;)
A Book A Week: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 10:25AM Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2010.
If you haven’t read this book, and want to enjoy it unsullied by the taint of spoilery revelation, then you might want to stop reading this post and come by when you’ve experienced Freedom first-hand (see what I did there?). See you in a few weeks.
[whistling]
Finished? How’d you like it?
Me?
First, Franzen makes it difficult for me to enjoy his work. If he’s not flogging Twitter he’s lamenting eBooks, cell phones, and instant gratification business models. I would have finished this book much sooner if he hadn’t been standing on his Old Media lawn shaking his fist at newfangled sociodigital networkishness. I don’t completely understand my reaction to Franzen’s positions either, because I don’t really disagree with him.
This book is smart, wryly funny, and painfully insightful about American behavior. Here are a few ideas I jotted down while reading.
- By the time people realize a relationship is bad news, they’re too ensnared to escape without shedding some flesh. So more often than not, they stay, letting the punctures heal and calling the snares body jewelry.
- All relationships (or hookups, mates, best friends, parents, kids, business partners, roommates) are bad news in one way or another.
- All of the relationships in the story are circular. In families especially, behviors are repeated generationally. The details change, but the essential actions and emotions repeat over and over. The payroll gets bigger and the drugs of choice come and go.
- Core relationships are galvanized around age twenty. After that, all emotional actions yo-yo back to that twenty-year-old triangle. Embracing, rejecting, tolerating, reconstructing, tolerating, pining, blasting, aching, loving.
I’m not sure I agree with those staked out points. And I could really be spared Franzen’s one dishonesty: the happily-ever-after ending. I could not believe it, and when I got it, I didn’t want it. But the ending was a small problem compared to the surprising lack of emotional connection I felt reading the book.
I’m a crier. Poignant moments, sadness, pain, death, frustration, injustice, joy, victory, gratitude, love. They all make me cry. Sometimes just a quivery vapor. Sometimes book dropping sobs and shuddering.
So when I reached the climax of this story, the moment when an important character dies a tragic, ironic, unexpected death just when we think that a renewed sense of peace or happiness or contentment is possible? Nothing. It was a showstopper for me. Not because of my emotional reaction, but because of my lack of emotional reaction. I even reread that bit, wondering how I could be so crass, so unfeeling toward these characters I’d been hanging out with for hundreds of pages.
And then I realized that as plausible Franzen’s portrayal of these characters might be, I felt nothing, did not care about them. I only vaguely liked one or two of them. Oh sure, I can identify with Patty Berglund’s struggle to define her own purpose and self-identity. I can enjoy the banter and style of Patty and Walter and Richard and believe in their human characteristics as if they are people that I know in real life. But I still did not care about them. And that made me feel a bit empty, wishing that on top of this engaging book about complicated ethics, about business and personal relationships entwining and mirroring one another, if Franzen had just been able to communicate an equally real sense of empathy and compassion, then this merely smart and interesting book could have been a great book.
A Book A Week, Read Something in Words 
Reader Comments (3)
Two other questions: If this had been written by a woman, would someone have labelled it a romance novel? Why did Oprah put this book on her list, or Time put Franzen on its cover?
Ok, one more, a suggestion, rather than a question, let's talk about War and Peace and why Patty is reading it at a pivotal moment in the story.
I sense a follow-up post developing. A rumination on "freedom."
My follow-up post is here.