Freedom and Franzen

Jonathan Franzen has had buzz from the very beginning. His debut novel The Corrections was that unique blend of page-turning storytelling and bona fide jaw-dropping prose. His two novels since have been received more quietly. While I have not read Strong Motion or either of his non-fiction works, I did prior to the release of Freedom read The Twenty-Seventh City, a St. Louis-set novel whose writing embraced the postmodern aesthetic with more loose ends and a cacophony of characters who seem to multiply and fracture as the work progresses. The story in The Twenty-Seventh City doesn’t unfold so much as collapse. All in all, if The Corrections was a work of art ready for mass consumption, The Twenty-Seventh City was a work for the elite, those in-the-know and a work bound to disappoint the chain bookstore shoppers who wanted a cleanly started, cleanly finished page-turner.

Which brings us to Freedom – the novel whose back cover incorrectly (and tellingly) identifies it as Franzen’s second novel, rather than his fourth. Freedom is the literary though not the literal follow-up to The Corrections, and like Franzen’s hit debut, Freedom is a story of average middle-class middle Americans muddling through life. His sentences track the minutiae of their lives, the consumption of things and the piling up of days that define contemporary life. The story is tight and complete, a read as satisfying as it is insightful.

Like The Corrections the narration is in close third person, shifting between characters, so that we are drawn into an individual’s world and shown their perceptions before moving to another character. The three core characters form a modern-day love triangle. The main character, whose therapeutic memoirs are close to half the novel, is Patty Berglund, a former basketball star turned housewife prone to depression. Her eventual husband Walter Berglund is an all-around great guy with a preoccupation with overpopulation who succeeds at everything but lacks that one central ingredient for success in America – charisma. Rounding out the love triangle is Richard Kern, Walter’s college roommate and Patty’s lifelong crush, a musician cliché who stumbles onto a hit record after a tryst with Patty. The sex and love of Freedom is 100% new millennia, devoid of Victorian frothing, and rooted (pardon the pun) more in boredom and narcissism than any romantic ideals.

The central triangle of characters each has a match in the next generation, a clever and well-employed device that shows how this particular story is interesting because it is not unique: the same dramas that play out between Patty, Walter and Richard will repeat with the Berglund’s own children as they pass from childhood to college and eventually into adulthood. Patty and Walter’s son Joey (my favorite character) is in many ways like Richard. Joey’s girlfriend Connie is much like Patty. Patty and Walter’s daughter Jessica is similar to Walter. Of course, these three don’t form a love triangle themselves (the novel is not that clean), but they do seem fated to play out the same roles as their pairs in love triangles of their own making. The pairings come down to an immutable characteristic that doesn’t so much shape as handicap the particular character to a predictable reaction. Patty and Connie are prone to depression, to an obsessive need for someone else that leaves them always short of their own potential. Richard and Joey are charismatic, floating through life with ease, successful unintentionally, never trying too hard or taking on the problems of those they leave behind. Walter and Jessica do everything right, but are never the characters you want to read about (because readers, like everyone else, inevitably fall prey to the charisma of Richard and Joey).

Perhaps the greatest criticism that can be given to Franzen is that as much as he can empathize and develop a host of characters, his style is incredibly rigid. No matter what character is telling the story, the writer is always Franzen. Unlike other masters of the close third person, including a personal favourite William Faulkner, Franzen’s voice never varies (perhaps, another reason he sets his novels in America’s heartland, a place where the sameness of voices represents the sameness of middle America’s suburban dream). He is a writer for a generation brought up watching stories on screens. He sets the scene, masters the lighting, the angle, the close-ups, the landscapes, but never quite the voices, which are all scripted beautifully, but never sounded out in their pockmarked humanity. This particular blind spot in Franzen’s work is also responsible for another of his strengths – the ability to write male and female characters equally well.

Freedom may not be perfect, but it is still Franzen at his character-driven, story-telling best and the book, even in the early days of its release, is proving popular with counterculture hipsters, critics and Oprah bookclubbers alike. Franzen’s writing style and ability to so fully immerse himself in the lives he creates means that the details and surface story is a great read in and of itself, but the novel’s literary greatness comes from so much of the dysfunction that is unspoken or implied or left unresolved, such as Patty’s homoerotic obsessive relationship with her college best friend Eliza and Patty’s quasi-incestuous relationship with her son Joey. Whether these relationships actually turn sexual is doubtful (in the case of Eliza we are explicitly told it didn’t) is largely unimportant. What is important is Franzen’s ability to imply and weave into his wholesome white-bread character such subversive impulses that the characters themselves are scarcely aware of their own base nature. To the discerning reader the base nature that lies between the lines of Franzen’s detailed prose further rounds out and brings to life some of the best-developed characters in the English language.

All in all, Freedom is a novel very much deserving of the fanfare with which it has been received, and time will tell if it becomes, as tipped by some, the novel of our generation.

Megan Smith