Freedom is the complicated story of an unfree, deteriorating middle-class Minnesotan family (parents Walter and Patty Berglund, children, lovers, assorted relatives, neighbours, friends, shysters and enemies) who battle all their lives with unresolved family-of-origin issues. Walter's main agenda - as also with his Swedish male ancestors - is to avoid facing the threatening realities of deeply-buried emotions. Patty's emotional life is dominated by the pain of her parents' preoccupation with high-flying professional and political agendas, a date-rape incident, and of course relating to her one-dimensional husband.
Nearly a decade after publishing his prize-winning novel The Corrections, Franzen has done it again. Freedom is currently (November 2010) the most-discussed contemporary work of English-language fiction in the U.S. and Australia and who knows where else.
Freedom is the complicated story of an unfree, deteriorating middle-class Minnesotan family (parents Walter and Patty Berglund, children, lovers, assorted relatives, neighbours, friends, shysters and enemies) who battle all their lives with unresolved family-of-origin issues. Walter's main agenda - as also with his Swedish male ancestors - is to avoid facing the threatening realities of deeply-buried emotions. Patty's emotional life is dominated by the pain of her parents' preoccupation with high-flying professional and political agendas, a date-rape incident, and of course relating to her one-dimensional husband.
Walter and Patty are university graduates. He's a naive, nice, corporate lawyer/do-gooder, who resigns from 3M and moves into nature conservation, working for a minerals magnate who wants to turn some of his ill-earned millions into saving a small woodland bird, the Cerulean warbler. You might judge (if you're naive) that this is triple-bottom-line stuff, but there's only one outcome that magnate is interested in...
Franzen's main offering is a many-layered analysis of the Berglunds’ marriage. He tells the story partly via the device of Patty's journaling for her therapist - which, oddly, is composed in the third person.
The Berglunds are, at the beginning, NQR (not quite right) caricatures, nonentities who are nevertheless redeemed at the end. (I won't spoil it by disclosing the story-line). The main message: nonentities are people too. If they're willing to be humble and vulnerable and name their demons, they (and their families/marriage) can be saved.
So there's really a collision of 'freedoms' here. Every prodigal is free to flee to the far country (New York etc.) to escape family-of-origin realities, but there, in the loneliness of various pig-pens, each comes to realize that there's no place like home, if only they could figure out how to reconstruct home from the debris of past hurts.
Sample: 'He'd needed an extra brother to love and hate and compete with. And the eternal tormenting question for Walter... was whether Richard was the little brother or the big brother, the f***up or the hero, the beloved damaged friend or the dangerous rival' (131). (Note: they're my ***'s. You'd better cope with the four-letter words here or you'll get distracted...).
(Client: tell me how all this generally resonates with your story).
Sex is a major theme. Mostly problematical sex. Like here: 'Walter was what he was, and he wanted what he was to be what Patty wanted. He wanted things to be mutual! ... Eventually after years of resisting, she managed to get him to stop trying altogether. And felt terribly guilty but also *angry* and *annoyed* to be made to feel like such a failure... Sex seemed to be a diversion for young people with nothing better to do' (140-1).
There's also spectacular sex, sex within intersecting love-triangles, feral sex, half-hearted sex, depersonalized sex, phone sex, date-rape, promiscuous American College sex, and lots of other kinds of sex you didn't think you needed to know about. (Speaking of which: do you know any other author who's described in somewhat graphic detail how someone retrieved a wedding ring they'd swallowed?).
On the sub-themes of endangered bird-species, and overpopulation, I noted these:
* 'Too many damn people on the planet. It's especially clear when we went to South America. Yes, per capita consumption is rising. Yes, the Chinese are illegally vacuuming up resources down there. But the real problem is population pressure. Six kids per family versus one point five. People are desperate to feed the children that the pope in his infinite wisdom makes them have, and so they trash the environment' (219).
* 'The low-end estimate of songbirds daily murdered by cats in the United States [is] one million, ie. 365,000,000 per year (and this... [is] a conservative estimate and did not include the starvation of the murdered birds' chicks' (545). Back on page 222: 'Every year in the U.S. one *billion* songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats... but no one gives a s*** because they love their own individual kitty cat'.
* 'Walter had never liked cats. They seemed to him to be 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 lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where its true heart lay' (548).
The central metaphor - until you get to the denouement at the end - is not freedom but duplicity. It's Franzen's long sermon on the topic 'How Should We Then Live?' Someone on Amazon.com wrote: 'The apocalpyse, when it comes, clears the way for a postlude, set in Minnesota, that is as haunting as anything in recent American fiction. Visiting her daughter’s university, Patty observes a stone engraved with the words, “USE WELL THY FREEDOM”. The warning is there throughout. With its all-encompassing world, its flawed heroes and its redemptive ending, “Freedom” has the sweep of a modern “Paradise Lost”.'
Well, you get the idea. Professional reviewers and book clubbers (the 'chattering classes') will like it (there are glowing reviews in the NYT, Time, the Economist, etc.) but the comments by ordinary folks at Amazon.com - innocents who are prepared to say the emperor has no clothes - often only give it one or two stars out of five. Franzen has too many contrived conversations and improbable happenings (like a 19-year-old arms dealer traveling to Poland and Paraguay to make procurement purchases of spare parts for broken-down military trucks in Iraq).
I had three '!!!' moments: Walter's 'Welcome to the middle-class' speech (to which I responded, aloud, 'yoo-hoo!); a beautifully lyrical paragraph (485) on the wonders of bird migration; and a moving set of reconciliations towards the end (when I cried).
A little warning or two: for me this novel started slowly, but 'took off' about half-way through. Franzen could have reduced the number of characters by a third (to help folks with a 73-year-old brain to remember who's who). And he's verbose - maybe he'd have said more in 30 percent fewer pages. He writes brilliantly, of course (but not as fluently as John Updike), offering a lot of detail about this and that which had me skimming paragraphs.
If you enjoyed this you should also read Garrison Keillor (funnier), Tolstoy (who's in a league of his own) and John Updike (a better wordsmith).
Rowland Croucher
November 2010
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