Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (2010. Picador. ISBN 978-0-312-57646-2)
Mmm…Where to start? I actually bought this contemporary literary novel for my third son, Christian, either as a birthday or Christmas gift. He handed it back to me at the beginning of the summer with a somewhat lukewarm endorsement that I “might like the story”. He was right. I did.
Now, that having been said, this is a long, winding tale of an American married couple. Walter the stereotypical steadfast, chaste “good” man falls for and marries Patty, a former U of M (Minnesota) basketball star who tears up her knee and loses, in some serious fashion, her identity as the center of attention. They have two kids, live in St. Paul, and all, at the outset of the story, seems well. Except…
Walter, over the course of a twenty-five year plus marriage, is really the replacement husband and lover. Patty’s eye originally was focused on Walter’s best friend, Richard, the quintessential American Bad Boy rock and roll star. But things don’t work out between Richard and Patty, perhaps due to Richard’s “use ’em and lose ’em” predictability when it comes to bedding women; or perhaps because, deep down, Patty knows he is nothing but selfish trouble and understands that Walter is a safer, saner option. So the gist of the plot is that, in some sense of the word, Patty “settles” for Walter and tries, in her owned screwed up fashion, to create a life for her and her family with him.
There’s so much brokenness and pain in this book, it’s hard to see the humor that the back blurbs claim lies beneath the cover. Oh, I found some snippets of giggles mired in the muck of the contemporary American marriages depicted in the book. (It’s not only Patty’s and Walter’s nuptials that are a mess; pretty much every couple that has a major role in their lives, including their kids when the become adults and the couple’s own parents are totally, gloriously fucked up.) There’s no question that Oprah, when she (or her minions) select books to affix her logo to, looks for conflict and angst and ugliness and pain. And all that can be found, in spades (along with ample sex and drugs and rock and roll) on the pages of Freedom.
Well written for the most part, when Franzen delves into the details of saving the planet or post-9/11 politics and, either through dialogue or long winded narrative, tackles, in no particular order: WMDs, mountain top coal removal, global warming, population growth, poverty, and a host of other big ticket topics, the story loses steam and meanders a bit. I found myself skipping through some of the author’s sermons and descriptions in the middle course of the tale to get back to the meat and potatoes of the novel: The dysfunctionality of marriage as an institution in contemporary America. Most everyone in this book comes off as self-absorbed, indulgent creatures. No one other than Walter (and perhaps his ghost-like, barely-present-for-the-show daughter Jennifer and the doomed activist (spoiler alert here) Lalitha) in this long, long book are folks we’d want to invite over for Sunday dinner.
Also, for all its pretensions of being set in NE Minnesota and St. Paul, one comes away believing that Franzen, if he’s visited the places he describes in my beloved home state, stopped in for a cup of coffee. The descriptions of No Name Lake in the Grand Rapids area, especially at the end of the book, don’t ring true, at least to my native eye. It’s not like other authors with Minnesota ties (Franzen’s father grew up here, apparently) either fudge local settings in their tales (I’m thinking of Kent Kreuger’s Aurora, Minnesota which bears no resemblance in fiction to the “real” Iron Range town of that name) or simply make shit up. But to me, a Minnesotan who writes fiction about my home state, I am mildly disappointed when fiction set here doesn’t quite ring true.
Still, there’s enough psychological and familial conflict (And sex: Did I mention there’s plenty of sex?) inside the pages of this tome for me to recommend it to serious readers of literary fiction. I doubt that casual fiction readers would outlast the heft and length of this book. But there are ample rewards for those that see the story through to the end.
4 stars out of 5.
