Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom is a strange relic of 2010: it’s written to be place in a time capsule and dug up (or simply refreshed on some future screen) as representing Middle America in the aughts. (There are several sentences that make this clear in its choice of verb tenses–it’s meant to be read many years from now.)
It is also a book for other writers, clearly, and there’s not a single page that goes by that Franzen doesn’t manage an apt metaphor or leave behind a simple, but shattering detail about the psychology of its characters. There are reasons it’s been getting excellent reviews, though I have been ignoring them. (I tend to find fiction reviews unhelpful unless I’ve read the book.) He is excellent at his craft, though perhaps that would be the one minor chord one could strike: it can sometimes show of his abilities to a fault (for example, the diary of one of the characters is apparently written by a writer to ranked just behind Franzen in whatever rankings do this sort of thing).
Let me take an inelegant analogy, but since I’m teaching Husserl, I find it apt: this is certainly a phenomenology of characters, the best I’ve read (or rather, I suppose, I’ve read in a recent work) for some time. He detaches us from the natural attitude of realism (this is the word he has championed in interviews) for an eidetic reduction into literature. There, on the page, we can twist and turn each person from various angles, from various personae or masks, just as we turn each page, seeing them from behind and front, and thus developing a “sympathy” he notes one of the characters has innately for even the worst among us; literary realisms tend to leave character behind in the passing of scenes and details. Definitively not so with this work.
The theme of the book is the disintegrating families of the last thirty years, and freedom here just passes as a by-word for liberality and license: one should not be detained by a second thought that there’s any second thought from this book about “freedom” beyond that.
It’s simply about “bourgeois freedom,” a term used at one point and apt. It’s also about parents wanting their kids to be their friends and the ways in which we invariably disappoint our parents as much they do for us. I say “we,” though I mean that in a limited sense, though this book bills itself about the middle class, the salaries of the characters are exceedingly upper class and barely a sympathetic note is played for any character that isn’t (which mirrors the elitism of one of the main characters, and thus there’s a thematic reason for this).
Franzen commented on NPR’s Fresh Air the other day his feeling that contemporary parenting is too egalitarian, too unstructured. But this is a vague over-generalization, since the violence and almost royal abuse in many American homes is not without evidence in child welfare statistics across America, which suggests being unstructured but not egalitarian. But I’m sure we all know a parent that has said something to the effect of some of the characters in this book, though, again, I don’t find those people often. Also, he suggests that the “adults” of the 90s and aughts never grew up, and I think we can all see that in friends who spend their entire lives continuing to ask their parents for money and for support. And their children, in turn, never grow up. Here’s one scene:
Whereupon Sarah asked if she could fire the nail gun. She was like a walking advertisement of the late-model parenting she’d received: You have permission to ask for things! Just because you aren’t pretty doesn’t mean you don’t! Your offerings, if you’re bold enough to make them, will be welcomed by the world! In her own way, she was just as tiring as Caitlyn. Katz wondered if he’d been this tiring himself at eighteen, or whether, as it now seemed to him, his anger at the world—his perception of the world as a hostile adversary, worthy of his anger—had made him more interesting than these young paragons of self-esteem. He let Sarah fire the nail gun….
We expect this license, even in politics. Franzen does capture a reactionary version of freedom (for guns, etc.). He writes about one character, “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage,” and this seems ever-present the past few years (if not well beyond that).
But it needs to be countenanced not that people don’t want to work, as Franzen makes an explicit theme at several points, but that the rest of the story is economy: the jobs of today are simply not enough to support the middle class lifestyle of a generation ago. The statistics of middle class income and the declining wages of all but the richest 1% since the 1970s does have its effect. That’s simply a fact, an unalterable fact, and telling people to grow up won’t change the economic conditions such that a middle class income can’t buy a house in most major cities and suburbs, that the cost of education is several times higher than a generation ago; good or bad parenting isn’t going to change that. If I pause over this, it’s because I want to emphasize that the book does, near the end, depict what is a dying middle class in this country, and for the well known reasons, but it’s only in the last few pages.
(In fact, it’d be difficult to think of a character who is facing financial difficulties in the book who isn’t simply choosing not to work, or not to derive a larger income. Perhaps this goes back to the title of the work and certainly he discusses some of those choices as somewhat complicated, but nevertheless…)
The book attempts, though not as successfully, say, as Delillo’s Underworld, to pull together the personal and larger stakes (in Underworld, it’s about waste and the nuclear age). But he does match well his themes about parenting to larger questions about generating life and the infinite growth capitalism expects:
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 least interesting character—the rest are lawyers and housewives–is ironically the aging sexed-out rocker. One character, an assistant, talks about not wanting kids. She’s asked rightly about what her future self will make of this, and of course her reasoning is one we all recognize when we make choices for a future self who might want otherwise: “But what if I know that I’m right now, and my future self is the one I don’t trust?”
This book abstains, as much as possible, from the Philip Roth-style peons to middle age narcissism and the treatment of young women as mere excuses to write long descriptions of their breasts. There is one older man/ younger woman relationship, but it’s touched by the decency of the middle-age man and the decency and brightness of the younger woman, and there are passages I didn’t cite that make his feelings of being cliche and making a morally dubious choice clear. Here, he finds that his late-2os paramour has for the first time been angered by him:
But these were the first seconds in which he’d ever experienced anything like coldness from her; and they were dreadful. What he’d never understood about men in his position, in all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn’t keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.
In other words, he expects the world to congratulate his goodness, but of course, expecting his estranged wife to congratulate him for not falling for his assistant, or not going through with the relationship, is a tough sell; so too, with his assistant.
He also has a Straussian character hooked into the Bush administration, a touch that does feel a bit forced, but then again, there were really Dr. Strangelove characters roaming Washington in those days (and these days as well). This character gives a longish speech on political lies, then adds:
In normal times, he said, the great mass of American public opinion was isolationist and know-nothing, but the terrorist attacks had given “us” a golden opportunity, the first since the end of the Cold War, for “the philosopher” (which philosopher, exactly, Joey wasn’t clear on or had missed an earlier reference to) to step in and unite the country…
There’s a nice touching moment when Patty, the once über-housewife who disintegrates in combined and warring feelings of longing, regret, and self-loathing that she didn’t deserve better, approaches her own mother about her childhood. I’ll just quote the last line, which matches about what I came away with when I once approached my dad about any regrets he may have had (the conversation in the book is almost too close at points):
And this was all Patty got from her, then or later. It wasn’t a lot, it didn’t solve any mysteries, but it would have to do.
Of course, these are out of context and thus look pedantic or worse.
The book is, though, what we expect the great American novel to be. That it’s gotten such coverage either confirms this or confirms that we want this to be the case, which is perhaps the same thing.
PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF ERROR 