Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen
For many Americans, their 20s are about experimentation and finding one’s way; their 30s are about settling down and growing more acquisitive and complacent; and their 40s are about blowing the entire contraption to smithereens.
Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom offers the most compelling chronicle of this woeful progression I’ve ever had the pleasure of devouring. The opening pages introduce us to Walter and Patty Berglund, the archetypal liberal couple. Walter bicycles to his job in the Twin Cities; Patty rears the couple’s two children and restores the family’s derelict Victorian. Franzen presents us with this neat tapestry of domestic life at the on the threshold of its unraveling. The Berglunds’ son Joey moves in with the sketchy family next door; Patty rekindles a long-suppressed flirtation with Walter’s best friend; Walter embarks on a quixotic attempt to address the inherently incompatible agendas of environmental activism and corporate self-interest.
Freedom also focuses on the extent to which our lives are defined by the zigs and zags we experience at crucial decision points, and how those choices can lead to perfect happiness, or a perfect storm. Franzen’s characters choose, reconsider, backpedal, and regret. Their lack of resolve not only demonstrates the miseries that stem from basic human frailty: It also reminds us that achieving perfection was never really the point.
As the Hindenburg erupted in flames, a journalist uttered a phrase that encapsulated the horrors of the 20th century: “Oh, the humanity!” Time and again, Franzen’s characters walk blithely into the emotional equivalent of burning buildings, spurred on by lust, naiveté, jealousy, and all the other lower-brain impulses that wreak havoc with our lives. Yet by the novel’s end, we see how those conflagrations can be transformed into fires of redemption. The towering achievement of Freedom lies not in its depiction of what human beings are capable of doing to one another, but in revealing how, nestled within those acts of cruelty and ego, lie seeds that can blossom into grace and forgiveness. Oh, the humanity, indeed.
Neal Kane
©Copyright 2011 Libretto,
Inc.
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