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The Excavator

REVIEW: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom


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Published: Aug 25, 2010

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The Corrections was a big moment for Generation Y's readers. It got our attention. We all read it, believing it was an Important Novel, maybe the first not assigned to us in class. The title! The National Book Award! Something about the Midwest! And did you hear he and Oprah had a fight? All of which only seemed to make the book More Important — whether we ultimately loved it or not.

The luster hasn't faded. Fans and skeptics of all ages have been awaiting Franzen's latest volume since it was first excerpted in The New Yorker last June. And now — finally! — Freedom (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Aug. 31) has arrived, promising another helping of his signature social realism. Like The Corrections, it's a girthy, character-driven family tale as well as a lament for the modern American character. This double meaning is key to Franzen, who is as carefully attuned to the individual inner life as he is to the disappointments of the broader civic life we share.

Here, the family belongs to Walter and Patty Berglund, a boomer couple on the vanguard of gentrification in St. Paul. Walter, environmental lawyer and native Minnesotan, rides his bike to work and works himself up over the problems of global population growth. Meanwhile the sparkling Patty, a former college basketball star and current full-time mom, is forever escaping the humiliation of having been the less-loved jock in a family of wealthy New York liberals. Their best friend from college is a reckless but revered avant-garde rocker, and their children are generally exceptional, though the younger one, Joey, a budding entrepreneur and possible Republican, wants nothing more than to get out of his parents' house. Really the only thing anybody wants is what the title suggests, but each in his own complicated, often corrupt, and always American, way.

After all, real freedom is no longer quite so easy to identify. Post-9/11 (which must, of course, be mentioned), Joey's takes a personal hit:

Later, as his troubles began to mount, it would seem to him as if his very good luck, which his childhood had taught him to consider his birthright, had been trumped by a stroke of higher-order bad luck so wrong as not even to be real. He kept waiting for its wrongness, its fraudulence, to be exposed, and for the world to be set right again, so that he could have the college experience he'd expected. ... The culprit, in hindsight, seemed almost like bin Laden, but not quite. The culprit was something deeper, something not political, something structurally malicious, like the bump in a sidewalk that trips you and lands you on your face when you're out innocently walking.

This is vintage Franzen, delighting in the excavation of a character (warts especially), even as he unspools the narrative thread. "Later," he promises, seductively, and so we read on, knowing things will happen to Joey of his own devising, but that something political and structurally malicious will also play a role.

Freedom will no doubt inspire culture-wide fawning, excoriation and reams of intelligent criticism in between. For as in any book of its size and ambition, not everything quite works. Several secondary female characters remain cipher-fantasies, and some events seem determined less by the characters than by the despairing polemicist Franzen.

But these are quibbles.

The brio and insight of the writing, the flesh-and-blood central cast, and the impressive inventory of so much in our world, from indie music fans to songbird decimation, makes Freedom a literary event of the sort Franzen himself once feared had passed. And yes, it's better than The Corrections.

Read it to escape the modern world, and to reckon with it, too.

(k_hill@citypaper.net)