Book Review: “Freedom” — Jonathan Franzen Unbound
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel is the talk of the town, but does it have anything to say?
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 576 pages, $28.
Reviewed by Tommy Wallach
In two days, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux will publish Freedom, the new novel by Jonathan Franzen whose last book, The Corrections, made just about every best-of list of 2001. It also earned the National Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and an offer (later rescinded) to be a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. Bret Easton Ellis called it one of the three great books of his generation, and just last year, the literary website The Millions voted it the best novel of the decade.
All of which is to say that something is in the air. It is possible that the rarest of occurrences—one comparable to a visit by Halley’s Comet, or a negative quarter for Apple, or a watchable M. Night Shyamalan film—is imminent. We may be about to witness a national conversation about literature.
When was the last time it happened? Scandals don’t count (sorry James Frey), nor does genre fiction (nobody was allowed to doubt Harry Potter, only to marvel at its stratospheric success). Hipsters may have discussed the finer points of a Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer novel, but the mainstream couldn’t have cared less. And the majority of the bestseller list is fodder for non-thought—the kind of stuff you read in order to avoid having a conversation.
In truth, one might have to look back to 2001 to The Corrections itself for an equivalent historical-literary moment, meaning there is quite a bit more resting on Franzen’s shoulders than the threat of sophomore slump. He is one of a very small cadre of authors still capable of firing up America’s interest in books. And Franzen seems to be well-aware of this fact, as evidenced not only by his occasional self-aggrandizing interview or unforgiving screed against “difficult” books (see the infamous “Harper’s Essay”), but by his newest novel itself. Freedom seems to take its inevitable cultural importance as its very premise, working backwards from there. So the question isn’t so much “Will people be talking?” but “What will they be talking about?”
Novelist Jonathan Franzen: He knows the way we live now? Photo by David Shankbone
The novel announces its major theme on the title page, and the nearly 600 pages that follow provide the variations. The kernel of the story concerns Walter and Patty Berglund, an average, suburban couple who spend the bulk of the novel struggling with freedoms, psychological, physical, sexual, and romantic.
“One strange thing about Patty, given her strong family orientation, was that she had no discernible connection to her roots,” we are bluntly told in the clever opening chapter of Freedom, which is narrated by a kind of collective suburban dislike of the Berglunds. Soon after, we are made privy to Patty’s autobiography—written at the behest of a nameless therapist. That Patty, a tall, white, college basketball superstar (who isn’t named Harry Angstrom), writes suspiciously like Jonathan Franzen is a fact we’re expected to ignore.
(A side note: While many critics have experienced near-ecstasy at Franzen’s literary stylings, I found the prose fairly unexciting. Though there are certainly moments of Updike-inspired beauty—a washed-up New Yorker actress in her late forties is described as dressing “tarty-teenage”, and she eats a piece of cake by “parceling out each small bite for intensive savoring, as if it were the best thing that was going to happen to her that day”—just as many lines are plain nonsense, such as the description of a character’s rent payments as “so low as to be literally nominal.” And though it may seem odd to have a discussion of an author’s style noted in parentheses, it seems perfectly reasonable to me in this case.)
Patty and Walter meet in college, where Patty is lusting after Walter’s friend and roommate, Richard Katz. Katz soon becomes a rock star, as the front man of The Traumatics, and his success is rekindled decades later (because that happens all the time) with a band called Walnut Surprise. Richard and Patty circle each other lustily for a couple hundred pages but don’t end up getting down and dirty until Patty has given in and married heart-of-gold Walter. Anguish inevitably ensues for all involved.
Richard was my least favorite character in a book full of hateful personalities. I’ve found the majority of recent portrayals of musicians in fiction to be problematic (Juliet, Naked and A Visit from the Goon Squad springing most immediately to mind), but Richard is by far the worst. The problem is Franzen’s penchant to sacrifice his veneer of realism whenever he has a stereotype to inflate and pop. Take this conversation Richard has with a young, earnest fan:
The kid was wearing a hoodie and the sort of low-cut skinny pants that Katz had first observed in London. “What do you think of Tutsi Picnic?” he said. “You into them?”
“Don’t know ‘em,” Katz said.
“No way! I can’t believe that.”
“And yet it’s the truth,” Katz said.
“What about the Flagrants? Aren’t they awesome? That thirty-seven-minute song of theirs?”
“Haven’t had the pleasure.”
It’s at the phrase “thirty-seven-minute song” that Franzen departs from the realm of gentle satire and embraces farce. This boy doesn’t exist in the real world, but wouldn’t he be hilariously annoying if he did?
And Richard himself is no better. His implacably cool demeanor, his claim that his goal in life is to “put [his] penis in the vaginas of as many women as possible,” his anti-corporate rant that goes viral on the internet (one of two rants that end up going viral over the course of the novel; am I the first to coin the phrase “deus ex technologica”?)—all of it reeks of the author’s lampooning pen.
Unfortunately, this looseness extends to other characters. Take Walter and Patty’s “golden-haired and pretty” son Joey, who is said to innately “possess the answers to every test a school could give him, as though multiple-choice sequences of As and Bs and Cs and Ds were encoded in his very DNA.” This is a weirdly illogical description, and its hyperbolic inanity infuses Joey’s character throughout the novel. In high school, he moves out of his parents house and in with his girlfriend, Connie, and her family. For a decade, Connie allows Joey all manner of physical infidelity, desiring only to be with him and fulfill his every desire: “Connie could not be fought with. Insecurity, suspicion, jealousy, possessiveness, paranoia—the unseemly kind of stuff that so annoyed those friends of his who’d had, however briefly, girlfriends—were foreign to her. Whether she genuinely lacked these feelings, or whether some powerful animal intelligence led her to suppress them, [Joey] could never determine.” In college, Joey becomes involved in a plan to sell Paraguayan vehicle parts to the American military operation in Iraq.
Which brings us to what really matters about a post-millennial Franzen novel: the size of the canvas. The verisimilitude of a teenager getting involved in military transactions is immaterial to the author’s greater point, which is that our personal, political, and even environmental freedoms are inextricably intertwined.
Joey’s exercise of his entrepreneurial freedom brings him hefty rewards, but also results in the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. Patty’s exercise of sexual freedom breaks her husband’s heart. Leading to a short-lived relationship with Richard whose end is described as not unlike that of America leaving Vietnam. Walter exercises his freedom by trying to save a species of bird that isn’t even on the endangered species list, resulting in the ironically-named Cerulean Mountain Trust shearing off the top of a mountain and selling the underlying coal to an energy company. Walter’s enthusiasm for this bizarre plan has been described in various reviews of Freedom as “weird” and “strange”; I’ll go with “inexplicably dumb.”
Walter’s passion for conservation is not, however, inexplicably dumb. His dedication to the cause is what makes him the novel’s only noble character. Before the book’s pat but touching denouement, we find Walter living in a lush, suburban enclave, where he spends his days begging the neighbors to keep their cats indoors to save the local songbirds. Personal questions about freedom (Is the desire for freedom the disease itself, or merely a symptom of the disease? Does marriage have to represent a sacrifice of freedom?) become political questions about freedom (Is the economic freedom of Americans worth more than the freedom of others? Is money a form of freedom, or the opposite?), which then become ecological questions about freedom (Does the freedom of a bird matter more than the freedom of a cat? Does the freedom of the next generation matter more than the freedom of the present generation?). Franzen reveals the ways that even the most insignificant issues are caught up in complex webs of conflicting interests, all of them relating to—say it with me—freedom.
Thankfully, Franzen eschews any simple answers, and his happy ending is a peaceful island in a roiling sea. Before Walter is reunited with Patty, he considers how perhaps he was not “made for a life of freedom and outlaw heroics” and needs “a more dully and enduringly discontented situation to struggle against and fashion an existence within.” It is enough of an answer for him, for Patty, and even for their children. But as for Walter’s dream, to conserve and protect the world that has offered us all so much freedom, Franzen fails to provide any answers.
Maybe this is the conversation we can expect once Freedom hits the stands. And the truth is that the critics are right: it’s a worthy conversation. However, even though Franzen poses all the right questions, it would probably be most encouraging if young people came down against the novel’s eventual endorsement of tending one’s own garden over the anxiety of involvement. Freedom speaks for its author’s generation, a generation that still had the freedom to choose ignorance.
As the cover of last week’s Time says, “Jonathan Franzen shows us the way we live now.” Now that’s a scary thought.
Tagged: American, contemporary, fiction, Freedom, Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
I’d like to take issue with Tommy Wallach’s review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.
Wallach ends his summary dismissal of Franzen’s style by saying, “and though it may seem odd to have a discussion of an author’s style noted in parentheses, it seems perfectly reasonable to me in this case.” What makes it “perfectly reasonable”?
Precisely because Freedom has met with so much acclaim—“near-ecstasy at Franzen’s literary stylings” as Wallach puts it—it would seem incumbent on a reviewer who wants to genuinely challenge received opinion to dig in and spend more than a parenthetical paragraph doing so.
Absent that kind of work, “perfectly reasonable” translates into haughty, lazy, and condescending. It’s true that the media has lauded Freedom with a unanimity that can’t but make one suspicious. That’s the way the media is in this country, when it comes to film, sports, and politics, to name some obvious venues. It shouldn’t be too surprising the same kind of behavior can be triggered by publishing. But to take disgust with this feeding frenzy out on the book itself is a fundamental error, a category mistake.
Freedom has a lot going for it. It has, for example, acute attention to psychological detail in marriage, family, and among friends. Franzen’s intelligent writing about the misunderstandings and cross-purposes that afflict intimacy drives the novel.
Yes, there is some threadbare prose in Freedom, as Wallach points out too disdainfully. At times Franzen labors like a Dos Passos working at breakneck speed to connect too many far-flung dots. The writing becomes perfunctory and the connections weak and forgettable.
But there’s excellent writing as well. Beyond the depictions of intimacy gone awry, which are, to my mind, at the core of the book, Freedom touches on the broader culture in ways that have made it quotable. For example, Walter, one of the main characters, weighed down and often blinded by his high-mindedness, says: “It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties . . . People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You maybe be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want too.”
Franzen’s previous novel, The Corrections, was propelled by the media storm occasioned by the author’s rejection of Oprah’s seal of approval. Some of that heavy weather surrounds Freedom, as well. But The Corrections stood on its own as a very good novel. The same can be said of Freedom.
This review is an interesting contrast to others I’ve read this week.
I’ve heard so much about this novel I probably won’t read it for two or three years at least. I have to say, though, that it sounds like it could have been written 40 years ago. There’s something depressing about yet another “beatifully written,” social realist novel about white, middle class, suburbanites and their self-absorbed angst. Updike and Roth pretty much ran this one into the ground decades ago.
Has American life really become so thin and dried out that this one is a true literary triumph? Sad.
Hey Harvey,
Thanks for the comment. While I don’t quite like being referred to as lazy for foregoing mentioning every bland or illogical sentence in the book, I hear you that perhaps I could’ve gone further to explain what I meant by my flippant aside.
All I’m saying is that Franzen still does not seem to me much of a stylist, particularly when compared to those whose shoulders he stands on (Updike, Roth, Flaubert). The example you gave perfectly encapsulates my problem with it all. There’s no good writing in that example. The final clause, “. . . the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to,” is all well and good, from a thematic standpoint. Yes, yet again, Franzen lays out the philosophy of the novel. But the writing? The words on the page? I would argue they remain uninteresting and fairly on the nose.
Quotability, of the kind you mention, is not a hallmark of good writing. Franzen writes aphoristically, which is great. But it’s not stylish prose. People don’t quote a lot of Fitzgerald or Roth, but they do quote a lot of Wilde. That’s because Wilde is more clever. Franzen may be the cleverest American writer working today (as much as a marketer as a writer), but I’d still ask you to point towards a few BEAUTIFUL paragraphs to prove that he’s got sentence-by-sentence chops.
-t
[…] See the review at the Artsfuse. […]
Thank you, Tommy Wallach, for a counterbalancing voice, although I guess you’ll miss out on the the list of people who want one of my custom Traumatics t-shirts.
You say so many interesting things, that I’d like to place this in context on my personal reading experience. I bought Freedom at the head of a 4-month trip I’m on. I bought it at the airport on my way out; ironically, actually, at the Minneapolis (let’s say Minneapolis-St. Paul) airport. Devoured that book, and then, delighted, devoured The Corrections, a used copy of which I picked up in Southeast Asia. I had had another version on my bedside in Brooklyn; and a hardcover or two in Vermont, both of which has been merely nibbled at over the course of busy days. (I can attest that after Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, the book that you can most readily find at book sales in northern New England is The Corrections. I hadn’t given this too much thought previous to reading it, but it’s clear to me now such is the fate of Oprah-recommended books over 300 (uncut) pages).
Having read them in this reverse order, I have some superficial commentary. First, The Corrections is better. This will seem untrue perhaps to reviewers a decade later, but the two are essentially the same book. The core of which power is to show you your thoughts about our daily (American) life; to enumerate its manifold anxieties, complexities, inanities and profundities. But mainly its anxieties, the decisions, mainly deriving from guilty balancing of pleasure and sin, that we’re unsure of – and the approach to sureness that we feel should be simplified as we age, but never seem to, except in novels and films.
Anyway, the cumulative effect of this contemporary dialogue and scenery is dazzling, or dizzying – some adjective denoting a temporary loss of the senses. The relatability, the freshness, the magnifying power of the words are heuristic. It’s what makes you gasp and say “this is genius, this is a classic.” Indeed, the earlier novel was able to limn my family far more precisely, exquisitely (down to naming my parents, Alfredo and Eileen, as Alfred and Enid) than I know I ever could, astounding and delighting and frightening me. And so again, thank you, Tommy Wallach, for writing to us form this eye-level vantage of mortality to Franzen.
Didn’t I also, after all, at the same lines you quote, say to myself (but too quickly?) “Hm, that’s a bad way to put it?” Yes, after, all the “negligible rent.” Just say he pays $75 a month. I can handle it!
Some disagreements:
Richard was my favorite character. I felt he was the only straight and and true character all the way through. Well, almost. Wasn’t he attracted to Patty, after all? Why was anyone attracted to her? This was actually frustrating. Wallach calls the Berglunds an average couple but only Patty was average – so average she had no place in the book. Let’s write her out of the second edition. (Or are we already on the 8th edition.) I’ve never met a state director of the Nature Conservancy but I am positive that any such person holding that title is as extraordinarily driven and idealistic as Walter. With his “Welcome to the middle class!” rant, sorry, but Walter becomes a hero worthy of internet fame. I’m sold.
While we’re on it, Tommy, I also slightly disagree with your assessment of Richard, who is my favorite character. I believe and envy his aloof cool completely. I have been that idiot asking Richard if he likes the 37-minute song. Franzen may have quoted me. Rchard would be the type to quote that conversation. But, again – his fascination with Patty is inexplicable.
Oh, and Patty’s roommate – can’t remember her name – she was a distraction. That whole section (was it 100 pages?) should be left out of the 9th edition. My God, was she boring. Looking back, what was the point of that, an expositional segue between Patty and Richard? Should have been one sentence.
The style question is one too subtle for me. I wish I could partake. If by style we mean, in essence, is voice, then it is a curious question indeed. Is it a good thing to be invisible? You say Franzen has written about this, so it’s likely to be his argument, fiction as fantasy journalism, where style is an obstructionist, egocentric imposition of foppery. Maybe Franzen hasn’t found his voice yet. The parts that confirm to me that I’m not mistaken in feeling carried away is when he’s able to come at an impression or a description from the inside out – the poetic impulse – and it glows. To me, fiction I guess is the broad canvas of freedom to make things glow, that is scratch at the surface, scratch scratch; but maybe it’s JF’s invisibility that is his digging tool, his trowel of the true. I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me. Or one I can’t solve. I put aside the style question.
So the question becomes, to me, if I can get over some passages of poor characterization and some writerly excess, a few unconsidered longeurs, does this make this as good as book as I think? How I solve this is to ask myself how I react viscerally to this book vis a vis Roth Updike; shit- head to head with any book any American has written in the last 100 years. And my feeling is that, for overall effect, with all its problems, “Freedom and its Corrections” puts Hemingway and Dos Passos and the aforementioned crew to bed. I have to go back to Fitzgerald’s best book to give up the fight. In which case the kind of thing we’re talking about here is looking for chinks in the armor or greatness, which is a worthy thing; though not quite as worthy as awe.