Jonathan Franzen Will Go Down Swinging, by Benjamin Alsup

Jonathan Franzen Will Go Down Swinging, by Benjamin Alsup

 Jonathan Franzen

Some people believe the era of the Great American Novel is over. Freedom makes them look like fools.

Esquire, August 11, 2010

    The first thing people are going to want to know about Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28) is if it measures up to Franzen's last novel, The Corrections. It measures up. In fact, if you liked The Corrections, you may like Freedom even better. Or not quite so much. It doesn't matter. Some like Sticky Fingers and others like Exile. Some say Bird. Others say Magic. These are fun arguments,¹ but they're not important ones. The important thing is that The Corrections is a great novel. So is Freedom.

     Great isn't a term much associated with American novels these days. That's partly because so many Americans have given up on big books.² But it's also because many of our writers have given up on the very notion of greatness. Franzen hasn't. David Foster Wallace may have cashed in his chips, but Franzen isn't just hanging in, he's doubling down. And so Freedom kicks against the pricks like a thing intent on being. Whatever else Freedom is, it's a great slab of a book. Check out the specs: 576 pages (small font, tight spacing). Check out the sweep: a large cast of intergenerational characters, a narrative that covers more than 30 years and engages issues ranging from the influence of Big Coal on our politics to the way sex can both create love and destroy it. This is a book that acts as though people still had long conversations, still read long books.

     This makes Franzen a writer deeply at odds with his times. While his contemporaries content themselves with small books about nothing much or big books about comics, Franzen delivers the massive, old-school jams. It's not that Franzen's prose makes other writers seem untalented; it's that he makes them seem so lazy, so irrelevant, so lacking in the kind of chutzpah we once expected from our best authors. Freedom doesn't name check War and Peace for nothing. It's making a claim for shelf space among the kind of books that the big dogs used to write. The kind they called important. The kind they called greats.

     Is all this talk of greatness hopelessly out of touch? Probably. The Great American Novel has likely gone the way of the Great American Radio Drama. But I hope not. I hope that books like Freedom will still play a role in the culture, still engage us in a serious conversation about the anachronistic things that matter most — our families, our lovers, our country, our planet. Freedom reminds us just how much these things matter, reminds us that they matter more than Scotch and jeans and Jake Gyllenhaal. It lets us know that these things are worth thinking and fighting and maybe even reading about.³

1. Correct answers: Let It Bleed and Jordan.
2. According to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll, in one year, the typical American reads four books. One in four adults reads none.
3. If you disagree and dislike both The Corrections and Freedom, I'd be interested why.

http://www.esquire.com/fiction/book-review/jonathan-franzen-freedom-review-0910