Book Review : Jonathan Franzen - Freedom (2010)

Country: USA

Genre: Literary

Pages: 562

She knew him to be a man supremely irritated by female bullshit, and the fact that he'd put up with two nonstop hours of hers, which was about 119 minutes more than he was constituted to put up with, filled her with gratitude and sorrow about the waste, the waste. The waste of his love.

 The ideal qualifier for Jonathan Franzen as an author is "old school". The man writes novels like they did in the nineteenth century. They are lengthy and relatively straightforward for the current paradigm of high end literature. The subjects of his novels are very old school too. His last two epics were family sagas. THE CORRECTIONS (Dead End Follies' literary read of the year in 2011), featured the Lambert family who's members are struggling with their personal issues to accomplish the most traditional goal, spend a last Christmas in family, around their ill patriarch Alfred. In fact, I liked my holiday reading of THE CORRECTIONS so much that I kept FREEDOM for this year's holidays. A Jonathan Franzen novel is best read on long afternoon sittings, with shitty weather outside and family members walking around inside the house. So was this a winning bet? Absolutely. 

While THE CORRECTIONS read like a powerful display of what Jonathan Franzen could do as a writer, FREEDOM reads like a project. An attempt to say something about the world through the lives of individuals. There is a lot more characters and the structure is not as seamless, but one of FREEDOM's strong points is that it owns what it's trying to say. The message gets across. The messengers are the Berglund family. Walter, Patty, Joey and Jessica, who has a lesser role than the three others, mostly because she seems to have her things together and wants to avoid conflict. Franzen follows them through their life in the Bush years, where you know, freedom was the thing every American raved about. But freedom to do what exactly? That's what the Berglunds are looking to grasp an understanding of and every member of the family does it its own way and it's not always pretty.

Another of FREEDOM's achievements is the feeling that its characters lives are so closely interwoven that the very concept of freedom becomes unclear. Is freedom a personal thing? And how bad taking personal freedom is going to shit on another human being's life? I had a hard time to discern a favorite character in the novel, but my choice stopped on Patty and I think it's Jonathan Franzen's favorite character also. The most powerful statements are made through her*. Here's a woman who was chasing excellence in her teenage and young adult years and let it aside when she got injured (she was a basket-ball star), to enter adult life in the most literal sense of the term. But her personal longings are conflicting with her sense of responsibilities all the time and she came to loathe herself for it. These longings in the novel are symbolized through the person of Richard Katz, Walter's friend who stayed true to his principles and beliefs all his life and found success for it. Patty is deeply in love with Richard and over time these feelings shifted from true love to being in love with the idea of Richard.** The strong, free artist. Here's a passage that illustrate how complex and toxic her self-loathing has become.

YES, FOR YOUR SAKE. Don't you get it? I have no sake. I don't believe in anything. I don't have faith in anything. The team is all I've got. And so I'll get some kind of job for your sake, and then you can just leave me the hell alone, and let me send Joey however much money I make. 

They're talking about Joey here, who's exercising his freedom to be not like his dad, which means he's turning into a raging republican. Yeah, it's pretty funny. There are minor chinks in FREEDOM, but I don't think it's worth going in length over. The longer a novel is, the more vulnerable it is to have weaknesses and FREEDOM is not exempt. The storyline of Walter, working at his eco-friendly project in Washington D.C had poor narrative appeal. I know what Franzen was trying to do here. He was trying to tie up the microscope view of the Bush years, to the "macroscope". To display direct causality. It's only about sixty pages long, but I have to admit I skimmed those a little bit.

Since everybody is taking position in this David Foster Wallace Vs Jonathan Franzen competition of who's the greatest writer, I will also because FREEDOM made my position clear. While Wallace is so far ahead in the non-fiction department it's not even funny, I prefer Franzen's novels. Except for two stories in BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN***, I think FREEDOM is the best fiction that was produced by any of the two writers. That's a personal opinion though, I "get" more of what Franzen is trying to say through those social portraits and often struggle with Wallace's language and find his vision a little curious at time. I'm not saying one is clearly superior to the other, both are amazing writers by any means, but I find more to appreciate in Franzen's work and especially in FREEDOM. That's how much I liked it. If I had a limited number of books to bring on a desert island, it would get a very strong consideration.

*At least, I find.

** That said, the relationship in between Richard and Walter is almost as deep and interesting.

*** FOREVER OVERHEAD and the second segment of BRIEF INTERVIEWS where the black man discusses his father's life as a men's room valet.