[NO SIGNIFICANT
SPOILERS.]
I've had an
interesting history with this book.
Almost two years
ago, I got up a post that was a review of Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer. (Read it here.) In
it, I discussed my gradual loss of interest in contemporary American fiction,
giving up on it some short way into Susan Minot's Evening. At the end, I
mentioned that someone whose taste I respected had given me Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, his award-winning novel,
universally praised as one of the greatest novels of the last fifty years. I promised the gifter to read it and intended
to. Franzen's prior novel, The Corrections, won the National Book Award and was famously
selected by Oprah as one her Book Club selections (an honor in which Franzen
refused to participate). In a cover
story, TIME mag called him "The Great American Novelist." At the end of the prior post, I wrote: "It's next on my list. I'll give you a report."
All I knew about
the book is that it was about a modern family.
Frankly, I didn't think I was going to like it. I thought it was going to be a long sneer at
middle-class values, a tiresome attack on the hypocrisy of the life of affluent
Americans. Sure, those values can
sometimes use some work and there's a streak of hypocrisy in the life of the
best of us. Even the title, Freedom.
Yeah, yeah, it's how the freedoms our American society affords us
ultimately entrap us with our prosperity and make us miserable, etc. etc. etc.,
yawn. Let's flip to the back .
. . 562 pages.
I was weary of it before I cracked to page 1.
But I wanted to give
this shining example of modern fiction a shot.
I started it earlier this year.
On rare occasions
I'll start a book, tire of it or otherwise fail to become engaged, put it
aside, pick it up again, and love the darned thing. A recent example is Saul Bellow's
masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie
March, which confused me in its first few dozen pages, and there were
several hundred more to go. I picked it
up again months later, started over, worked a little harder at keeping the
characters straight and kept on going. I
ended up finishing it quickly and was astounded by the extravagant beauty of
the thing.
I started Freedom this spring. Indeed, at first I did find it irritating, but
not so much for its story or content. It
was the writing that was giving me some trouble. (More on that next.) But it did interest me; and I did realize
that my prediction of its theme was, if not entirely wrong, pretty wrong. Eventually, though, I put it aside about a
hundred pages into it. But I didn't put
it back on the shelf. I put the dust cover back onto it and put it on a
table where it rebuked me daily. I hoped I would remember the
characters and what had happened so far if and when I picked it up again.
Eventually, I
did, and I did. And I started liking it better,
despite its flaws, and blasted on through to the end. When I was done, I was sold: Freedom
is a fine novel that repaid my hours of reading. Maybe better than fine, maybe great, but
the technical issues I'll get to in a moment are holding me back on the g-word.
The novel takes Walter and Patty Berglund from their
college years and courtship, through their years in St. Paul, and eventual relocation
to Washington, D.C. Central to the book
is the relationship of each of them to indie musician Richard Katz. They have two children, the precocious and
obnoxious Joey, who gets a lot of ink, and better-girl Jessica, who is almost
invisible in the story. Neighbors, colleagues, friends. Over the course of the book, the emphasis
shifts from Patty's unhappiness to Walter's as they age, change, deceive themselves and one another, and reach for
meaning. I read it closely, without skipping (except for the final two-thirds of some of the dialoguey encounters), and ended up loving it.
But first .
. . some misgivings:
I have to depart
from the majority of critics who liked the book, and some who didn't, who
praised the writing. (See the Wikipedia entry for Freedom.) The
question I continued to ask myself as I read was: What
has happened to the Great American Editor?
Did Franzen's celebrity intimidate whoever got assigned to redline this
behemoth? It is true that Franzen can
put together marvelous-sounding sentences.
But there was a lot, and by that I mean a lot, of writerly showing-off in this book, prose that
said look at me more than it
illuminated the thoughts and feelings and actions of the characters. There were also passages that were much to jokey, Franzen giving the reader a nudge in the ribs as if to say that was a good one, wasn't it? A good editor would have gotten some of this
under control.
And some of that
self-conscious scribbling was just plain clumsy. One need not look far for an example. It is one of those myths of writing that
happens to be true is that first sentences are important. Books have been written about the art of the
first sentence. The first sentence of Freedom, however, was very bad:
"The news about Walter Berglund
wasn't picked up locally – he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years
earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now – but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill
were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times."
Of course we're
going to meet Walter and Patty in a bit.
But right off the bat, the reader is confused rather than
intrigued. The dash-bracketed insertion
then both over- and underexplains about these characters we don't know. If people who were gone only two years
"meant nothing to St. Paul now," they probably never did, which thus
does not explain why "the news about Walter" was not "picked up locally"
(it takes a moment to figure out that "local" means "St. Paul"). And what does it mean for people to
"mean something" to a city?
Finally, the two negatives in the last phrase are very hard to figure
out ("not so loyal to their city as not to read" – very clumsy) and,
when finally parsed, expresses the rather silly thought that loyalty to a city
discourages one from reading The New York
Times.
Editors exist to fix
writing like this.
They also exist
to cut. This book needed it. The leading candidate for reduction were the
dialogues, which repeated themselves from encounter to encounter, and each of
which went on and on with the characters continuing to say the same things to
one another over and over. Good skipping
territory.
Large sections of
the book are taken up with an "autobiography" written by Patty
Berglund. Problem: She writes just like Jonathan Franzen.
Finally, these
very unappealing characters are given some very deep, detailed, complex, and
rather florid thoughts to think. An
unappealing person can have deep and florid thoughts, but Franzen's description
of them (in frequently very striking prose) contrasts jarringly with the very
pedestrian lives and intellects he has crafted for them.
So far, I've
barely said a nice thing about this book.
So why did I end up liking it so much and why did it leave me with a
good feeling about the future of fiction?
The foregoing
stylistic accusations aside, I did enjoy the music of Franzen's prose. It was such a pleasure after decades of
minimalism and Iowa Writer's Workshop crap to feel the evocative and almost
physical power of the English language, wielded by a master.
Franzen also
makes a real effort to wrestle with the issues that upper-middle-class
Americans have faced since the Appalling Sixties: Ennui; balancing commitment with family;
wrestling with the contradictions of the sexual revolution; negotiating the DMZ
between principle and compromise.
The characters,
while unanimously unappealing, were vividly and consistently sketched. I could see each one of them. It would be both a cliché and untrue to say
that I "cared" about them, but I was interested in seeing what was
going to happen to them. Which, I
suppose, is a way of saying that once I got past some of the Franzian flash, I
got immersed in the darned story of
the thing.
The book is fair-minded. I had
expected it to be strongly political, and strongly leftist, but I found it
pretty agnostic on political matters. So
I was surprised when I read in the book's Wikipedia entry that "[m]ost
lukewarm reviews praised the novel's prose [see?], but believed the author's
left-wing political stance was too obvious." I don't think so. All the main characters, to the extent they
could be tagged at all, were pretty obviously liberal (one, and only one, moves
unattractively rightward later in the book) but even more obviously deeply
flawed human beings. I certainly didn't peg
Franzen as a conservative. I pegged him
as an artist. He was seeking to tell the
truth about the private life of people with certain identifiable public beliefs
that I, at least, associated with taking today's liberal arts education too
seriously. The same book could have been written about a Tea Party family. A charge of political bias
diminishing the book is factually wrong.
Although I
complained about the prose sometimes overwhelming the slightness of the
characters' moral architecture, in the end I admired the acuity of Franzen's
insights into human nature, and their incorporation into a grand family
story. The novel cannot be called inspirational -- the most positive thing about the fate of the characters is that they've more or less resigned -- lifted my spirits and made me
think maybe I've been missing something in recent fiction.
I'm looking
forward to getting back to exploring what modern writers have to say.
But that Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace has been sitting on my shelf for quite awhile . . . .
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