Cerulean Warblers Edition

Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen

It is fitting that Jonathan Franzen has one of his main characters (Patty Berglund) reading War and Peace, and that he intermittently references Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece here and there throughout Freedom. It is fitting because the way Franzen maps out his characters’ lives in this book, and how they try to navigate themselves out of their own fate and undoing, is as close to being Tolstoy-ian as I have read. Note: I am not saying that Franzen is as great as Tolstoy, or that he deserves to be joined with Tolstoy when speaking about the greatest writers of all time. I am saying that the way he writes about his characters’ unhappiness and their inner monologues is very Tolstoy-esque. Under normal circumstances, I am loathe to compare, however abstractly or directly, modern writers (or artists or musicians) to any classic counterparts but in this case making a dotted line connecting Franzen’s writing ability to Tolstoy’s writing ability, albeit in a very static sense, is something that I will stand by.

Yes, Freedom is that great.

Jonathan Franzen did an excellent job of writing about a family with all sorts of problems in his previous novel The Corrections, a novel that was met with enough critical praise to fill the New York Times Building. (Full disclosure: as much as I loved and was thoroughly blown away by much of the writing in The Corrections, I found the ending to be cold. I was rather disappointed by it, almost to the point of retroactively being indifferent to the novel as a whole. I was afraid that Franzen is to writing what the Coen Brothers are to moviemaking: extraordinarily gifted, but incapable of producing satisfying endings.) And while The Corrections and Freedom have some similarities—both focus on the shifts and minor (and major) self-inflicted destructions that can happen to a family, both have a male child going to a foreign country because of their job, both have at their core an attempt by Franzen to try and reconcile the differences (and similarities) between people near his generation’s age and his parents’ generation, etc.,—the biggest difference is that Freedom focuses mostly on the parents, Walter and Patty Berglund, throughout the novel whereas The Corrections focuses mostly on the Lambert children, Gary, Chip, and Denise, and makes the parents, Alfred and Enid, appear to be quite plastic at times. To put it a different way: The Corrections is like John Lennon; Freedom is like Paul McCartney. The former will probably always be more popular and have signifiers like genius thrown around because that art has been deemed to be Important (when, in actuality, a lot of it is kind of self-gratifying and a little too-cool-for-the-room), whereas the latter is more upfront in its greatness. This is the part where I tell you that I’ll take McCartney over Lennon; “Rocky Raccoon” over “Revolution 9,” “Wonderful Christmastime” over “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”

Freedom follows the lives of Walter and Patty Berglund, from the University of Minnesota where they met to Nameless Lake to Washington, D.C., and everywhere in between. Patty is a tall girl, a scholarship basketball player for the Gophers, whose athletic gifts were at natural odds in her New York household growing up, living with a political mom and a lawyer father who would have rather championed their other kids’ Bohemian-style artistic creativity than Patty’s ill-fitting talents. Initially, Patty is attracted to Walter’s college roommate and frontman of the local band The Traumatics, Richard Katz. (Katz is described at one point as being a more attractive version of Muammar Gaddafi.)

Walter, on the other hand, is from Minnesota. His childhood involved an alcoholic father, a mother who seemed fated to be unhappy, and siblings that were purposely useless and seem to always be looking for the easiest paths in life to take. Walter spends countless hours working at and fixing up the family business, a sorta run-down motel. Walter is inherently good, is smart, and is capable of making a very good amount of money; Patty reaches a point where she just wants to get married, have kids, and stay at home. They get married. And you can probably guess that most of the novel involves unhappiness and poor choices, just based on this and the previous paragraph. The rest of the novel unfolds with an organized chaos of events that anyone who seeks out and loves great fiction will enjoy immensely.

We have somewhere in our minds a default image of what we think a writer looks like. Some of us may think of an older-looking man from a different time writing on sheets of paper and pausing to dip his pen in the bottle of ink. Some of us may think of a Jack Kerouac type slaving over a typewriter. Reading this book, the image I had of Franzen writing was of him sitting in an oversized room with one or two giant whiteboards, which would have numerous connecting points and notes to create a large map of this novel. Everything in this novel comes across on the pages as if everything were rigorously thought out in advance. Every word in this novel seems to have a definite purpose because Franzen routinely cross-references things that are split apart by tens or hundreds of pages with ease.

I will refrain from going into any great detail about the story for fear of ruining even the slightest part or sub-plot for you. But I will say that my one main criticism of the novel is that the parts that are written from Patty’s point of view (she writes an autobiography as part of a therapy exercise) seem to be a little too similar to that of the omniscient narrative voice throughout the rest of the book. I would have liked to have seen Franzen change it up a little bit more and given Patty a slightly more distinctive voice. But at the end of the day this is nitpicking. Buy this book and read it. Now. It more than lives up to the hype and praise that it has received.

And the ending is great.