Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was his first novel in nine years, since his acclaimed 2001 novel The Corrections, and was greeted with even greater praise. Esquire called it the Great American Novel (or at least a Great American Novel), two New York Times writers wrote glowing reviews, and the Guardian called it “the novel of the century.” It is well-written and intricately plotted, but it’s also far too long and, like The Corrections, a terribly depressing take on American suburban life – white suburban life, specifically.
The family at the center of this novel is the Berglunds, Patty and Walter and their two kids, Jessica and Joey, who live in suburban St. Paul and whose family is gradually unraveling. The couple’s marriage is hanging by a thread, the kids are moving out and moving away from their parents, and Walter’s job is short-circuiting his brain by causing cognitive dissonance. Walter’s former roommate, Richard, is an aging ex-punk rocker who has had a second 15 minutes of fame thanks to a new indie band and our culture’s habit of making everything old cool again; his story intersects multiple times with both Walter’s and Patty’s. Patty has left behind her New York family, including her politician mother, but lost much of her identity as a stay-at-home mom whose mind has atrophied and who finds herself disdained by one child and used by the other. Walter’s job, creating a nature preserve for the cerulean warbler by giving away land rights to a company that intends to engage in mountaintop removal mining, a highly destructive practice that conflicts with Walter’s longheld environmentalist principles. Joey hooks up with the girl next door and has a hard time getting out of the relationship … I could go on, but you get the idea. Everyone’s a mess, and everyone’s miserable, despite having all of the privileges and benefits in the world.
Based on just those two novels, it seems like that’s Franzen’s worldview – money and prosperity won’t make you happy; in fact, they might make you less so. He creates these setups where the reader would think the characters’ lives would be easy, and they’d be better able to find happiness, and then the characters go and fuck everything up (often literally, by fucking people other than their partners, which, shocker, leads to a lot of trouble and unhappiness for multiple characters around them). Having money just leads them to greater opportunities to make mistakes. (They’re all white, though, so some very real problems that affect people of color are just not in play here.) The difference between Freedom and The Corrections is that this time, their misdeeds are more interesting, and sometimes even funny. The presence of some interesting side characters, especially Richard, elevates a huge portion of the novel – he’s the best character in the book, and the most believable. Franzen must be a longtime music fan, because even small details around Richard’s music career are credible, and he’s crafted a character who could just as easily have been part of Utopia Avenue.
Then Walter’s work project takes over as the primary narrative, and the book runs out of steam with about 200 pages to go. The plan itself is far-fetched, but the execution within the book is a mess, and requires more suspension of disbelief and acceptance of some of the less credible details, like Walter’s obsession with zero population growth or the plan he and Lalitha, the very attractive (of course) young employee with whom he must work very closely on this project, cook up. I’m sure you can imagine where that goes, but that’s probably the most believable part of this entire subplot. Franzen comes up with a local yokel to oppose their efforts in West Virginia, right out of central casting, and it all devolves from there until he writes himself out of a corner with a convenient plot twist to get us to the end.
Through about half of the book, I was on its wavelength, certainly appreciating the prose and the plotting even if I couldn’t quite say that I was enjoying it. Once the story moved to Walter and Lalitha and the cerulean warbler, though, I started to lose interest, to the point where eventually told my wife I just wanted the book to be over. It starts out better than The Corrections, but it seems like Franzen didn’t have a great idea where he wanted Freedom to go. The big conclusion to the West Virginia storyline doesn’t work well with what appears to be the overall theme of the book, unless Franzen was just trying to make fun of suburban liberals and their pet causes – but even that is weirdly set up, since Walter had interest in environmental causes like this going back to college, and his upbringing was nowhere near as privileged as the life that he’s given his children. I get it, Jonathan. Suburban life is hell. I don’t think I need to read another novel about it, though.
Next up: Just finished Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus this morning.
made the TIME list of the 100 greatest novels published since the magazine began for its use of dark humor in an unstinting portrayal of both the modern American family and of our unending winter of discontent. It is a well-constructed novel with smart prose, one that challenges the reader often without becoming an arduous read, but ultimately suffers from its depressing outlook and the presence of only one really compelling storyline.
, a historical novel set during the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967-70.