{"id":9471,"date":"2022-06-08T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9471"},"modified":"2022-06-07T23:56:47","modified_gmt":"2022-06-08T03:56:47","slug":"freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/08\/freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jonathan Franzen\u2019s Freedom<\/a><\/em> was his first novel in nine years, since his acclaimed 2001 novel The Corrections<\/em>, and was greeted with even greater praise. Esquire<\/em> called it the Great American Novel<\/a> (or at least a<\/em> Great American Novel), two New York Times<\/em> writers wrote glowing reviews, and the Guardian<\/em> called it \u201cthe novel of the century.\u201d It is well-written and intricately plotted, but it\u2019s also far too long and, like The Corrections<\/a><\/em>, a terribly depressing take on American suburban life \u2013 white suburban life, specifically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s marriage is hanging by a thread, the kids are moving out and moving away from their parents, and Walter\u2019s job is short-circuiting his brain by causing cognitive dissonance. Walter\u2019s 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\u2019s habit of making everything old cool again; his story intersects multiple times with both Walter\u2019s and Patty\u2019s. 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\u2019s 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\u2019s longheld environmentalist principles. Joey hooks up with the girl next door and has a hard time getting out of the relationship \u2026 I could go on, but you get the idea. Everyone\u2019s a mess, and everyone\u2019s miserable, despite having all of the privileges and benefits in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on just those two novels, it seems like that\u2019s Franzen\u2019s worldview \u2013 money and prosperity won\u2019t make you happy; in fact, they might make you less so. He creates these setups where the reader would think the characters\u2019 lives would be easy, and they\u2019d 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\u2019re all white, though, so some very real problems that affect people of color are just not in play here.) The difference between Freedom<\/em> and The Corrections<\/em> 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 \u2013 he\u2019s the best character in the book, and the most believable. Franzen must be a longtime music fan, because even small details around Richard\u2019s music career are credible, and he\u2019s crafted a character who could just as easily have been part of Utopia Avenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Walter\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019m sure you can imagine where that goes, but that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

Through about half of the book, I was on its wavelength, certainly appreciating the prose and the plotting even if I couldn\u2019t 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<\/em>, but it seems like Franzen didn\u2019t have a great idea where he wanted Freedom<\/em> to go. The big conclusion to the West Virginia storyline doesn\u2019t 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 \u2013 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\u2019s given his children. I get it, Jonathan. Suburban life is hell. I don\u2019t think I need to read another novel about it, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Just finished Joshua Cohen\u2019s The Netanyahus<\/em><\/a> this morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Franzen\u2019s 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 \u201cthe novel of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,98,616],"class_list":["post-9471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-literature","tag-depressing","tag-dysfunction","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9471"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9472,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9471\/revisions\/9472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}