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Franzen’s latest explores life, liberty, ‘Freedom’
Again, Franzen concerns himself with a troubled Midwestern family. Walter and Patty Berglund are “the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation,” born at the tail end of the baby boom and ready to reject the suburban flight of the generation just passed by returning to the city and helping to gentrify a crumbling Victorian block in St. Paul, Minnesota. Walter is a soft-spoken idealist and environmental lawyer, Patty a former college basketball star happily engaged with raising their small children.
But as “Freedom” starts, we’re already looking backward at the Berglunds’ best days. By the turn of the new millennium, things have gone badly wrong with their once-idyllic life: Their teenage son has moved next door to live with his girlfriend and her backward parents, Patty is coming unhinged before her neighbors’ eyes and Walter seems to have checked out mentally.
The rest of the novel asks -- then largely answers -- what happened to the Berglunds. We go both backward into Patty and Walter’s childhood, their college romance and the complicated lifelong friendship they both maintain with Walter’s college roommate, a sensitive but irresponsible rock singer named Richard Katz. We go forward into the years after the Berglunds depart St. Paul for Washington, where Patty spirals deeper into depression while Walter dabbles in borderline-irresponsible environmental policymaking at the shadowy fringes of the second Bush administration.
Real world is in Franzen’s novel
Franzen is highly perceptive about the foibles and vanities of regular people, and never afraid to make his characters unlikable. To some readers this might seem like outright disdain, but in the end, his unflinching view of humankind comes across as something almost like affection: for the way we stumble, fall and get back up as we try to overcome our bad habits and irresponsible impulses. But “Freedom” is far more than a character study. It is set squarely in the real world, all too rare in most current fiction; its characters argue about politics and watch sports and «American Idol» on television.
This is a book that’s opinionated about many things, but it’s refreshing to see a novelist who wants to engage the questions of our time in the tradition of 20th-century greats like John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis. Franzen’s politics will read as left-wing to most in his scathing opinions about President George W. Bush and the U.S. in the post-Sept. 11, 2001 years, but in truth, he levels his judgments at people of all stripes.
In “Freedom,” liberals are just as likely to be bad parents as are conservatives; left-wingers just as prone to impotent rage as right-wingers. The sacred cows of the educated elite get skewered, as Franzen aims his satiric gaze at the insularity of public radio listeners, indie rock fans and urban bohemians. Patty’s East Coast-based parents and siblings are the type of artsy Democrats whose faith in the superiority of New York City “was the foundation of her family’s satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that brought them the right to behave like children.”
No vampires or zombies, no apocalyptic scenarios or serial killers, no giant domes: Franzen and his publisher are gambling that there’s still an audience for a 576-page novel about middle-class people and their problems. For those willing to invest the time, the reward is a book you’ll still be thinking about long after you’ve finished reading it.
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