Jonathan Franzen offended my Gulf Coast sensibilities years ago. A guest of Houston-based Inprint's reading series, he was spinning yarns from his highly acclaimed The Corrections. Franzen attempted to make an analogy comparing something to watching a boring baseball game, and cited the Houston Astros as part accomplice. I would normally take umbrage to such an assault, especially when you consider how good those Astros were at the time.
But Corrections pulled me in. All was forgiven.
Offend me once, shame on you. Offend me twice, well, after reading Freedom, let's just say Franzen hit it out of the park on this one.
Freedom navigates the twists, turns, sharp cliffs, foggy, low-visibility roads, and rocky, jagged embankments relationships take when each party values individualism, as most Americans do, whether they admit it or not. And when each carries resentments, as most humans do, whether they admit it or not.
Freedom's Walter and Patty Berglund are no exception, but they are different from the troubled relationships society watches for sport: Sandra Bullock/Jesse James; David Arquette/Courtney Cox; Al and Tipper Gore; Tiger Woods/Ellen Whatshername; Susan Sarandon/Tim Robbins, and on and on, to the extent that the Huffington Post now has a section dedicated to divorce.
Similar to the aforementioned couples, the Berglund's story is at times a sad one - but always captivating. It is a sadness that is refreshing in a way that is real. There's a line in a Guy Clark song, "give me chicken fried steak, not a baby ruth." Meaning, give me something with substance. Something that is real. This story is a chicken fried steak.
And this is a family that could live on your street, a couple you could be friends with, all confronting issues that are recognizable.
You root for them for good reason.
According to research conducted by Rose McDermott (Brown University), James Fowler (University of California, San Diego), and Nicholas A. Christakis (Harvard University), titled "Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years," we are well served to tend to the relationships of our friends as much as our own.
"Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one's own friends' marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one's own relationship..." and "that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network."
And so it is -- or isn't -- with the Berglunds. Freedom takes us through their years as the "it" couple, Whole Foods shoppers and gentrifiers of a St. Paul neighborhood where residents "relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn." Walter, saving the world as an environmental lawyer who commutes to work on his bicycle, and Patty, a neighborhood resource who walked effortlessly down the street with her child in a stroller.
"Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel."
In a layered narrative, Franzen chronicles the adolescence and college days of Walter and Patty, thoroughly enough to understand how our families shape us, good and bad, and how we carry those wounds and cures with us, but not so painstakingly that the reader gets lost in the details. The point is further driven home in the stories orbiting the Berglund children, Joey and Jessica.
At pivotal points in the novel, Franzen employs a versatile literary device to give insight to the book's main characters through an autobiography Patty writes at her therapist's suggestion. Titled, "Mistakes Were Made, Autobiography of Patty Berglund by Patty Berglund," it is so genuine it was more akin to reading a journal than an autobiography: at times, I couldn't help but feel like I should not be reading it.
"She didn't think she was an alcoholic. She wasn't an alcoholic. She was just turning out to be like her dad, who sometimes escaped his family by drinking too much. Once upon a time, Walter had positively liked that she enjoyed drinking a glass or two of wine after the kids were in bed. He said he'd grown up being nauseated by the smell of alcohol and had learned to forgive it and love it on her breath, because he loved her breath, because her breath came from deep inside her and he loved the inside of her....But once that one or two glasses turned into six or eight glasses, everything changed. Walter needed her sober at night so she could listen to all the things he thought were morally defective in their son, while she needed not be sober so as not to have to listen. It wasn't alcoholism. It was self defense."
Patty is not the only person a harsh light is shined on. Walter, their children, friends, neighbors, colleagues, parents, and Richard Katz, a college friend of Patty and Walter that loves them in profound yet inappropriate ways - and who I could not help but envision being played by Benecio del Toro if this book became a movie - all come across as flawed, human, and lovable.
As he did in Corrections, Franzen has a choke hold on American fiction. Freedom is about more than just attaining freedom for the sense of the word. Patty and Walter are desperate for freedom from isolation, and each other, and that contradiction plays out in ways both familiar and unexpected in this novel.
Read it.
And invite your friends over for dinner.
