Reading a Jonathan Franzen novel is exhausting! This major novel is every bit as big, complicated and long as The Corrections before it.  Its premise is rather promising: the teenage son of a committed Democrat couple (Patty and Walter) decides to move in with the Republican family next door. The reasons for this are slowly revealed, but really this event fades into the background as the novel’s trajectory veers off to include rape, corruption, adultery, nepotism, war, depression and a maybe-murder – all against a background of impending environmental doom. Are you sure you want to keep reading?

Like its predecessor, Freedom is what is usually called a ‘sprawling’ family saga. Like The Corrections¸ there is some wild and slightly unlikely international intrigue and all sorts of politics (family, national and international). Like The Corrections it is an easy read in the sense that it pulls you in quickly and keeps you reading till you arrive (somewhat breathless) at the final resolution.

Now for the differences: Freedom has not even one – not one! – likeable character.  I can believe the bundle of neuroses and complaints that forms each personality, but somehow the sum is less than the parts… Take Patty, our alleged heroine (or anti-heroine?): early in the novel, as a teenager, something terrible happens to her and this initially engages our sympathy, yet Patty herself is somehow still closed off: her emotions and thoughts are described in great detail, yet she remains rather a cold fish. Why this appearance of coldness and distance when we are given so many thousands of words about her? I think in the end, although intended as a somewhat ‘scattered’ character, she is just too scattered – there’s no central core that the reader can get a hold of and say, “Oh, so that’s Patty”.

Patty’s husband Walter is a Democrats-supporting birdwatching nature-loving environmentalist who seriously loves Patty. He loves her so much, in fact, he is willing to temporarily suspend his passionate anti-population beliefs in order to have two children with her! The struggle between political loves and human loves forms much of the tensions of the rest of the narrative, as all characters assert their need to be loved in the face of overwhelming global calamities that require nun-like devotion and seem to leave no time for personal relationships.

Walter is the voice of Nature, but ironically in order to protect Nature he has to become a particularly frenetic, disconnected, un-natural human being. Machiavellian machinations and political wheeling and dealing partly appeal to him and yet underneath it all the motivation for this dubious activity is the simplicity of the natural world itself – especially the birds! He looks longingly to nature for relief from his own dehumanising lifestyle:

He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat.  And then to take wing, to know the air’s buoyancy even for an hour…

It’s easy to know what freedom is for a bird – the freedom to fly around, to not be in a cage – but how to explain the complexity of human freedom? While cleverly displacing his preachiness onto the fanatical Walter, Franzen reveals both the problem of human freedom and the urgent environmental one, along with the depressing unlikelihood of finding a solution to either in the near future.

The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished negative and positive ideas of freedom – ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. All the characters in Franzen’s novel desperately pursue a ‘freedom from’ their particular demons and eventually achieve it. What happens when they achieve these freedoms is when the novel gets really interesting: they were so quick at escaping their constraints that they hadn’t stopped to consider what positive things they might value. An allegory for American politics? Perhaps.

Franzon also explores how one person’s ‘freedom’ may impinge on another’s – an issue at the centre of contemporary American society in particular:

People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to…

Freedom here becomes a kind of compensatory wealth which many people value even if it kills them. Franzen seems particularly interested in understanding the more loony end of politics in the United States: the defence of guns, of prison rates, of the death penalty and the question of why so many ‘freedoms’ fought for in America are so often purely negative.

In the end, Freedom is a very sad book – sadder than The Corrections – and possibly angrier. Its conclusion doesn’t really resolve anything, but at the very least Franzen has gone on record as indicating, from a global point of view, his concern for the world’s intractable environmental problems, and, from a human point of view, his belief that love solves nothing but is somehow equally inevitable.

Verdict: Rollicking but depressing family saga with the now-expected Franzonian mixture of humour and pathos. Not always fun to read, but definitely rewarding.

Read more: Read an interview with Franzen about Freedom and how he doesn’t believe in the ‘Great American novel’ here:

Jonathan Franzen is famous for two things: (1) writing The Corrections, and (2) refusing an offer to be part of Oprah’s Book Club.  (Possibly more famous for the latter!)  His concern at the time was not so much a high culture / low culture clash but a worry that male readers would be alienated by an ‘Oprah’ sticker on the cover, Oprah’s Book Club being seen by many men as a women’s thing.

Franzen in a way predicted his own novel with a 1996 essay in Harpers literary magazine.  In Perchance to dream: In the age of images a reason to write novels, he sets out his vision for what a modern novel should be. Central to his vision was the importance of characterisation – Franzen argued that many novels had become mere mouthpieces for the author’s set of ideas and provide nothing for readers to empathise with. He writes:

 At the heart of my despair about the novel had been a conflict between my feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream, and my desire to write about the things closest to me, to lose myself in the characters and locales I loved…. Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society – to help solve our contemporary problems – seems to me a peculiarly American delusion.

The Corrections was subsequently heralded as delivering upon these promises, reviving the old-fashioned Tolstoy-type ‘social novel’ that doesn’t solve the world’s problems but presents them in a social form readers can relate to.  Does he succeed in his ambitious aim?  Well, let’s just say his characters work – they’re sometimes so unbelievable as to be convincingly true (truth being stranger than fiction, etc). 

This is a lengthy Midwestern family saga in which all members get their time in the sun. What I liked about Franzen’s characters was the way he could genuinely surprise us with their depth – in the first third of the novel we get set-ups which present them as ‘types’ – the artistic son, the corporate son, the rebellious daughter, the repressed mother, the distant father, and we think we’ve seen all these characters before.  But Franzen, having drawn us into their stories, starts to let us enter their minds and there’s much there to make us reconsider our initial evaluations.  The most complex and intriguing character is the matriarch Enid, who presents at first as having mindlessly absorbed the mores of her childhood, continuing to espouse her general disapprovals of the younger generation in a robotic fashion.  Yet through flashbacks (and forwards) we see a more sensitive and complex picture emerge: the young, innocent wife, the disappointments she endures, her ambitions, her interest in things new to her – an interest that never dies but continues to manifest itself in surprising ways… yes, there’s more to frumpy stay-at-home Enid than meets the eye and her character’s emergence through the novel’s progress is a delight.  Enid’s daughter, Denise, too is an endearingly complex personality, and Franzen’s sensitive telling of this mother-daughter love-hate relationship proves he really can ‘write’ female characters.

The ‘corrections’ of the title are ostensibly those that Chip the Artistic Son has to do to his ever-changing screenplay in order to get it to work (we are given glimpses of this screenplay and rather doubt it has a future).  More broadly, Chip with his knowledge of high-end literary theory and critical Marxism, wishes to correct the entire decadent western world – and his arrogance is such that he really think he can do this via his university teaching.  One of the particularly funny scenes is where he is confronted by his students: a hostile bunch of Generation Y-ers, sick of deconstructing advertisements and being urged to hate the corporations they depend on.  In this scene, light though it is, we have a nucleus of current stand-offs between those who can see through the manipulative operations of corporations and resent it (Generation X) and those who see it but accept it (Generation Y).  This is where Franzen gives us so much more than just a family saga – he has his finger on the pulse of contemporary (sub)culture-clashes and is able to deliver up a depth of ideas without compromising the narrative thrust of his family of characters (and they are characters!). 

Mother Enid wishes to correct her children’s lives, to set them on the straight-and-narrow path like other people’s children, so she can swap boasting stories with her suburban friends. Her husband Alfred’s worsening Alzheimers is in desperate need of correction, but can the new drugs hyped-up by powerful drug companies help?  There are all sorts of misapprehensions and misunderstandings which call out to be corrected but may never be… (Chip happily lets his parents think he is writing for the Wall Street Journal, when he is in fact proofreading legal documents).  How will this all pan out?

Franzen is at his best when presenting characters in their native habitats and at his worst when he takes them to other places.  I’m ambivalent about the worth of  a bizarre sub-plot in the middle, involving Chip and some dodgy semi-traitorous activities in Eastern Europe, which reads like it should belong in some other novel.  And yet… I have to admit it does give it an unhinged air, a sense of ‘anything could happen’, which pushes it to an edge which other social novels might not reach. 

A gem in Franzen’s work is his detailed description of the modern tyranny of stuff: in a world of cheap imported mass-produced goods, of bills and shares and tax returns, the modern resident of the western world is threatened with burial under an enormous, never-conquered mountain of pointless paperwork and broken un-fixable things.  How well he captures the strain of anxiety, always-running in the background, caused by the need to finally pay that bill, follow up that letter, find that souvenir from long-ago holidays… the strain of endless triviality is rendered with precision and sympathy and the suggestion is clear: to have so much stuff is a liability, and this one statement upends the American belief in the superiority of that country and its ways.  That’s where he shines – in capturing the ‘here and now’ of the crisis of American (and ergo any westerners’, to a lesser degree) middle-class experience.

The Corrections is a thoroughly enjoyable novel with some serious substance to it and characters who will stay with you.  Did it have to be so lengthy?  No (and on the whole we get rather too much of Chip as a character – the descriptions of his bodily functions and variety of obsessions wear thin after a while),  but there’s a tradition of American male novelists writing big books – let’s put it down to peer pressure!  Reduced by a third, The Corrections would have been a masterpiece, but in its present form it is still exceptional in its balance of human stories (the gossipy epicentre of all good novels) and the Big Ideas.   

Verdict: A thoroughly entertaining family saga with persuasive characterisation and big ideas, intelligently presented.  Overly-long but worth going the distance.

Watch out for: Nine years after The Corrections Franzen has published another Big Novel, Freedom (2010) , which I'll review later in the year.  Also check out an interesting interview with Franzen in The Onion, in which he presents his views on the craft of writing – in a nutshell: block out the outside world, superglue the internet portal of your computer so you can’t be distracted by the net, and just write.