I just finished Freedom
The writing deftly captures the spirit of several different decades and when a scene is set in the 1970s or 1980s it seems realistic. Most novelists, e.g., Tolstoy, seem to love their characters. One of the reasons the typical novelist spends so much time writing a book is that he or she is enjoying spending time with the characters. With Franzen one gets the opposite impression. He seems to have contempt for his characters, despite any virtues they might have. If he spent time with them scribbling out 576 pages it is perhaps because he enjoyed feeling superior to all of them.
The novel has a couple of unconventional features. One is that two sections are supposedly diary excerpts by a female character. This is not convincing because the female character writes exactly like… Jonathan Franzen. The second unconventional feature is that Franzen introduces some characters within the last 1/6th of the book. They feel like afterthoughts and why do we want to invest time learning about them when the book is about to end?
One aspect of modern-day American life that Franzen captures is the pervasiveness of government regulation and war in our economy. None of the characters make money by working in a widget factory. One guy is involved in a very lucrative deal that hinges on obtaining government approval to do mountain-top removal mining. Another character is making obscene profits selling junk truck parts to the U.S. forces in Iraq; this would have seen implausible if I hadn’t read Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Others work directly for the government or for non-profit organizations.
According to Wikipedia, Franzen spent his childhood in the Midwest, his college years at an elite liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia, and his adult years in New York City and Santa Cruz, California. For some reason, the novel calls for one character to be an in-your-face racist. He approaches a Caucasian guy having dinner with an Indian-American (South Asian) girl and walks right up to the guy saying “Like the dark meat, do you?” and “I seen what you doing with that nigger girl.” Is the scene set in any of the places that are familiar to Franzen and his friends? No. It happens in a restaurant in West Virginia. The scene doesn’t seem credible to me based on my many trips through West Virginia. Maybe in a fighting bar among drunk patrons at 1 am, but not at 7 pm in an Applebee’s. Perhaps a patron might think an unkind thought about a couple with different skin colors. Perhaps a couple with different skin colors might get some unwelcome stares, but a racist walking right up and saying “nigger” is simply not part of the Applebee’s experience, even in a small town that a fancy New York/California-based writer might regard as benighted.
The book seems well-crafted rather than clever or delightful. A lot of the main characters’ motivations do not seem credible. There is a saintly middle-aged guy whose wife has been depressed for years and sleeps in a separate bedroom. Yet he resists sleeping with his willing 27-year-old beautiful assistant who happens to live in the same townhouse. Franzen and his publicists have been hyping this as the Great 21st Century American Novel, but it falls well short of the standards set in the 20th Century by An American Tragedy
Frankly, I was intimidated by all of the praise heaped upon this writer. So I went to Amazon and sampled the book.
Franzen is not an exceptional writer, just look at his sentence construction and choice of words. He hits false notes frequently.
So what is the appeal? I think for a certain demographic–the northeast liberal elite psuedo-intelligencia whose vanity would extend to judging true art with gold foil stars–he speaks to the core of their experiences and thoughts.
Their flawed and stunted lives are stretched out naked on a well-lit examination table, exposing their disfigured glory, like one long, cathartic, self-involved therapy session dragging on across the pages.
Government and nonprofits? This is their milieu. How could their superiority not be tortured by the unspeakable truth that their lives are contingent upon the Dalits who create, when they offer nothing but guile, theft, and pledge-drives to acquire their daily bread.
Michael: Reviewing a book after reading just the Amazon sample? Maybe this will be the next frontier for lazy high school essayists!
Maybe Franzen read that since former Sen. Byrd was in the KKK 60 years ago then everyone in the state must be like that in 2010. Agreed, that scene (as you described it) sounds like BS. I very highly doubt that would happen in West Virginia today or even 20 years ago.
Jay: Even the KKK did not go up to folks in restaurants and disturb their dinners. They put on white sheets and marched or burned crosses anonymously. Robert Byrd does seem to have used the term “white nigger” in an interview (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd ) in 2001, but he wasn’t directing it directly at another person in a social situation. I do wonder what the term means, actually. A Samoyed who likes to listen to Rap?
Phil,
Why is it you express watching TV to be mindless yet you waste as
much or more time reading a fictional book? Isn’t that the same thing?
Andie: In the 1800s, when novels were becoming a mass market item, contemporary newspaper editorials spoke about the time being wasted by people reading Austen, Dickens, and others now regarded as classics. The language was almost exactly the same as a modern essay about the time-wasting evil of television.
Do you want to say that reading a novel is more of a waste of time than watching NASCAR? The novel is, as you say, purely fictional whereas NASCAR is real. I once tried persuading an MIT engineering graduate that Shakespeare was more important to read/experience than a biography of a business executive or a Boston Globe article. One of my arguments was that the great fictional works are good for understanding human emotions and motivations (Mark Hurd as Macbeth, the HP board as Lady Macbeth, and the shareholders as Duncan?). This is why people are still interested in Shakespeare more than 400 years after the works were first performed. She was not convinced.
Phil,
I should have been more clear. The classic novels certainly offer
much “understanding”, as you put it. But you have posted reviews of
novels that will never be known for anything more than entertainment
(to some, at least), and it is these books that could be categorized as
the paper and ink version of watching mindless TV. The only thing
thought-provoking about some of your novels is wondering why
anyone would waste the time it takes to read them.
And FWIW, I’d consider watching NASCAR akin to waterboarding.
Andie: One reason I read novels instead of watching TV is that I don’t have a TV (unless you count one that is in front of an elliptical machine in a basement room that has no chairs; thus the only way I have to watch TV is to exercise, a prospect too horrible to contemplate). Novels from the library are also a lot cheaper than cable!
Phil,
You have no TV?
You’re officially my new idol! 😉