Jack:
The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard
Amy:
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
I read Jonathan Franzen's
The Corrections (2001), winner of the National Book Award, while I was in college. It was an absorbing, expansive novel about a depressive midwestern family. I thought it was kind of brilliant.
Freedom, published last August, is another absorbing, expansive novel about a depressive midwestern family. It's a 562 page social-realist novel about "the way we live now," in the style of Tolstoy (as Franzen himself indicates with numerous allusions throughout
Freedom) or Dickens. Once again, I fell into the world Franzen created and read obsessively until the story ended.
Franzen is a great writer, and he's received plenty of acclaim. The New York Times
called Freedom "a masterpiece of American fiction," and New York Magazine
gushed "total genius"; Time Magazine put Franzen on their August
cover; President Obama reportedly read an advance copy of the novel on his summer holiday in Martha's Vineyard.
All this good press also brought
Freedom some bad press. Several best-selling female authors
complained that literary critics choose their favorites and shower praise on a few "white male literary darlings" without giving fair notice to equally brilliant novels by women. Jenifer Weiner (chick lit alert!):
"It's just interesting to sort of stack them up against a Lorrie Moore or against a Mona Simpson — who write books about families that are seen as excellent books about families," Weiner says. "And then to look at a Jonathan Franzen who writes a book about a family but we are told this is a book about America."
{Franzen, for the record,
agrees with their critique: "The categories by which we value fiction are skewed male, and this creates a very destructive disconnect between the critical establishment and the predominantly female readership of novels," he says. "That's inarguable."}
Despite how absorbing and brilliant I did find this novel, especially some parts of it, I also found it to be a little heartless. While I cared about what happened to the characters, I didn't actually
like any of the characters, and I found it hard to believe that Franzen did either. He seems to disdain just about every person he creates. And, frankly, I felt he was a little crass and heavy-handed in bringing home his theme of "freedom".
As the Berglunds - Walter, the self-made man, the liberal environmentalist, the nice guy; Patty, the former basketball star, the repressed stay at home wife; Jessica, the good daughter; Joey, the overindulged brilliant son who at 16 moves out to live with the neighbors (and sleep with their daughter) - once the envied family of the neighborhood, begin to fall apart, Franzen repeatedly shows how personal freedom is not the key to happiness. Questioning our cardinal American value (both in personal life and in the capitalist market), Franzen none-too-subtly declares that freedom can leave us empty while commitment can bring us meaning.
As Patty writes in her third-person "autobiography," "By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable."
Later Walter describes himself as "not being made for a life of freedom and outlaw heroics; of needing a more dully and enduringly discontented situation to struggle against and fashion an existence within." Just a few pages later, he describes his homeless, jobless brother, who lives in a tent at a campground that looks "like an auto junkyard" as a "free man," and it's quite clear to the reader that there is nothing good about his freedom.
Here is absolutely the best critique of the novel that I've read, comparing it to a very similar novel (by a women) that also came out last year. This review convinced me that with my extra reading time this month, I should read
The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman. And maybe you should too.
{12 in 12 challenge found here.}
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