The family romance is as old as the English-language novel itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s particular subject, as it is no one else’s today … Franzen grasps that the central paradox of modern American liberalism inheres not in its doctrines but in the unstated presumptions that govern its daily habits. Liberals, no less than conservatives — and for that matter revolutionaries and reactionaries; in other words, all of us — believe some modes of existence are superior to others. But only the liberal, committed to a vision of harmonious communal pluralism, is unsettled by this truth … Like all great novels, Freedom does not just tell an engrossing story. It illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew.
Mr. Franzen delves further into the state of mind of his creations, developing them into fully imagined human beings — not Nietzschean stereotypes easily divided into categories of ‘hard’ (shameless, ambitious brutes) or ‘soft’ (pathetic, sniveling doormats); not bitter patsies fueled by ancient grudges, but confused, searching people capable of change and perhaps even transcendence … Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges.
Franzen remains superb at rendering the psychological texture of everyday experience: the gyrations of the soul, the power struggles of domestic life, the chess moves of romantic behavior. But if the terrain, and the mind that maps it, are recognizably those of the earlier novel, the contours are different … The novel is named for our nation’s highest value and is everywhere a criticism of it. The desire for freedom, in Franzen’s view, is nothing other than an adolescent urge for irresponsibility and unconnectedness. The novel is full of people whose freedom not only makes them miserable, it makes everyone around them miserable, too.
Freedom’s ambition is to be the sort of novel that sums up an age and that gets everything into it, a heroic and desperate project. The author all but comes out and says so, using Walter, a conservationist, as his spokesperson for the big statement that draws everything and everyone together … It is surely not an engagement with the culture that dooms any fictional treatment of [Freedom] but rather a tendency to create polarized oppositions of public behavior, the entirely virtuous on one side, the entirely bad on the other, generating a landscape where no middle ground exists for any character to occupy.
This finely fanged tale of neighborly spite and camouflaged jealousy lets you relish your own superiority – if you don't recoil at the narrator's smugness, which is perhaps what always separates Franzen's fans from his detractors … Unfortunately, the novel doesn't offer its themes so much as bully us into accepting them with knife-to-the-throat insistence. The word ‘freedom,’ for example, beats through the book frequently enough for a frat-house drinking game. As the characters attain the freedom they craved – from children, from spouses, from work – they inevitably discover that it's unsatisfying and self-destructive … The point to remember is that Freedom is big enough and thoughtful enough to engage and irritate an enormous number of readers.
The dominant freedom in Freedom is, as Walter puts it in a moment of aggravation, ‘the freedom to fuck up your life’ … There is something vaguely misogynist (though the tone is always too noble for any awareness of prejudice) in the novel’s suggestion that Patty’s emotional troubles—by this point she is drinking a bottle of wine or more a day—are primarily motivated by an unsatisfied desire to ‘properly [have] sex’ … The lack of plausibility presented by Patty’s autobiography and by the numerous contrivances in this meandering narrative would be disturbing in any serious novel. But it is all the more striking in light of Franzen’s celebrated knack for accurately capturing the particulars of modern life.
The book would probably be insufferably dull if it weren’t for the fact that it also happens to be a work of total genius … Few modern novelists rival Franzen in that primal skill of creating life, of tricking us into believing that a text-generated set of neural patterns, a purely abstract mind-event, is in fact a tangible human being that we can love, pity, hate, admire, and possibly even run into someday at the grocery store … The difference between reading Franzen firsthand and thinking about him from a distance is the difference between having a dream and trying to tell someone about it three years later.
Franzen has a wonderful way of boiling down this kind of perspectival comedy even further, into a little bouillon cube of diction … The novel picks up and probes everything it comes into contact with, managing in the process to take apart a goodly portion of what currently constitutes American life … Freedom, in its intertwining personal and political aspects, is Freedom’s explicit concern. It should be noted, though, that the bird the novel keeps coming back to (and that graces its cover), is a blue one, allied not so much with freedom as with happiness.
The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen … If Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more ‘social,’ broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus … The prologue raises expectations for a socially engaged, or at least social, narrative that are left unmet. Too much of it takes place in high school, college, or suburbia; how odd that a kind of fiction allegedly made necessary by America’s unique vitality always returns to the places that change the least.
The novel aspires to be a portrait of America on a Tolstoyan scale—at least that's one way to interpret the many references to War and Peace in it—and Franzen has indeed absorbed some of Tolstoy's astonishing capacity for empathy … What passes for freedom in America, Franzen seems to be implying, is a refusal to accept limits, to acknowledge and shoulder the burdens of one's inheritance. Certainly everyone in the novel comes to rue freedom, their own and others' … What propels Freedom from the ranks of good novels into that of great ones has nothing to do with plot or political acumen. It has to do with Franzen's writing and his ability to evoke character.
Even though Franzen gets more praise for doing what many fine female writers do ‘backwards and in heels,’ in the case of the blandly titled Freedom, it's well deserved … It's the novel — by a man — along with novels by women like Allegra Goodman, Lionel Shriver, and the incandescent Sue Miller, that I'd elect to put in a time capsule to give a sense of the texture of middle-class American life to future readers. And, I sincerely hope that last phrase is not an oxymoron … There's not one throwaway scene in Freedom and, yet, for all that effort, nothing feels overwritten or false.
Franzen pulls it off — as he pulls off nearly everything in this rich and nuanced novel — because for all that it appears to be their book, Freedom is more than just the story of the Berglunds' fall. Instead, they are the tip of the iceberg, a filter through which to explore the unresolved tensions, the messiness of emotion, of love and longing, that possesses even the most willfully ordinary of lives … Freedom is a response to the brutal decade that has followed [9/11], in which the illusion of a post-ideological world in which the vagaries of history have been rendered moot by market forces was revealed as the most self-serving sort of lie.
The epic sprawl of this ambitious yet ultimately unsatisfying novel encompasses everything from indie rock to environmental radicalism to profiteering in the Middle East … The plot here seems contrived and the characters fail to engage. The narrative takes the tone of a fable … Such ideas seem a lot more important to the novelist than the characters in which he invests them, or the plot in which he manipulates those characters like puppets.
Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family's facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at—incredibly—genuine hope.
