#2: Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

I read this on the Kindle I received as a Christmas present. Took it with me on a business trip to Denmark.

Freedom was fun to read. It’s about characters who come from backgrounds a lot like mine, and it’s set in the present. It was easy to appreciate the socio-economic anxieties of the main characters, and to catch all the cultural references—to Wilco, to Garrison Keillor, to everything that pertains to being a well-read, over-educated, slightly affluent liberal American in the last half of the first decade of the twenty-first century. When a minor working-class character in the book sneers about tofu-eating Volvo-driving liberals I think “What’s wrong with that?” I’ve owned a Volvo and I like tofu. But I’ve never felt like I was marginalizing myself with these tastes. But I guess someone like Sarah Palin would find it all pretty damning. The other night I was cooking with some Vietnamese fried onion-flavored tofu. It was really tasty. Not at all like the soft wet stuff you get in supermarkets. But I digress.

Early on Freedom was very impressive. College athlete Patty Emerson comes west to Minnesota for college to escape her striving, pretentious and unwholesomely ironic family. Patty falls in with Eliza, who is a bit of a psycho—spectacularly co-dependent, dishonest, what I think is known is some circles as a “borderline” personality.

Patty and Eliza meet up with Richard, an aspiring musician, and Walter, his highly ethical best friend, and, after Eliza drops out, the remaining three form the core of the plot for the remaining few hundred pages. Patty and Walter marry and have two children. Patty has an affair with Richard. No way this book does not eventually become a movie.

The second half of the book was conspicuously less satisfying. Franzen seemed to recall his obligations as a cultural critic, and a complicated machinery of diabolical environmental cynicism was introduced. Yes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but so what? Walter and his beautiful young assistant create a non-profit dedicated to fighting overpopulation. He and the beautiful young assistant begin a passionate love affair. The beautiful young assistant is killed. I lost my ability to connect to the characters as everything became more heightened, more melodramatic. It’s like when a reasonably interesting crime movie devolves to car chases and gun battles for the final 40 minutes. Is any one car chase really different from any other car chase?

I think back to Franzen’s little dispute with Oprah Winfrey. She had decided to select his previous novel, The Corrections, for her book club, and he decided he would prefer not. I can understand Franzen’s reluctance to be branded a women’s novelist, a brand that is built into the Oprah endorsement. Which is not to say that Oprah exclusively picks books with flowing script and gauzy photographs on the cover. She’s chosen Faulkner as well, though I don’t suppose her endorsement would do much to alter his reputation. Still, it was a misstep on Franzen’s part, indicative of a desire to steer his book to a desired audience and to decide for himself what sorts of categories he belongs in. I feel something of that anxiety in Freedom—a sense of calculation.