I admit, I had never even heard of Jonathan Franzen before reading Lev Grossman's August article in Time Magazine, which I pick up maybe twice a year. I'm glad I picked that particular one up.
If you google Franzen or his new novel Freedom, you will undoubtedly find reviews and analysis by people who are more famous than myself. I have read a few of them. So why undertake my own review? I guess because writing about what I read is the best way I know to engage with books and to ensure the highest level of comprehension possible. And because this particular book, in my opinion, deserves the attention it receives.
Freedom is what I am beginning to refer to as an "everything novel." It is the kind of book that, when asked what it is about, you answer, truthfully, "It's about life." Grossman points out in his article that Freedom steps back from the micro approach of so many contemporary novels (and even more so, poems), and lets us see generations of life unfold, how one event and person affects another event and person. He gives us more context into the inevitable pain and sorrow that comes. "We make our own heaven and hell," Veronica prophetically tells her sister Patty, one of the book's most important characters.
Freedom is one of several examples of these types of stories I've read in recent months. Parts of it read like Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons. But it is Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible that really come to mind, more for their holistic story-telling. Each novel is long, moving slowly at times, paining and frustrating us every step of the way in the same sense that life does because it does not work out according to our plans most of the time.
Freedom lets us into the life of contemporary Middle American family, where ambition, transience, "green" advocacy, our addictions to SUVs and plasma televisions, and expressive sexuality that we do not talk about are all out in the open, juxtaposed with each other. What Franzen makes abundantly clear through the plight and (even the small, redemptive moments) is that for all our individualist good intentions, community in our culture mostly disintegrates. And so, when Patty indulges in her long-repressed fantasy with her husband's rock start best friend, she ultimately loses the emotional trust of her beloved son. Likewise, as her husband, Walter, falls for a younger, attractive professional assistant, his daughter resents him for years to come, a great pain for him. Walter is probably the "hero" of the novel if there is one ("I adore you for your goodness," Patty writes to him), but he is hardly a perfect or even enviable one. He loses both women he loves, mostly estranges himself from his children, his political and professional dreams are far from ever truly realized, and he cares for a best friend who betrays him and who does not take his intellectual or political pursuits seriously, even when they agree.
The disintegration of community runs deeper than sexual behavior. When Walter and Patty move to Washington, D.C.--away from their smaller and perhaps more nature conscious neighborhood in Minnesota--a part of the Berglunds is lost, even as they experience financial success far beyond what they enjoyed in Minnesoata. Compromises on principle become commonplace, until Walter becomes someone the rest of the family, and perhaps even he, can no longer recognize.
The title of the book is ironical, as best I can tell. The story seems to communicate that for all our freedom to travel, freedom to mobilize economically, freedom to exploit nature for economical profit, freedom to express sexuality with and however we want to, we really are not all the free. We instead become enslaved to the disastrous consequences of our decisions, especially the ones that take us further away from the people we love most. All of the Berglunds, and even rock star Richard, spend a lifetime pursuing individual interests, and it eventually wrecks them one by one in a personification of the U2 lyrics, "I can't live/With or without you" and "I still haven't found/What I'm looking for." Bono's lament does not seem to far from Patty's, when she begins to understand that her and Walter are both the worst and best thing that ever happened to each other.
I do not wish to spoil any more of the book for you, but Franzen is one of the refreshing few who integrates and takes his various vocations--bird watching and writing--seriously. He approaches the craft of writing with fervor and discipline, locking himself in an Internet-less room for hours to write, purifying his work from distractions, rather than quickly splurging a Twitter update in a busy coffee shop with three social network sites and two by-the-minute news sites minimized on his laptop.
He has written about his concerns for contemporary writing in his nonfiction essays, including but not limited to "Perchance to Dream," later retitled "Why Bother?" in How to be Alone, yet another curious title from one who writes so much about family but spends equally as much time in personal solitude.
0 comments:
Post a Comment