Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Jonathan Franzen
Fourth Estate 2010
Like many people I suppose, I often subconsciously link novels to the places I am when I read them or the music I’m listening to at the time. Thus The Virgin Suicides is in my mind set in Merano and Jonathan Franzen’s previous novel, The Corrections, is all about Rome. For me Freedom will now always conjure up The Suburbs, Arcade Fire’s “letter from Houston” – and appropriately so, as the novel, like the album, takes a jaundiced look at middle class American life.
It’s getting on for nine years since I read The Corrections, and I’m pleased to report that Freedom is nearly as good. Again, the story is that of a family: Walter Berglund is a political idealist on the brink of a misjudged compromise; Patty is his wife, a college sports star now living aimlessly and not well; Joey and Jessica are their children. Franzen juggles a variety of narrative perspectives cleverly to tell us how they got where they are and where they go next. En route he reveals how their patterns of behaviour echo those which have gone before and, in particular how Americans over the decades have responded to and coped with their freedoms. As in The Corrections, there is a lot of sex, and what seems to me a rather odd faecal obsession; there is also much discussion of the political events, in particular 9/11 and its consequences and the growth of the environmental movement, which have shaped the country since the earlier novel appeared. Some critics have felt this material rather shoe-horned in , but I didn’t get that impression. Rather I found the novel an engrossing picture of a family and a society in crisis, apparently effortlessly well-written. The only reservations I have are that the third-person interludes supposedly written by Patty herself are stylistically indistinguishable from the rest of the novel, and Franzen sometimes seems a little bit too conscious of his own brilliance. It’s also probably about 100 pages too long.
I have a theory, with which I bore people when in drink, that American novels are usually such door-stoppers and exude such moral confidence because they are the products of the world’s dominant culture and its most powerful nation, just as Middlemarch, Vanity Fair and Hard Times were in the nineteenth century. However, just as in many Victorian novels, there is an ominous undertone in Freedom too: the environmental, economic and political threats to American hegemony are all too clear. (“This empire is ending, like all the rest”, as Randy Newman sings on his most recent album.) The lasting and most valuable impression this novel leaves is the individual and collective human response to this changing world.
14 January 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Franzen
|
|
