One man’s freedom is another man’s prison

Freedom
Jonathan Franzen
Fourth Estate pp562
ISBN-978-0-00-731852-0

If Jonathan Franzen were to scribble a shopping list, I would want to read it. And that’s because, if I had to ask myself the shallow (even though, what’s wrong with that?) question of who my favourite author is, it would have to be Mr Franzen.

The only problem is that Mr Franzen’s writing entails a lot of waiting – just consider that nine years separate his latest novel Freedom from the previous one, The Corrections.

Yet when he does, Mr Franzen writes heavyweights with the kind of wordcount that harks back to the 19th-century novel and which tackle the big themes in life.

The Corrections weighs in at 672 pages, Strong Motion at 528 pages while The Twenty-Seventh City is 517 dense pages long. Even his collected essays in How to Be Alone are endless musings. His slimmest work is The Discomfort Zone at 192 pages, yet it is such a beautiful book that you have to give it a second, third and fourth reading – you do the maths.

Mr Franzen is frequently hailed as the foremost literary figure of our generation; the author with the potential to write that holy grail of literature – the great American novel. Last August, he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine, a rare accolade for a living novelist.

His novels are a publishing event – his spate with Oprah was widely publicised, President Obama read Freedom while on holiday, and Mr Franzen had his spectacles stolen during the launch of Freedom in London.

The curiosity that Mr Franzen fuels in his readers is not only through his work, but also through his persona. Glossies frequently report on the quasi-monastic discipline he inflicts upon himself – he spends years working on a novel, and is reported to have written The Corrections wearing earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold in order to avoid any distractions.

Despite his commercial success – The Corrections sold three million copies worldwide – Mr Franzen continues to write for a small audience. Or rather, for himself. Yet he speaks to every reader.

Like The Corrections, Freedom is an expansive, multi-generational epic that focuses on a family which, from the outside, has everything yet is inwardly sad. The Berglunds, baby-bommer Patty and Walter, are the golden couple of the neighbourhood. They are financially stable and have two gifted children. Yet, as the neighbours wonder, “There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds”.

When the novel begins, the Berglunds have already moved away, yet Mr Franzen starts with their arrival in the gentrified Ramsey Hill, as seen through their neighbours’ perspective. Walter is an earnest, calm man while athletic Patty is very much into her children, gifted Jessica and the precocious prodigal son Joey.

When Joey starts sleeping with Connie, the neighbour’s daughter, it is the shocking act which scratches at Patty’s surface and reveals what the reader had long suspected – that her niceness was just a terministic screen. She starts drinking and becomes distressed while Walter seeks consolation in his work.

After Walter is offered a job in Washington, they move away, without Joey. However, the real story in Freedom is the three-way relationship between Walter, Patty and Richard, Walter’s college roommate.

The narrative structure bears the weight of the novel. Apart from the authorial voice, there is Patty’s confessional autobiography, entitled Mistakes Were Made written at her therapist’s suggestion, and which uncovers Patty’s unhappy childhood and rape.

The memoir leads on to confessionals by Richard, Walter and Joey. The narrative structure may sound confusing, but it isn’t. Rather, it allows the reader to read an event from multiple perspectives.

Set in the century’s first decade, Freedom cannot ignore Iraq – Joey is embroiled in a scheme to sell parts to the military in Iraq. For Mr Franzen, Iraq is an “odd sort of war in which, within a rounding error, the only casuals were on the other side”.

Freedom is not about freedom, that word which has had such an influence on American history. Rather, it is about the problem of being free when in a relationship, and how one’s freedom necessarily threatens that of others.

In fact, throughout the novel, Mr Franzen uses sex as a metaphor of one liberty feeding off another.

Most of the main characters in the novel all spend long periods of time on their own, but they are unable to survive. Walter and Patty cannot live together, but they cannot bear the suffering of being apart.

Every sentence in Freedom is written with the skill and confidence of a great author. The dialogue is superb and Mr Franzen directs his sharp sense of humour at his characters – the Berglunds’ neighbour Merrie Paulsen, writes Mr Franzen, “was 10 years older than Patty and looked every year of it”. Yet despite his frequent scathing attacks on his characters, Mr Franzen loves his characters for their flaws.

Just like the Lamberts in The Corrections, the Berglunds encapsulate a whole culture, society, and everything that makes us human.