Just another word for nothing left to lose

The world may, on occasion, ask itself what America means — what its intentions are, what its mistakes might be, what good it possesses — but only Americans have the right to ask themselves what it means to be American.

Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom looks at this very question in minute detail, through the intertwined lives of Walter and Patty Berglund and their college friend Richard Katz. In the span of 562 pages, Franzen dissects the matter, slicing and dicing the current state of America in a way that his 2001 novel, The Corrections, sought to do.

For me, though, Freedom succeeds in ways that the earlier, Oprah-approved novel did not. This one is also lengthy, full of various tendrils and digressions, wry commentary on contemporary human (American) behavior and its fixations. It’s satirical, but also has a good deal of heart, something The Corrections sometimes missed from its omniscient narrator perch.

An omniscient narrator perch is actually a pretty rare thing in fiction these days. It’s the kind of perch from which people like Henry James, Thomas Hardy or Leo Tolstoy best observed the human condition in the late1800s. It gave the social realist novelists a god-like authority that was largely washed away by James Joyce and Modernism a generation later. (The world of fiction was never the same after Ulysses.)

And now comes Franzen, with his sweeping tale of interwoven lives, passions, MP3 music and environmentalism, war and political opportunism. It’s about how people try to find happiness, and exercise freedom. But it’s also very funny, at times trying, and ultimately quite moving.

Walter Berglund is a Minnesotan married to Patty, a former college basketball star who is attracted to Walter’s “goodness”: he’s a liberal with lots of environmental concerns, such as planet overpopulation. But she’s also attracted to Walter’s wannabe rock star friend, Richard, who fronts a punk band called The Traumatics. We follow this frustrating triangle through chapter after chapter, and the tension Franzen draws out of such a chestnut of a situation is riveting (he even invokes Tolstoy’s War and Peace at one point, to show that the love triangle situation is as old as, well, Natasha, Pierre and Andrei).

Walter and Patty are the type of perfect couple that try to make their neighborhood a better place through recycling, raising two kids who are exceptional, taking an interest in community matters. But underneath, Patty is unhappy. She has a traumatic incident in her past; her relationship to her parents is strained; she smothers her son with attention until he moves next door, to be closer to his girlfriend; and her attraction to the wrong type of guy is a fatal pulse running through the first half of Freedom.

Walter is old-fashioned, committed to the planet, and abstract about everything else, except his love for Patty. But she somehow feels she doesn’t deserve him. And it’s this that pulls the Berglund world apart.

That Patty is drawn to Richard, a callous Lit major who refers to all women as “chicks,” seems like a self-inflicted punishment. Yet their mutual dance is full of repressed tension and release, like something out of Edith Wharton. With Freedom, Franzen finally taps into characters you can care about over the course of 500 pages.

He also gives them voices that are often too witty, too self-aware for real life. Yet it’s this that makes Freedom such great fun. Patty is really just a retired college jock, yet she possesses the sassiest mouth in recent fiction. And both Richard and Walter provide the funniest expositions on modern life in the form of rants. These rants are strategically placed in the novel to launch each into unexpected fame: Richard, after becoming a cult figure on the indie music scene, agrees to give a spoiled teenager an interview which he can then post online to impress a high school girl. Katz uses the chance to spew a priceless stream of vitriol about modern music and its real purpose:

Q: Okay, what do you think of the MP3 revolution?

A: Ah, revolution, wow. It’s great to hear the word “revolution” again. It’s great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the amount of time before it loses its flavor and you have to spend another buck. That era which finally ended whenever, yesterday — you know, the era when we pretended rock was the scourge of conformity and consumerism, instead of its anointed handmaid — that era was really irritating to me. I think it’s good for the honesty of rock and roll and good for the country in general that we can finally see Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop for what they really were: manufacturers of wintergreen Chiclets.

Walter too has his public meltdown, informing people at a groundbreaking ceremony — where they’re turning over their homes to a coal-mining corporation for a meager profit — that they’re simply lining up to become members of the middle class, a more efficient “cancer on the planet.” His visceral rant goes viral online, and lends his cause — human overpopulation — unexpected credibility.

It’s interesting that Franzen makes rage the chosen outlet for America’s freedom of expression. Of course, neither liberals nor conservatives have a monopoly on public rage. Rage is, in fact, a driving force behind Freedom, but Franzen doesn’t want to cover us all in spit. It’s obvious he’s taking a pulse read on 9/11, the War on Terror, the obscenity of corporations getting rich off war contracts by selling shoddy equipment to the US military, the battle between Creation Science and Evolution, the fear and insular greed that marked the past decade. He rips into iPods and the world’s preoccupation with “coolness.” He has a problem with human overpopulation and consumerism, but also with environmental extremism, the kind that would protect a tiny bird like the Cerulean Warbler by allowing surrounding lands to be stripped for coal in a land-raping process called mountain top removal.

Freedom also looks at today’s youth, and how strange and different they are from their parents (basically, the type of people who would be reading Freedom in the first place). According to Patty, young people are all about flip-flops (“It’s like the world is their bedroom”) and credit cards (“Using a credit card to buy a hotdog or a pack of gum? I mean, cash is so yesterday, right?”). Franzen finds much to mock here, but also stuff to praise; from his third-person omniscient perch, he takes a leavened approach, realizing that no one — not even he or she with the best of intentions — is perfect. Liberalism is fraught with as much folly as conservatism. “Lord, what fools these mortals be” is from Shakespeare, but the Bard said it to make us feel a connection; to realize that being foolish is part of the human condition.

All this stuff is woven into a plot that sometimes runs off into the sidelines, the way The Corrections did, but always circles back to the people at its center. You could fault Jonathan Franzen for not pushing the envelope of fiction, for seeking shelter in a realist mode that has its built-in limitations. When Patty declares in a written dissection of her marriage to Walter that they “were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best thing,” it could come off as a little schmaltzy. But Franzen is not Nicholas Sparks; this is no Oprah Pick. There’s a lot to savor in Freedom. And a lot to preserve.

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Available at National Book Store.