A Family
Full of Unhappiness, Hoping for Transcendence
By Michiko Kakutani
FREEDOM
By Jonathan
Franzen
562 pages.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
Jonathan
Franzen’s galvanic new novel, “Freedom,” showcases his impressive literary
toolkit — every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles
— and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American
middle-class life. With this book, he’s not only created an unforgettable
family, he’s also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed,
apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight
of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public
and private lives of his characters.
Whereas
Mr. Franzen’s first novel, “The Twenty-Seventh City,” borrowed liberally from the
likes of Thomas Pynchon and
Don DeLillo to create a dark, splashy
picture of a futuristic St. Louis, his 2001 bestseller, “The Corrections,” signaled his determination to
write an American sort of “Buddenbrooks,” to conjure contemporary America — not
by going for a cartoonish, zeitgeist-y epic but by deconstructing a family’s
history to give us a wide-angled portrait of the country as it rumbled into the
materialistic 1990s.
While
“The Corrections” attested to Mr. Franzen’s discovery of his own limber voice
and tamed his penchant for sociological pontification, the novel was something
of a hybrid in which the author’s satiric instincts and misanthropic view of
the world sometimes seemed at odds with his new drive to create fully
three-dimensional people. It felt, at times, as if he were self-importantly
inflating the symbolic meaning of his characters’ experiences, even as he
condescendingly attributed to them every venal quality from hypocrisy and
vanity to paranoia and Machiavellian conniving.
In
the opening pages of “Freedom,” this dynamic seems even more exaggerated, as we
are introduced to members of the Berglund family as an assortment of
disagreeable caricatures, who perplex and perturb their neighbors in St. Paul.
Known for his “niceness,” Walter Berglund is a weak, passive-aggressive husband
and father, who weirdly sells out his nature-loving ideals to work with an evil
coal company. His wife, Patty, also seems “nicey-nice” on the surface, but
turns out to be an ill-tempered shrew, who rages at Walter and inexplicably
slashes a neighbor’s new snow tires. Their cocky teenage son, Joey, is so
unhappy at home that he moves out of the house and in with his girlfriend’s
family next door.
It
turns out, however, that these farcical sketches are simply meant to show how
the Berglunds might be perceived by outsiders, just as Patty’s account of this
period of her life, which immediately follows in the book, reflects her own
need to filter everything through the prism of her anger and depression. As
“The Corrections” dramatically demonstrated, Mr. Franzen is extremely adept at
depicting those two emotions — which not just Patty, but nearly every character
in this novel suffers from, too, and which all of them trace back to injustices
or slights suffered at the hands of their parents.
As
the novel proceeds, however, Mr. Franzen delves further into the state of mind
of his creations, developing them into fully imagined human beings — not
Nietzschean stereotypes easily divided into categories of “hard” (shameless,
ambitious brutes) or “soft” (pathetic, sniveling doormats); not bitter patsies
fueled by ancient grudges, but confused, searching people capable of change and
perhaps even transcendence.
We
come to understand the dynamics between the earnest and eager-to-please Walter,
a good soldier reeling with suppressed rage; and Patty, college athlete turned
housewife, who indulges in alcohol and sarcasm to assuage her sense of
uselessness and loss. We also come to intimately know Walter’s best friend,
Richard, a cool, charming musician and compulsive womanizer, whom Patty first fell
in love with decades ago and with whom she later has an affair.
Mr.
Franzen’s repeated allusions to “War and Peace,” suggesting that there is some
sort of parallel between the Walter-Richard-Patty triangle and the
Pierre-Andrei-Natasha triangle in Tolstoy’s great classic, are laughably
conceited, but he does an agile job of tracing the constantly evolving
relationships among his three main characters, as well the dynamics between
Walter and Patty, and their two children, Joey and Jessica. He understands the
improvised game of emotional dominoes that can play out in families, and the
psychological chutes and ladders that can pop up in their lives out of the
blue.
From
the start of his career with “The Twenty-Seventh City,” Mr. Franzen has been
ambitious, striving to write a Big American Novel that might capture a national
mind-set, and this novel is no exception. Its title, “Freedom,” announces a
theme that runs like a riptide beneath the narrative — lots of talk about what
liberty means in terms of being free of familial responsibilities and
ideological beliefs, and the rootlessness and dislocation that often follow in
its wake.
But
it is neither this heavy-handed leitmotif nor the twisty, Dickensian plot
(which has Walter and Joey getting involved with a ruthless Halliburton-like
company) that lends this novel its narrative heft and hold on the reader.
Rather, it is Mr. Franzen’s characters and his David Foster Wallace -esque
ability to capture the absurdities of contemporary life — where the planet is
“heating up like a toaster oven” and people use credit cards to buy a pack of
gum or a single hot dog (“I mean cash is so yesterday”), where rage among
liberals and conservatives alike is scorching the country in the George W. Bush
years, and intemperate blog
entries and Howard Beale-like outbursts are cheered as expressions of a
collective distemper.
Writing
in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his
characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting
mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of
life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges. He
proves himself as adept at adolescent comedy (what happens to Joey after he
accidentally swallows his wedding ring right before a vacation with his dream
girl) as he is at grown-up tragedy (what happens to Walter’s assistant and new
beloved when she sets off alone on a trip to West Virginia coal country); as
skilled at holding a mirror to the world his people inhabit day by dreary day
as he is at limning their messy inner lives.
In
the past, Mr. Franzen tended to impose a seemingly cynical, mechanistic view of
the world on his characters, threatening to turn them into authorial pawns
subject to simple Freudian-Darwinian imperatives. This time, in creating
conflicted, contrarian individuals capable of choosing their own fates, Mr.
Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet — a novel that turns out to
be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible
portrait of our times.
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