Freedom

Jonathan Franzen writes novels for men--and women, but he has said that one of his objections to being an Oprah pick for The Corrections was that he didn't want the novel to get a reputation as a women's novel. So I went into reading his newest novel, Freedom, with that in mind.

What I loved about this novel from the first is the writing. Describing his main characters, he describes their increasingly gentrified neighborhood:
"...she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street."

He manages to capture the spirit of an age, even with fictional song lyrics, like these from his character Richard:

"What tiny little beads up in those big fat SUV's!
My friends, you look insanely happy at the wheel!
And the Circuit City smiling of a hundred Kathy Lees!
A wall of Regis Philbins! I tell you I'm starting to feel
INSANELY HAPPY! INSANELY HAPPY!"

When Richard has his inevitable rock-and-roll breakdown, he goes to a clinic "for six weeks of detox and snide resistance to the gospel of recovery." That strikes me as particularly good writing, because of the brevity with which it conveys character.

Franzen is very good at presenting character. Even his female character, Patty, thinks in a way that I have to admit seems genuine. In her forties, she finally "acknowledged realities about her physical appearance which she'd been ignoring in her fantasy world...she humbled herself." Having just done this myself, I can't say it doesn't ring true.

But it really rubs me the wrong way (ahem) to read that a woman's intelligence lies in her sexual organs:
"Connie had a wry, compact intelligence, a firm little clitoris of discernment and sensitivity...."

On the other hand, Patty really does have an interesting thought process:
"I feel so old, Richard. Just because a person isn't making good use of her life, it doesn't stop her life from passing. In fact, it makes her life pass all the quicker."
"You don't look old. You look great."
"Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked."

It's the male characters who intrigue, infuriate, and carry the plot. As an American, I found this kind of throw-away line, part of the back story about how the main male character's, Walter's, ancestors came to America, one of the most intriguing:
"...it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others."

Walter is the most interesting character; he is the source of all the ideas that everyone who has been reading this novel is looking for. He makes the kind of ethical compromises that most of us make, but writ larger, as he is actively working to save some habitat for a little blue bird, the cerulean warbler:
"But the environmental mainstream doesn't want to talk about doing things right, because doing things right would make the coal companies look less villainous and MTR more palatable politically."

He gets to expound on the state of America today in conversations with his friend Richard:
"This was what was keeping me awake at night," Walter said. "This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV--there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli."

And Walter gets the best rants of anyone in this novel:
"In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet's future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it's beautiful to have a lot of babies. The more the better. Kate Winslet is pregnant, hooray, hooray. Some dimwit in Iowa just had octuplets, hooray, hooray. The conversation about the idiocy of SUVs stops dead the minute people say they're buying them to protect their precious babies."

Even the fights Walter and Patty have, after years of marriage, ring true to me. They refer to so many loosely-related things that it's hard to offer you a quotation to show this--which will tell those of you in a long-running marriage how true to life they really are. At one point Patty says, as probably every long-married spouse has said to every other at some point in an argument: "Oh, finally it comes out! Finally we're getting somewhere!"

So I liked a lot of things about reading Freedom. Franzen said, in an interview with Alden Mudge, "I want the pages to turn without effort." And they do. I was immersed in the story, and enjoying the complexity of the characters, even through the occasional jarring note.

Towards the end of the novel, though, I can't follow Walter's fanatic bird-loving towards domestic cat-hating, and I can't rejoice in the muted good fortune of his irritating and facile son. It's hard to believe in the sort-of-happy ending. And personally, I have a hard time with the self-conscious cuteness of the writing at the point where the "iron cauldrons and racks" which Walter's father used in making candy for Christmas are described as "necromantic."

That's my female (and non-necromantic) view on reading Freedom. For a male view, check out yesterday's post at The New Dork Review of Books.