Franzen's Freedom

Freedom

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is a pretty good book, by which I mean it’s not, in my estimation, a book deserving all the praise it garnered from Time. The writing is generally engaging, and the characters are sharply drawn and almost believable. I read the first hundred pages or so while we were visiting my sister-in-law this summer: it was on the nightstand of the room where we slept. Those opening pages captivated me sufficiently to make me want to get Freedom for myself, which I did by making it my first new-novel downloaded to my Nook. Very liberating.

Around page 300 I was ready to give up. The characters seemed sorry mixtures of cluelessness, heartlessness, carelessness, and overall hopelessness. Page upon page of self-centered stupidity...or is it stupid self-centeredness? Even the noble environmental ideals held by some of the characters didn’t seem likely to save them from themselves (and they didn’t).

Until Joey, around page 388, faces up to his own crap and deals with it. Literally. You have to read the book to know just how literally. From that point on Joey leads the procession toward the “salvation” of the others, whose lives turn around along with his. Freedom lurches forward toward happily ever-after conclusions for most of its main characters.

It is hard to imagine that the same people could be so bad for 380 pages and then so good after a couple of hundred more. No, their transformations are not easy, and redemption comes at a high cost for some. Facing our own crap is not pleasant, even when it’s figurative. But the main characters seem so ideal and idealized at the end that it’s hard to connect the people they have become to the people they once were. Such complete changes in people usually only happen in religiously motivated fiction, which I generally distrust.

Despite my qualifications, I recommend the book. It writes large the frantic search for authenticity many Americans are engaged in today. It may force some readers to check through their own crap, and come to terms with it. Frankly, it did that just a little bit for me. But not enough to make me ideal. Not yet, anyway. Not until I stop grasping for freedom.

Here are some quotes from Freedom I like and why:

“Richard, flummoxed, kept stepping outside to smoke cigarettes and fortify himself for the next round of Berglund fraughtness...” (p. 141 [Nook]) Franzen may have invented “fraughtness” - a great addition to the English language!

“There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it’s never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness.” (144-145) “stillness experiences pain in being broken.” I remember the first sounds of my mother in our kitchen on Iowa mornings.

“The angry words he’d spoken to his father had felt pre-formed, as if there were an aggrieved second self inside him 24/7, ordinarily invisible but clearly fully sentient and ready to vent itself, at a moment’s notice, in the form of sentences independent of his volition. It made him wonder who his real self was; and this was very disturbing...” (252) Ah yes, I know the experience well. “Who am I really, that I could say such things? And who are you that I would say them to you?”

“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.” (400) I think of the Tea Party; some of you probably think of “ultra-liberals.” We’re all on to something.

“At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart...” (478) Good place to stop, don’t you think?

WAIT! One more...

“Walter had never liked cats. They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals’ lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs.” (491) Can’t think about that one too much either, lest my heart break for our world.

Thanks for reading.