Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

This book has been receiving a ton of hype and attention: Jonathan Franzen's face graced the cover of Time magazine; Oprah selected the book for her book club; Jodi Picoult claims that the difference between the critical reception of her work and the critical reception of Freedom (both she and Franzen, she contends, deal with similar themes) is driven by the fact that he's a white male, so might be expected to produce Literature or The Great American Novel, whereas she's a woman who writes chicklit; pranksters stole the very glasses off Franzen's face at a reception in London; Freedom was snubbed when the National Book Awards finalist list came out; and the UK first printing had to be pulped and reprinted when the wrong draft of the book went to the printers!

After all this hype, Freedom delivers (at least) on its promise of telling a good story. While both the Berglunds struck me as overdone in their unfortunate antecedents (although part of that, I think, was that Patty narrated large chunks of her own story in a third-person memoir that both constitutes part of the text and drives a lot of the plot as an object), I found their story (with Richard Katz, Walter's college roommate)--set up in the book as the story of a typical, urban, yuppie family gone horribly wrong--was great to read. Franzen's prose works, his plot is engaging, the characters are mostly realistic (if reprehensible and hard to like at times), and the use of the memoir works surprisingly well in a formal sense. I wasn't quite sure how to read Walter's environmentalism. It reminded me a bit of Ian McEwan's most recent book, Solar, in that aspect--the environmentalism is an important plot engine, and the author takes the environmental positions of the characters seriously, but shows the characters' environmental attitudes leading them to take CRAZY and untenable actions. Surprisingly, for an American novel, there was much more concern about class (for example, in Joey's friendship with his roommate at UVa, Jonathan, the class power (or lack thereof) and class status of poor people being moved from their land in Appalachia to make the land available for mountain top removal, or in the class implications that Free Space's messages would have) than about race (although Walter does briefly engage in an interracial relationship with Lalitha, which is only commented upon by some ignorant folks in West Virginia, if I'm remembering correctly).

This novel dealt with 9/11 in mostly tangential ways. It was really most important to Joey, who was in his first year at UVa when it happened. Perhaps the local connection was what made this portrayal most acceptable to me: I have a lot of friends who were at UVa in the fall of 2001, and Joey's experience as far as school goes pretty neatly matches what they've told me, so it feels real. It also wasn't fetishized in the text. It happened, it changed some characters (particularly Joey, but it also gave some political tangles and consequences to Walter's work in Washington), and people moved on rather than dwelling (which is not to say that dwelling is bad, but rather that I've yet to see a book that dwells on 9/11 (except possibly Netherland) that hits the right emotional tone for me, and even in some books with passing references to it, I finish the book with my hackles up--for example, The Stars in the Bright Sky).

The references to UVa were meticulously correct insofar as place and experience goes (did Jonathan Franzen visit UVa to research? Undercover?), but they struck me at times as less than generous to unfair. Dressing up for football games is what makes us great (it's certainly not the football team, and definitely not after their disgusting performance last night)!

Is this book worth reading, thinking about, discussing? Without reservation, yes. Is it the next (or the) Great American Novel? If we ignore the fact that the Great American Novel is a construct, I'd still say probably not. It's one of the great novels of the year, but I think to pretend that it's somehow sui generis or unique or so far ahead of other novels that it's somehow in its own class is to do a disservice both to all the other great American fictions (and great novels generally) that are still being written and that have been written and to Freedom itself, which I think is strongest when you consider it among and in conversation with other novels (for example, there are a lot of explicit references to War and Peace running through the text).