With the publication of his fourth novel, Freedom, his first since The Corrections, it is the year of Jonathan Franzen, who has just been canonised on the cover of Time as a (and probably the) “Great American Novelist”.
It’s also the decade of Franzen. In October 2001, when The Corrections had just been published and the rest of the world was choosing its sides in a different conflict, Franzen got into a fight with Oprah. She chose The Corrections for her book club and asked him on to her show. He worried out loud that her approval would diminish his credibility with a serious readership. She disinvited him on the grounds of ingratitude. Nonetheless The Corrections went on to become the bestselling serious novel since anybody could remember.
It may also be the century of Franzen. Jonathan Jones, in the Guardian, concludes that Freedom is “the novel of the year and the century”. Oprah, as if to prove that she has a heart as big as this novel is long, has made it a selection for her book club. And in this way the media-industrial complex centred in New York and London, for which Franzen’s novel is too important a business proposition to be read, has shipped a century’s worth of copies around the world and accumulated enough praise for a century.
Only in the past week or two have some reviewers, such as BR Myer in The Atlantic and Ruth Franklin in The New Republic, expressed anything like doubt about this new century, which may not be a hundred years of darkness but will certainly be a hundred years of the kind of blandness that the United States has exported to the world in the form of Starbucks and McDonald’s.
Freedom is a good product. It’s an unexceptional but long novel that is anchored by a marriage, the ups and downs along three decades of the union of Patty and Walter Berglund. Patty was once a basketball star at college. Walter is basically nice, until he isn’t, and then he is again. Then there’s their sometime best friend and enemy, Richard Katz, a rock ‘n roller, Patty and Walter’s children, their other friends and associates.
In Harper’s in 1996, before his decade and his century commenced, Franzen repudiated the challenging literary ironies of his early works, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion. He committed himself to a more popular model that would privilege the representation of characters and reproduce the texture and density of the society around him. It was that model, universal in the 19th century, that seemed to be realised in the family studied in The Corrections and even more so in the many stories of Walter and Patty and their larger community in Freedom.
If there is an argument to the novel it is presented in the title. It concerns the difficulty of putting one’s individual freedom to good use. In the first third Franzen is at his best, which is to say, as a writer of clever vignettes and a gentle exposer of the shortcomings of his characters.
In her first year at university in Minnesota Patty acquires a female stalker, bonds with her and becomes disillusioned. She meets the glamorous Richard Katz but ends up in a relationship with Richard’s overshadowed friend, Walter, for a mixture of right and wrong reasons. If she is to “win — her obvious best shot at defeating her sisters and her mother — was to marry the nicest guy in Minnesota, live in a bigger and better and more interesting house than anybody else in her family, pop out the babies, and do everything as a parent that her mother hadn’t”.
Franzen wants us to see that Patty is as competitive off the basketball field as on it, and I see it, but somehow I never felt it to be so. This may be because the style and thinking in Freedom are limited to a sort of bland maturity not unlike Patty’s or Walter’s. It has the cardinal virtue of allowing the writer and his reader to feel much more grown up than Patty and Richard and Walter, but not to be otherwise engaged beyond this insistent but mild condescension.
In its 600 pages you do start to think like the characters in Freedom. When Patty, for example, invites Walter to meet her family “she was a tiny bit embarrassed to let her family see him. The unkind part of her, which exposure to her family always seemed to bring out in force, couldn’t help regretting that he wasn’t six foot four and very cool.”
Well, Patty, you want to say after that, maybe being six foot four and very cool doesn’t count for very much in the long run. Maybe being very cool at the age of 22 is not a very good thing at all. Maybe you could be happy with a dwarf. Patty, nowadays, in her 50s, would no doubt agree. And so would Franzen. And so would Oprah. If I was a Marxist I would say it is the voice of a good corporate citizen, or if I was a Freudian I would call it the sound of the superego.
As a result, after a hundred pages or so, I read on, without much joy, just as dutifully as Patty or Walter would do themselves. And, in a way, it was appropriate. Freedom becomes an obligation for Franzen’s characters. Patty, in early middle age, has the sense that “there always seemed to be something in the way. There was the house and garden she’d neglected. There was her cherished freedom to go up to Nameless Lake for weeks at a time whenever she felt like it. There was a more general freedom that she could see was killing her but she was nonetheless unable to let go of.”
Patty is depressed, of course, and considers leaving her husband for Richard. Walter is depressed and considers leaving his wife for an Indian assistant. Richard, who’s working as a handyman or floor restorer or something like that, is depressed until his new band, Walnut Surprise, becomes an unexpected hit. Even after that he is depressed and goes back to his floors or walls.
By the final third Freedom had overcome me, as it had Patty’s marriage and Walter’s good sense and Franzen’s ability to make any of it interesting because he can’t devise good subplots. Oprah, and the Guardian and Time, wouldn’t have read so far, because they have busy lives, but the novel simply replicates pages from what must be an environmental website. Walter, involved in a scheme to trade mountain tops for bird sanctuaries, takes the brunt of Franzen’s poverty of imagination: “Given how much we’re pouring into South America, it would really have helped to get some public funding in West Virginia. And the mountaintop-removal issue turns out to be a real tar baby. The local grassroots groups have all demonised the coal industry and especially mountaintop removal.”
Most of all Freedom is a book written under the spell of a pious idea of what a book should be. In The New Republic, whose publisher Marty Peretz was taking time off from explaining that all Muslim life was cheap to be honoured by Harvard, Ruth Franklin called the novel a “pseudo-masterpiece”, which is the perfect formula. Hundreds of thousands of people will read it, or parts of it at any rate, and come away in the belief that they’ve dipped into a masterpiece.
After finishing Freedom, which Oprah will never do, I was almost sure that I hated the idea of literature. I had to read three beautiful and original books — Elif Batuman’s The Chosen, about her adventures with the worshippers of Russian novels, the translation from Norwegian of Per Petterson’s novel, I Curse the River of Time, and the new collection of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s prose — before it seemed that it might still be worth reading in this year, or decade, or century, of Franzen.
Freedom is published in South Africa this month