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Franzen on freedom, redacted
I’m about 100 pages from the end of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. This novel is thrilling critics on multiple continents. It’s being compared to War and Peace. Critics view it as an epic of our time, a witty, insightful work of millennial American genius. Here’s Judith Shulevitz at Slate: “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.”
Shulevitz presses the empathy theme, returning to it over and over. “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’.” The power of the novel, she argues, lies in how Franzen handles his characters’ disappointment in lives that don’t measure up to their crackpot conceptions of what “freedom” should be for them. He “lets” them “figur[e] out how to endure their rage and despair … with tenderness and a compassion.”
Granted I have not finished the novel. And perhaps the tenderness and compassion will appear magically in the last few pages and will wash over me with such power that it will mitigate the pinched and cramped effects of the first 450 pages. But I’m having my doubts. Freedom is not a compassionate or tender novel. It’s angry, bitter, and deeply troubled. It’s written from a narrative perspective that struggles to see its central characters through anything other than a sour, sardonic lens. And, in titling the novel Freedom, it elevates this struggle–or tries to elevate it–to the level of philosophical meditation. The result is a jaundiced and dysphoric work that–while compulsively readable in the manner of The Corrections–is hardly a tender or compassionate account of “the many ironies of life under late capitalism.” Rather, it reads like a claustrophobic tautology: a blanket indictment of middle-class Americanness that sees Americanness as an ugly inevitable distortion of humanity caused by the irredeemably flawed premises of America itself.
Case in point. Late in the novel, Franzen treats us to a short family history of Walter, one of the novel’s main characters. Walter is a second generation American of Swedish descent. This is how Franzen describes the immigrant experience and its genealogical aftermath:
Unable to stand not being the favored one, [Einar] sailed for America on his twenty-second birthday. Once he was there, he never went back to Sweden, never saw his mother again, proudly avowed that he’d forgotten every word of his mother tongue, and delivered, at the slightest provocation, lengthy diatribes against ‘the stupidest, smuggest, narrow-mindedest country on earth.’ He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.
[...]
America, for Einar, was the land of unSwedish freedom, the place of wide-open spaces where a son could still imagine he was special. But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. Having achieved, through his native intelligence and hard labor, a degree of affluence and independence, but not nearly enough of either, he became a study in anger and disappointment. After his retirement, in the 1950s, he began sending his relatives annual Christmas letters in which he lambasted the stupidness of American’s government, the inequities of its political economy, and the fatuity of its religion. … Though an entrepreneur himself, Einar detested big business. Though he’d made a career of government contracts, he hated the government as well. And though he loved the open road, the road made him miserable and crazy. He bought American sedans with the biggest engines available, so that he could do ninety and a hundred on the dead-flat Minnesota state highways, many of them built by him, and roar past the stupid people on his way. If an oncoming car approached him at night with its high beams on, Einar’s response was to put his own high beams on and leave them on. If some pinhead dared to try to pass him on a two-lane road, he floored the accelerator to keep pace and then decelerated to keep the would-be passer from getting back in line, taking special pleasure when there was danger of a collision with an oncoming truck. If another driver cut him off or refused him the right of way, he pursued the offending car and forced it off the road, so that he could jump out and shout curses at its driver. (The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.)
And so on. The immigrant experience is reduced to an anti-social tic, in Franzen’s prose; the American ideal is rendered as the toxic myth that attracts assholes to our shores and ensures their misery. Within a generation or two, moreover, these auspicious alienated beginnings harden into a reflexive philosophical contempt for America in both its real and ideal forms. Here’s Walter:
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,” for Franzen, is a red herring. As a national ideal, it paralyzes us, preventing government from behaving with the rationalism of European nations (there are passages about this in the book). And, on a personal level, it is simply immiserating. Every last one of Franzen’s major characters suffers from the burden of too many choices. They have “the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to”–and they all royally do. Worse, they do so for the stupidest and shallowest of reasons–they want what they want (usually sex or money), and in most instances conscience and ethics really don’t enter into their decision-making, at least not until it’s too late. In other words, freedom’s just another word for everything to lose.
We’ll see where it all goes in the end. But I am starting to think that this novel may amount to a fictional companion piece for Cass Sunstein’s Nudge.
So, maybe Freedom isn’t the Great American Novel of the new century? Good to hear a note of dissent. I haven’t read it myself, but some of the passages you quote make me feel I’m being preached at (and not missing much), e.g.:
America, for Einar, was the land of unSwedish freedom, the place of wide-open spaces where a son could still imagine he was special. But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. Having achieved, through his native intelligence and hard labor, a degree of affluence and independence, but not nearly enough of either, he became a study in anger and disappointment.
The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.*
Is the whole book like this? And do you think people are lauding this novel primarily because they find in it some ideological affinity? Because they find support for their pet peeves? And for God’s sake, what about that old rule, Show, don’t tell?
This might be a little unfair, but reading the excerpts above gave me the feeling I was reading not a novel but a critic expounding on a novel–as if Mark Twain had written “The river, for Huck, was a place of un-domestic freedom, the place of wide-open spaces where a boy could still imagine he was free of the strictures of domesticity. But nothing disturbs the feeling of freedom like the presence of another human being who is not free….” Something like this might be part of a perceptive critical reading of Huckleberry Finn, but probably not part of a great novel. The excerpts made me feel vaguely as if I were reading an exceptionally lively scholarly article in American Literature, ca. 1961.
FWIW, re freedom as a literary theme, in my American Lit II class I often teach Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as, among other things, a meditation on freedom. Newland Archer lives in the freest nation on earth. He’s a white, male, wealthy, intelligent, and well educated member of the New York aristocracy. What could possibly stand between him and the fulfillment of his dreams? Not the government, and certainly not any kind of racial or sexual or class oppression. Yet the one thing he most wants to do (marry Ellen), he is not free to do. It would seem that political freedom is not enough to guarantee happiness. It would seem that one’s family and social circle can also restrict your freedom, and in some pretty profound ways. (In fact it would seem more generally, perhaps even universally, that the social structures that produce freedom in one sphere inevitably restrict it in other spheres.)
The point here is that Archer responds to his predicament by doing precisely what Franzen’s Americans apparently refuse to do: he decides to “accept limits, to acknowledge and shoulder the burdens of [his] inheritance.” Well, OK, his family forces him to accept those limits. But he does come to accept them, and by doing so he matures as a human being, and learns that living within those limits is really not so bad after all, etc. And Wharton handles it all with the “tenderness and compassion” you say is missing from Freedom.
* This strikes me as just plain wrong. In my experience, “the personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom” is prone not so much “to misanthropy and rage” as to denial. But no doubt Franzen’s experience differs from mine.
ES – I’m with you 100 percent. You cannot write a worthy novel if you despise your main characters — and Franzen does. You double your problems if you indulge the urge to tell rather than show, particularly when you layer politics on top. As you note, the combination creates a preachy tome that does leave one suspecting that the raves it’s getting have less to do with its aesthetic virtues than with its capacity for stroking the narcissism of its ideological affiliates. Also — it strikes me as I read your comment that Wharton already wrote the novel Franzen may have thought he was writing. He’s certainly tightly focussed on how erotic longing can interfere with our independence and negate the value we place on it. And, as you note, Wharton does it all with infinite tenderness and compassion. The novel is heartbreaking in so many ways — and despite its sadness leaves you feeling that life is large and wonderful and endlessly worth it even when it’s tragic. Which of course is a big part of what long form fiction is all about. It can do that. Franzen isn’t up for that at all. The reading experience is claustrophobic as hell, because the novel renders such a relentlessly shallow, cynical world. One review I read made a big point of saying how much fun the book is, how sharp and funny it is. I don’t see it.
Freedom does bring problems galore. Its consequences may be equally negative as positive. May. But freedom’s importance is not in its consequences, but in itself. If the intrinsic goodness of freedom is forgotten, if freedom is reduced to economics or sexual gratification or the pride of conquest (as it sadly is for many), then it is worth losing and will indeed be lost.
I don’t know Franzen or his book outside your comments, but I’m not encouraged.
“this novel may amount to a fictional companion piece for Cass Sunstein’s Nudge”…an interesting thought.
“If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily”..highly questionable: often, when people *lose* money & status, they often react by throwing away their freedom to establish some sort of collectivity. See for example Germany, 1930-1945. I believe it was Erich Fromm who quoted a young Nazi acquaintance: “We Germans are so free–we are free of freedom.”
(test message–spam filter got another comment–I’m trying a different email address to see if it’s happier with that)
George Eliot:
“Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessman had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own . . . You would be especially likely to be beaten if you depneded arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.”
Too many experts and intellectuals fail to understand the point Eliot was making here, and hence are constantly irritated at the chess pieces for attempting to use those passions and intellects to think and to move on their own. I think that is a significant factor behind what seems to be the growing choice-is-bad-for-you movement.
Thanks for the quote, David. It seems significant that it’s from Felix Holt: The Radical, no? Eliot anticipates the paradoxes of freedom–especially as it incites anxiety among stasists–all the way back in 1866. I once went to a conference panel on Eliot. I remember that during the discussion afterward, the difficulty of writing about Eliot came up. The consensus was that no matter what you may think you have to say about her, upon close examination she always proves to have thought of it first. Amazing, amazing writer.
all i can say after reading the examples is “ugh.” it sounds like idealogical pandering, peopled with cariactures instead of characters. no thank you. i’ll avoid this like i’ve avoided Rand. thanks for the warning–i was considering picking this up.
Erin, thanks for reading this so we don’t have to! Seriously, I waded through Franzen’s The Corrections to see what the hype was all about, and I found it much as you report here. It’s highly readable stuff, but it’s suffused with contempt for the sophomoric diorama of middle-American losers that comprises Franzen’s characters. Mercy, but does he hate them! Jason, you’re quite right: somehow the longer Franzen went on (and The Corrections is nearly 600 pages) the more his characters became caricatures. That’s quite a trick. And why does he hate them? I suspect it’s because they’re so, so American . . . .
I’ll admit I judge Franzen by the light of David F. Wallace and continually find him wanting. Wallace also pointed out the narcissistic tendencies of Americans and their cheap pleasures, but he usually found a way to some human sympathy. Wallace’s problem was that he recognized a deep need for a transcendence that subverts abstract freedom, but was often embarrassed to point out that need. Franzen doesn’t even see this problem behind the problem. Wallace wasn’t afraid to reference the biblical notion of The Fall as a central metaphor for human existence, and with it, the possibility of grace and joy in some sort of half-fulfilled redemption. These are old words now, I know, and “theological” and “Christian” to boot, but God, I wish we had more novelists in 2010 that took them seriously.
“it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others”
1)Is Franzen really not aware of, say, the Irish famines, the East European pogroms, the desperate poverty of southern Italy, and all the other various factors other than lack of sociability that might have led people to come to the U.S.? (Maybe, of course, it’s just the character speaking, and not expressing the author’s own views, but it sure doesn’t sound like it)
2)When did writers and intellectuals become so concerned with sociability & getting along with others? It wasn’t all that long ago that intellectuals tended to look down on “joiners” and conformists, and to value the man or woman who went his/her own way. Now, it seems that many of them want everyone to live in Gopher Prairie, with escape sealed off.
Brian — I agree. One doesn’t have to be a practicing Christian (and I am not) to share a longing for more novelists who are willing to take the plunge into moral earnestness–and who use Christian ideals of goodness and redemption as a point of entry for that. As you point out, it can be done with wit, intelligence, and postmodern savvy. But it requires a writer with real courage and depth.
David — I found myself wondering the same thing. The passage is definitely not done in free indirect style. It’s straight from the narrative voice, which we have no reason to assume is done in a persona that is substantially different from Franzen’s. The sheer contemptible ignorance about the history of emigration to the US is appalling — and ironic, considering that this is a novel that presumes to be ever so knowing about how ignorant and crass Americans are.
For fun: my Irish ancestors came over during the famine, and went straight to upstate New York, where they could farm and where there was already an established enclave of relatives and friends from Kerry. They bred and bred and bred, expanded and stayed put, for the most part, and many are still there (the exception was my great grandfather, who got work on the Union Pacific and worked his way out to California, where he settled and raised his family). Were these immigrants unsociable? Hardly. Rather, they were highly familial and interconnected and gregarious and strong — these folks were survivors, tearing themselves from a part of Ireland where the famine hit hardest, and making life anew in a strange far away place. My English ancestors had a similar history — one prospectless young son from northern England worked his way over to San Francisco on a ship during the gold rush. He got work as a porter, and brought over his parents and as much extended family as he could. Siblings came, too, and they all settled down and stayed for over a century, a vast close family becoming vaster and closer, and did rather nicely for themselves, becoming respected pillars of the community and all that. Such stories are a dime a dozen in this country.
I think a much more accurate view of the typical American immigrant experience can be found in Tom Russell’s song “The Old Northern Shore”
Some of us left out of hardship
Starvation, misery and pain
Some of us left for adventure
To find greener pastures and gain
But all of us left our loved ones behind
The heartaches drilled deep to the core
And heartaches are always awakened each night
When we dream of the old northern shore
This song is from Russell’s album “The man from God knows were,” which is an incredible piece of work, a meditation on the the immigration experience based on the stories of his own (Irish and Norwegian) ancestors. Not sugar-coated, pretty brutal in places. This album, and Russell in general, should be much better-known than they are.
“the man from God knows WHERE”, of course…
I’m with you, David–Franzen’s crack (it wasn’t the people with sociable genes) just doesn’t make sense. At first I thought maybe he might be referring, in the reductive sense of the Thanksgiving myth, just to the Puritan Separatists. That would at least go some distance toward justifying the characterization “people who didn’t get along well with others, since these people were, after all, separatists. But the phrase “crowded old world” pretty consistently refers to the Europe of the huddled masses, and never to my knowledge to the England (and then Holland) of the Separatists. In this nation’s mythic history, the Puritans came here “for religious freedom,” while the later arrivals from Ireland and eastern and southern Europe came here to escape the “crowded Old World.”
And Erin, you’re spot on about how utterly wrong Franzen is. We’re talking here about people who not only lived in a close-knit web of familial relations, but who also habitually formed unions, powerful political machines, popular sports leagues, etc. Yes, these organizations were certainly about paychecks, politics, and sports, but they also functioned as outlets for an innate sociability.
David, Thanks for the pointer to Russell. Do you know Peter Jones’ heartbreaking song, “Kilkelly, Ireland“? The lyrics are drawn from real letters sent home by Jones’ ancestral Irish immigrant between 1860 and the 1890s. They capture so much about the pain of immigration — the love and the loss and the necessity that was at the root of it for so many. Performed here.
Erin…no, I don’t know the Jones song. The lyrics are indeed sad, and I’ll get the music from iTunes or somewhere.
One of Russell’s songs on this album is Mary Clare Malloy, the story of a “picture bride” who came to the U.S. (700 of them on one ship!) to marry a man she’d never met. I haven’t been able to find anything definitive about Irish picture brides on the web, though there is quite a bit about picture brides from other countries.
Music Video of Mary Clare Malloy, sung by Delores Keane
Another novelist who made the plunge is Michel Houellebecq, with his Elementary Particles of 1998. He is somewhat nostalgic about the historic social formations of the Christian West (those previous to the late 20th century) without personally subscribing to the Christian religion. His moralism is tempered by nihilism, but perhaps only nihilism presents the only proper background to consider how ‘moral action’ might try to bring about ‘goodness’ in some sort of pragmatically justified way. I’m not sure. But I like his analysis and his bold futuristic imaginings that capture “christian” notions without the religion. But count me an odd Protestant.
B.R. Myers pans Franzen’s book at The Atlantic.
Nice takedown.
David Brooks says it’s Thoreau’s fault.
yes, you have to take thoreau with a boulder of salt. and remember that he went home for mommy’s cookies every day.
Brooks might have done better to blame Emerson rather than Thoreau. Emerson’s basic schtick was that we all have within us whatever it takes to be the next Moses or Jesus or whomever, if only we can be “self-reliant” enough, if only we can access that something within us that is authentic. Emerson’s audiences ate this stuff up, even as they mostly ignored Thoreau (who for a long time was nowhere near as popular and influential as his mentor). Emersonian self-reliance is all well and good as far as it goes, useful for the children if not strictly speaking true–but the downside of it is the implication that if we’re NOT the next Moses or Jesus, it’s because we’re not living authentically–which is to say, we’re ALL living inauthentically, for who among us is truly that great? Then again, since Brooks’s target is the trope of specifically suburban inauthenticity rather than the more universal version pushed by Emerson, maybe the real culprit is Marx. For Marx’s “bourgeois,” just substitute “suburban” and “middle class.”
I was rather taken with how “unknowing” Brooks’ piece was vis a vis his own work on bourgeois bohemians, bobos in paradise, etc. Franzen is arguing, in part, directly with Brooks’ own thesis about middle-class fulfillment. But there’s no awareness there at all.
Brooks seems to be wandering in the wilderness. He’s offered kind words for Philip Blond’s “Red Toryism” (a Burkean socialist critique of consumer capitalism, among other things) and for those arguing that college educational goals might be not be the be-all-end-all for America’s middle-class future. He doesn’t mention Crawford directly, if I my memory serves, but Crawford’s support for craft seems to be on his radar. I suppose he’s searching for a viable economic program that conservatives could rally around that doesn’t include bourgeois free-market bliss. If this eventually includes a little reflection concerning his past rah-rahing for said aesthetic bliss, I won’t complain. But I agree with you; it hasn’t happened yet.
FWIW, there are Mennonite and Amish communities in my region where craft trumps higher ed. Schooling ends with eighth grade, after which boys work as de facto apprentices at farming, carpentry, etc., and girls at gardening, cooking, etc. These communities seem to be thriving (and I can personally attest that both the food and the carpentry are really good.) Not to approve or disapprove–it is hardly my place to judge at all–I just offer this as a reminder that not all Americans have bought into consumer capitalism. There are quite successful alternatives out there. Maybe Brooks ought to spend some time with a Mennonite family to get a different perspective on consumerism and suburbia, from people who live the critique that others only write.
[...] Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom, but Erin O’Connor has been reading it and reviews it here. Based on her summary, it seems that Franzen’s basic opinion about freedom is this: he [...]
Linked: The scribes and the idea of freedom
I would rather have an industry scientist any day than a government funded one.
AGW is a government lie. Carbon sequestring is a fools errand. All giovernment suppoerted.
Flat out lies.
I think you’re taking that passage about Einar Berglund out of context considering that it was part of a few pages of backstory in a pretty hefty book and it’s the only thing you quoted here. Did you finish the book and still dislike it?
I did finish the book, and I was still disappointed in it.