The motor of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is the love triangle between Walter Berglund, his wife Patty, and his best friend Richard Katz. The situation is of a kind that we as readers have often seen before: the conflicted woman who must choose between two lovers, the good but boring man or his best friend, the bad but interesting man. The feeling of familiarity is unavoidable, yet this basic structure has served as the driving force behind countless novels for a reason, and I don’t mean to suggest that lack of originality in this regard is a bad thing. The particular details with which the relationships are adorned can allow such a simple set-up to compellingly sustain infinite variations and to say something new with each telling. Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over, for instance, is one fairly recent case in which the manner of the storytelling provides the premise with a new luster; the matter isn’t new, but the means are. On the other end of the spectrum, the primary interest of the cult film The Room also stems from the ways in which it rubs up against and deviates from the traditional tropes of this genre. In Freedom, however, the characters hew fairly closely to the generic bones, and there is nothing much to set apart either the means or the matter as particularly novel. Franzen works the geometry of this triangle, and he works it well—the characters are fully realized and have enough specificity to transcend their general types—but the details of the problem and its resolution somehow fail to suggest much of anything that hasn’t been suggested before. Now, as demonstrated by its popularity, as well as by the effusive praise with which it has been met by the literary world at large, the novel is obviously not a failure. But if its success doesn’t lie in the heart of the plot as I’m here defining it, I find myself wondering, where does it lie?
The most ready answer would seem to be that it lies in the fact that the novel is set in the very recent past, and that it is thus meant to speak to our current cultural moment. The same stories are written over and over because our context as readers is constantly in flux. The world in which Freedom happens is not the same as the world in which the same love triangle might have played out half a century ago, and the difference of context provides a difference of resonance and meaning. Franzen, through his shifting, close third-person narrator, is able to touch on timely themes as wide-ranging as the prevalence of flip-flops among today’s youth and the sociopathy of cats. In that sense, the book is certainly about where we find ourselves, as a culture, right now. Yet for all of its timeliness, Freedom nevertheless only looks in any detail at a fairly narrow slice of the current cultural moment, in that the only culture it actively engages with is that of upper middle class white people—except, of course, for the character of Lalitha, Walter’s second love interest, a “dark-skinned girl” whose death allows for a happy ending. But otherwise the novel features no prominent characters of any other cultural background. Of course, there might be a larger point to this choice. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (to Nabokov’s chagrin) has sometimes been read as speaking to the relationship between the Old World (Humbert Humbert) and the New (Lolita); perhaps Lalitha with her Indian ancestry is meant to follow in the vein of the character for whom she presumably was named and suggest something about the relationship between the First World and the Third. Or maybe not. The problem with this sort of reading of Freedom is that the narrative doesn’t pursue much beyond the love triangle with any degree of thoroughness. There is a bit of family history for each character to give them some breadth, and there is a bit about their personal interests to give them some depth, but otherwise it’s a novel about three characters and their interactions with each other, occasionally as seen by the communities around them.
Well, but then there’s Joey. Walter and Patty’s son also has two chapters devoted to him. Joey has ethical dilemmas and a sort of love triangle of his own to deal with, but he mostly just seems there to provide context and counterpoint for the story of his parents. Could Joey’s chapters be removed? Probably. At first I hoped that Franzen was trying to use all of these characters to make a larger philosophical point--something about too much freedom being a bad thing. That it incapacitates us, or we make bad choices, or that with great freedom there must also come great responsibility. But this is not gone about with the philosophical rigor of, for instance, David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest, and so if that was the goal, I feel that it failed. Especially since the novel tries to have it both ways. Is freedom even possible for the characters in Freedom? The patterns that recur down familial lines, as well as multiple explicit references to genetic predetermination, would suggest that it's not. So perhaps the title is ironic and these people are worried about the effects of something they can never have. That is, if it's even trying to make a larger point. Perhaps it's something about overpopulation or birds. These are obviously bees that Franzen has in his bonnet, but isn't this novel itself just a "gumball," as Richard Katz puts it? Isn't this exactly the sort of book that Walter gets mad about having to hear about on NPR, as if people think it's important?
Which is all just to say that, according to the consensus, this book is good. But I apparently just don't get it. |
