the patriarch Walter, his wife Patty, their son Joey, and daughter Jessica. We are introduced to them in an engrossing opening two hundred pages, first in a short breakneck summary told by an omniscient narrator (with writing so good it made me despair to write another word myself), and then in the form of a journal written by Patty at her therapist’s suggestion, appropriately entitled, “Mistakes Were Made”. In these pages, we see the family’s problems laid bare: we see Patty’s disappointing childhood that included a date-rape and basketball games her politician mother and lawyer father were always too busy to attend; we see her meet Walter in college, a left-wing activist nice-guy she hesitantly and uncomfortably commits to despite being more attracted to his best friend, Richard Katz, a punk rock singer; we see her past and current disappointments played out on her children, especially the bright, easy-going, nothing-like-Walter, and emotionally-closed-to-her Joey; and we see the deterioration and ultimate betrayal of a marriage.
Franzen switches POVs frequently from here, shifting from Richard, to Joey, to Walter, and back to Patty. The primary plotline here though is Walter’s.
Drawn to Washington DC by his deteriorating marriage and a job opportunity, Walter compromises his integrity by working for a Republican billionaire in order to organize a project that will give him a bird sanctuary he so desperately wants.
As Walter closes this devil’s bargain, environmentalists and the press get wind of the fact in order to achieve the bird sanctuary, coal extraction will be allowed on part of the land via mountaintop removal, an environmentally destructive process. This unwanted attention threatens the project, ramping up Walter’s stress levels. How can they not see the good to come out it? Walter wonders. How could they not see that saving the rare cerulean warbler - “the fastest-declining songbird in America” - was worth the compromise? Despite these obstacles, success ensues and other good things begin to happen for Walter - he now has the power and connections to talk about his real hot-button issue: over-population; he falls in love with his young and as-idealistic-as-he-is aide. But he’s still not happy and eventually things here fall apart too.
Meanwhile, we follow Richard, who has finally found popular musical success, but doesn’t seem to be so enamored with it. We follow another entertaining subplot involving Joey as he continues to be everything his father isn’t by cozying up to a Republican strategist, the father of his best college friend and his incredibly hot sister, who Joey has a crush on. He then ends up working contracting deals in Iraq - never mind that he’s still a college kid - that makes him bundles of cash but endangers troops. Young Joey begins to understand consequences and guilt.
In other words, Franzen displays for us the fruits of freedom as he sees them. He shows us people who have used their freedom to make themselves unhappy. All Patty “seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable.” This is true of all the characters. And this is a risk for Franzen. He brings them to places that some readers will find abhorrent, possibly even to the point where sympathy is impossible. This is a tricky area for a novelist to navigate. But Franzen doesn’t seem afraid of tricky fictional territory.
In his review of Freedom in The New York Review of Books, Charles Baxter said, “For the most part Franzen writes as if literary modernism and experimental postmodernism had never occurred.” This is a keen observation. Franzen writes like a nineteenth-century novelist, in the vein of Austen or the great Russian novelists. “… Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” as Tolstoy wrote, and Franzen seems intent on showing us the unhappy American families of today in all the ugly and twisty intricacies that relationships can take. He shows us Patty’s and Walter’s childhoods so we can see where their problems originated, so we can see how problems pass from generation to generation like a disease. He also loves to linger over the complexities of the human mind for pages and pages like Dostoyevsky. As great as these authors were, however, they’re not widely read by Americans because they are so thick with accumulated detail as is Franzen. He’s not afraid to tell you what a room looks like. He’s not afraid to take you through the nuances of the mind. He throws every detail against the wall to see if it will stick, and most do. But many readers these days don’t have the patience or inclination to sit through such thick paragraphs, no matter how brilliant the writing.
Also, Franzen’s take on society and politics will probably grate on anyone who doesn’t agree with his views. This is another Tolstoy-like characteristic, the penchant to take the small story of a family and toss it onto the larger canvas of today’s American society. He seems to want people to read his books a hundred years from now and get an idea of what America was like at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But, while I liked the broad implications he portrays and didn’t mind the political axes he ground, I did find him largely less effective in the middle sections, when we’re following Walter’s story, knee-deep in the societal problems he sees in virtually every aspect of life. Often Walter comes off as a crank or misanthrope, and while it didn’t bother me, I can see how it would bother a good many readers. Franzen is much more effective when he’s surveying the personal rather than the societal.
But what’s important is the story. Franzen has shown us people trying to muddle their way through life. They’re trying to find the love that will sustain them, or to figure out how to let the love they already have sustain them. They’re human. All these characters are tainted to a degree, like we all are. But what makes this book so wonderful is that Franzen allows them redemption. He takes them to the edge, but he doesn’t let them go over.
With all due respect to fantastic authors such as Kathryn Stockett or Geraldine Brooks, who have written brilliant novels of times past, Franzen does what I think a novelist is supposed to do. They’re supposed to show us a slice of life in the times we’re living, and give us a story about today’s human beings with today’s human problems and how they go about figuring things out. They don’t have to survive unscathed, just survive, with the hint that maybe everything will turn out OK. I don’t think one can ask for more from an author, and nobody does this better than Jonathan Franzen.
