A few weeks back I finished reading Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom. We selected, by a pluralistic vote amongst our peers, that Freedom would be our next group read for the New York Women’s Book Club (men are welcome too). I wasn’t excited about it. I’ve tried ‘Franzen’ on before. I even read two other shorter books before I finally committed to reading Freedom.
I was vehemently against it, remembering when The Corrections came out and was lauded and I picked that up only to abandon it within the first ten pages. As I have since come to find out, I wasn’t alone, the characters were detestable and I just wasn’t curious about detestable people. If I wanted to read about detestable characters, I’d peel open virtually any section of a newspaper and read about politics or the happenings of the times.
Finally settling into reading Freedom, I felt again that tug to give up on the writing. The characters never feel fully fleshed out, they drip with self-involvement and the whole storyline itself, as my wife would say time and again, seems to pour back into the general navel-gazing of the times. If I wanted to hear about this kind of crap I could just flick open my twitter app on my iPhone, why read it in a book? But how often are lives fully fleshed out in a novel, how deep and long must we go into the persona of a character to consider them whole? This question drove me on.
I’ve seen it written that Franzen himself, secludes himself and ties off his connections to the Internet and the world when he’s writing, and I don’t blame him, as I do it myself when sitting down to put my mind towards anything. It is not without irony then that I found myself reading Freedom on a Kindle app on my iPhone. Not only was my experience a virgin leap into the world of Jonathan Franzen, but it also was a step into the world of e-books. I feel baptised on a number of levels after reading this work. You see I’m one of those readers that dog-ears the hell out of books or writes in pen or pencil. I take notes, circle shit, underline, bracket passages and jot them down in my journal. I do it to understand what I’m reading and partly to remember the things I had questions about or felt carried enough weight to remember them. The Kindle, made that super easy. More so than carrying a pen and paper. I went nuts on highlighting and note taking with the Kindle. According to the Kindle page on Amazon I have 13 highlighted passages and 56 notes in Freedom. Most of these were not positive.
In a passage where Franzen’s third-person narrator dives into to fleshing out Patty we begin to see the patterns that take hold in my antagonistic relationship with the author as he sets the ground for his anti-heroes and I set the ground for disliking him:
“From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed absurdly young, pushing a stroller passed stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours from her day in the string bags that hung from her shoulder. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered preparations; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex-paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then Zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.” Ibid pg.4 Freedom
And my response to that last jab forshadowing Patty and the narrators perspective on all the Mom’s in the suburbs.
“Wow, that’s fucking loaded!”
And it is, but that is where as a reader, I get uneasy. Am I mad at the characters, the narrator, or am I just caught up in it because it’s that good? I mean, that fleshing out of Patty is so loaded, yet so good. Every one of the characters in Freedom, at some point, left a metallic bile taste in my mouth. I felt uneasy about them, their decisions and their viewpoint on the world. And finishing the novel, didn’t fully redeem them. Yet, when David and I were running a few weeks ago and I mentioned that I’d finished it and David being David, asked what I thought. I said, “It’s a book of the times.”
At that moment, the whole breadth of the work dilated in my minds eye. It grew into this large compositional work, not so much narrative as experience. I think what I meant by a book of the times, is a book of our times. Americans who are middle-aged or approaching middle-age, and have lived through the past decade of seeming unfurling chaos dilating out in electoral processes, national disasters, economic collapse, and retracting back to do it all again. Not just in the American experience but in this new, very global, yet at once detached version of society we sit atop. As our foundation wears out from under us.
It seems almost as if Freedom is bigger than its britches. In trying to take on it all, it feels very much like it dealt with none of it. And reading over only a handful of other reviews and interviews about the book and Franzen himself, I can’t help but reflect on my feelings as I progressed through the book. Early on the overall character of the story came off as fairly misogynistic. All of the women in this book are detestable, shallow and incomplete. As he’s building up the character of Patty, the momentum towards an inevitable relationship catastrophe sets in and he begins to set the stage for Patty the anti-hero, Patty the hated and as a reader he sets the stage for the impending doom.
“For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of socio-cultural pollen, an affable bee.” Ibid pg. 5 Freedom
My gut feeling and personal comment at the time:
“It's seems his sense of irony and sarcasm are pretty heavy here. I predict he divorces her. Is this an unflappable source of misogyny or something else?”
In an interview with NPR Jonathan Franzen claimed he over-identified with women and that his third-person narration of Patty’s memoir was a way of getting perspective on the three male characters in the book. But for me, the whole book gradually felt like a piece of psychotherapy for Jonathan Franzen, particularly when Patty shares her story through her auto-biography. The act of Patty using a third person narrative as therapy for herself, if anything, spoke more to me as this book being just that for Frandsen in turning to his own issues with women , social issues, and speaking publicly.
And in reflecting on Jonathan Franzen’s largely curmudgeonly public persona intertwined in interviews over the past decade, it seems clear that his characters as anything are very much amalgamations of his experience. There are elements of Franzen in Patty, Walter, and perhaps somewhere deep down Richard as well. Richard a weighed down lesser known music icon is as much Franzen as it seems to be an incarnation of his friend a tragic loss of David Foster Wallace. I’m surprised in finding an early assessment as much to that affect in my notes when I was about a third of the way through the book.
“And this whole bromance between Walter & Richard must be a surrogate for one of Franzen's own.”
In every way it seems Franzen has been able to take his own issues, with death, irrelevancy, childhood, environmental catastrophes and marital challenges and channel them through the characters of Freedom. And so I ask you and myself, is that not a larger point of good writing, to deal with these issues of life? Then why is it that I feel that I’m wasting time, that I’m performing some desecrated act in reading this work? Does the answer lie in his attempts to measure freedom in these ‘everyday’ struggles of middle-class family, or is it just an exploration, and attempt to raise the hairs on the backs of our necks and egg us on? Maybe Franzen’s success is found lurking in the interweaving of socio-political issues of the time deep within his characters persona's. Perhaps it lies mostly in his interconnections to the literary establishment of the United States, which for all its alleged pride at diversity and equality, so often levels it praise on a select few.
I still struggle with this work. I’m finished with it, but not done with it. There are nuggets of truth that ring in some of the characterizations of familial strife and yet, there remains a haze that gathers about the eyes when I try and look back at these characters and the flesh of the fictional nature, something amiss about it all. Which brings me back to the humanity of it all. Life never seems well enough reflected or spun out as a story when one looks at ones accomplishments. No matter the status one attains, looking back, we often ask, is that it?
We never truly know one another. Writing is one of the most personal ways of expressing oneself, even when you are purposefully obfuscating and visualizing worlds, fragments of you end up within. Some will count Freedom at the worst for it and others the better, but in my book of an accounting of things read, it remains a book of the times. And now I turn my thoughts towards finishing a book that remains timeless.
