Freedom

I read Jonathan Franzen's previous novel, The Corrections, and while impressed with its virtuosity I was let down by the aridness of its characters. But in Freedom his prose is bursting with humanity. This is a tale of life in contemporary America that breathes with life, and will have the reader firmly enmeshed in the rich details of its characters.

Freedom manages to be both epic in scale and fiercely intimate. The focus is only on a handful of characters--one family, the Berglunds, and a lifelong friend of theirs. But in this one family Franzen has created a representation of America in the first decade of the twenty-first century, even while reaching back to the 1970s and beyond.

The Berglunds are Walter and Patty, and when the book begins they are typical liberal suburbanites in St. Paul, Minnesota. Walter works for 3M, Patty is a stay-at-home mom and ex-college basketball star. They have two kids, a daughter Jessica and a son Joey. Things start to go wrong when the high-school aged Joey, who is coddled by his mother and at odds with his father, moves in with his girlfriend's family.

Walter takes a job in Washington with a group that is trying to save a songbird called the cerulean warbler. To do this they propose allowing a coal mining outfit to blast the top of a mountain in West Virginia, and then sealing off the land as a nature preserve. Joey, who drifts into the philosophy of a Young Republican, seeks to make money with a shady outfit selling old equipment to the U.S. army. Both Walter and Joey end up in cahoots with a nefarious Halliburton-like contractor.

Meanwhile, Patty spirals into depression, as her marriage withers. She is wracked with a nagging love for Walter's college friend, a rock musician named Richard Katz, and the two succumb to lust in a vacation home in northern Minnesota. She pours out her story in the form of an autobiography (told in the third person) to her therapist, in which she details how she met both Richard and Walter in her days as a roundballer for the University of Minnesota.

I'm just scratching the surface in attempting to sum up the plot of this book. There is also Joey's trip to Patagonia with the beautiful sister of his college roommate; the relationship between Walter and his much younger, Asian Indian assistant Lalitha and Patty's crazy, heroin-addicted college friend Eliza. The prose is both rich and fluid, like the best of the British doorstop novels of the nineteenth century. This book calls out for an adaptation by Masterpiece Theater.

There's so much to admire here that one must take a step back to fully recognize what Franzen is saying. Take for instance the title. Kick off your reading group discussion by asking why did he call it Freedom? The word appears throughout the text in almost all of its dictionary meanings. I think back to how the word was distorted during the Bush presidency at the height of the Iraq war, when enemies of the administration were called enemies of freedom. But it also touches on the freedom between men and women--can one be free in marriage? Or is it about the basic personal freedom that each individual strives for on a daily basis?

If you get too much of a headache pondering all that, just enjoy the writing. The characters are so vivid. Walter is a pill, a man obsessed with liberal politics, especially overpopulation of humans and the eradication of songbirds. I loved this passage: "In Walter's view, there was no greater force for evil in the world, no more compelling cause for despair about humanity and the amazing planet it had been given, than the Catholic Church, although, admittedly, the Siamese-twin fundamentalism of Bush and bin Laden were running a close second these days. He couldn't see a church or a REAL MEN LOVE JESUS sign or a fish symbol on a car without his chest tightening with anger. In a place like West Virginia, this meant he got angry pretty much every time he ventured into daylight, which no doubt contributed to his road rage."

The character of Richard Katz is also a brilliant creation--Franzen knows his rock and roll, and he uses Katz to voice abuse on the music industry. He gives an interview to a young blogger than does a nice job of damning the entire business. Franzen writes of Katz's music: "...on to their next gig, in Madison, and then on to releasing further wryly titled records that a certain kind of critic and about five thousand other people in the world liked to listen to, and doing small venue gigs attended by scruffy, well-educated white guys who were no longer as young as they used to be."

Franzen also writes some fantastic dialogue here. There's an argument between Walter and Patty that is as good as anything that's been heard on the stage, and a brilliant section that has Walter trying to persuade a neighbor to keep her cat indoors so it won't kill birds.

But above all it's the characters who make Freedom such a good read. It's a rare treat to finish a book and be saddened because time spent with the characters is over. These people were more than words on the page--they really live in the imagination.