Part 1 of this review is here.
Part 2 is here.
Freedom spans, as I said, what most people think of as a lifetime -- that span of our adult lives from about midway through college (or college-age years) to just shy of retirement. It's a big book, but that's a lot of ground to cover -- and Franzen doesn't focus in just on Walter and Patty (the main characters for most of the book) but also on their children, Joey and The Other Girl, whose name I also forget but who serves only a minor role in the book -- the Lisa Simpson or Tina Yothers role, if you will.
I've noticed, and probably you have, that in any pop culture family, there must be one drag. There must be one person who serves as the moral conscience of the family, as the Earth-Firster, vegetarian-lifestyle-tryinger, boring person in the pop culture family. I believe that this requirement started with Family Ties, when they had Republican/Funny Guy Alex, party girl/dummy Mallory, and The Third Kid, who needed a personality, too, and who for pop culture reasons needed to be very different from the other two. So they made Tina Yothers be the kind of person who once an episode would save a kitten or something, and left it at that - -with the exception of the rare episode where Tina might be the focus of the show and everyone would go watch Cheers instead.
In Freedom, the Other Girl Whose Name I Can't Remember -- that's not necessarily a knock on Franzen, since I'm terrible about characters' names -- is the Tina Yothers character. Franzen creates Patty and Walter and Joey all as fully-formed people with interesting lives and points of view and lets us see inside their heads from time to time and then, apparently running out of steam, he gets to Jessica -- I think that's her name -- and makes her The Good Kid, who goes to school and has a boyfriend and disapproves of Dad's budding affairs (but not Mom's?) and helps out with social causes and otherwise just blandly sits around being a person who exists in the book for no apparent reason.
I submitted a novel, a while back, to an editor, who told me she liked it and but wanted me to revise it to make it shorter. I'm still working on it, slowly -- with the help of some timely advice from that editor that I could save a copy of the book as it is, and then edit a new copy, so that I didn't feel like I was throwing out parts I liked. With that advice in mind, I decided that part of how I'd (try to) get down to the word count that the editor wanted before I resubmitted was that I'd completely eliminate one character.
Completely. I decided that person wouldn't appear in the book, wouldn't be mentioned, wouldn't exist at all.
Doing that -- wiping a character from the story -- was actually not as hard as it sounds, which says something about how integral that character might have been. Sure, there were great scenes with her, but the ease with which those scenes lifted right out (to use a phrase I co-opted from an episode of Friends) shows that the character really wasn't that big a deal in the book.
That's what I kept thinking about everytime Jessica, if that's her name, appeared on the scene. Why is she here? I thought, and thinking back now, I'm trying to imagine, if Jessica were removed from the book, whether anything would be any different.
I don't think it would be.
And here's the thing: My Eliminated Character was actually a subplot meant to add some drama to the ending of the book and to show that my main character might be the sort of guy who'd get engaged on a whim. In other words, a character designed to add some depth to the book.
As far as I can tell, Jessica doesn't even do that.
The inclusion of The Disposable Well-Meaning Character wouldn't be that bad, except that there's so much else going on in the book -- Franzen crams in background characters ranging from Walter and Jessica's lower-class neighbors (including a right-winger who makes an appearance midway through the book and stays), to Patty's parents and sisters and eventually a brother with a Russian wife, Joey's roommate, Joey's roommate's sister, Joey's roommate's dad, Joey's roommate's sister's fiancee, a guy who works for a company that sells stuff to the government in Iraq, Joey's fiance who was also his next-door neighbor, Walter's brother, and, even, near the end, a Christian McMansion owner who loves cats as a way to spite Walter.
That's a lot of stuff happening and people doing things, and I haven't even scratched the surface. I haven't, for example, talked about Richard, Walter's college roommate who was Patty's crush and who becomes a music star and who also knew Patty's friend in college and who also works as a roofer and meets a kid who interviews him and so on and so forth.
With all that happening, there's a glaring error, too -- one that not only leaps out at someone who reads the book, but one that also brings up the Franzen-vs-Irving comparison: Lalitha.
[SPOILER ALERT! THERE IS A MAJOR SPOILER COMING ALTHOUGH IF YOU READ THE BOOK, IN RETROSPECT IT WAS PRETTY OBVIOUS THIS WOULD HAPPEN.]
Lalitha is introduced probably about midway through the book: She's a young, pretty girl who works with Walter on a project Walter is doing -- the too-thoroughly-explained mining/reclamation/wildlife preserve project that dominates at least 1/3 of the book and which appears intended to demonstrate to us, the reader, just how thoroughly Franzen can research something. We get it, authors. You can get detailed information about stuff. Quit turning novels into textbooks.
Lalitha loves Walter -- we're told that pretty soon after meeting her -- and eventually Walter and Lalitha become a couple, and as their coupledom rambles through a part of the book that feels tacked on the way the Shire-must-be-saved ending of Lord Of The Rings felt tacked on, and eventually the couple gets into a fight, and Lalitha goes on ahead of Walter on a stage of their planned journey, while Walter waits behind to go visit his brother in Minnesota...
... and Lalitha...
[SERIOUSLY. SPOILER ALERT!]
... dies.
She dies offstage -- we're given an account of what happened the way we're given an account of almost everything in Freedom: news-ticker style, rattling off information quickly. Lalitha dies when he car is forced off the road on a mountain, and the moment I read that, I thought this:
"Wow, that's the second book I've read in a year where a major character dies when a car is forced off a road in a mountain."
Because the first time that happened, literarily speaking, was in Last Night In Twisted River -- and after that character died, the main character went into isolation on an island on a frozen lake and spent his time mostly thinking and hiding out from the world.
Whereas, Walter deals with Lalitha's death by going back to his boyhood home and hiding out from the world in a house next to a small lake.
That diminished the moderate enjoyment I was getting from Freedom, because it seemed so derivative. I'm not saying Franzen copied Irving -- Freedom must have been written before Last Night In Twisted River came out -- and maybe things would have been different if I'd read the books in a different order, but it still felt hackneyed when Franzen killed off Lalitha.
Hackneyed, and easy -- because Lalitha was the complicating factor in Walter's story, the part of Walter's story that made him a little less noble and might have evened things up between him and Patty, who'd cheated on Walter first (with Richard, the rock-star-friend) and who made Walter and Patty's life (and Richard's) more complicated simply by existing -- but she turns out to just be a deus ex machina who is thrown into the story to provide some plot twists and move the story forward, a good explanation for why instead of backstory or glimpses into Lalitha's thinking, we're given Post-It notes on her character: She really doesn't want to have babies, and she's foreign, and that's about it.
Freedom, in the end, celebrates its title by clearing a pathway for an uncomplicated decision: Walter, in the end, has a chance to take Patty back (they've been separated but not divorced while Walter is camping around the country in a van) and the fact that Lalitha is dead leaves the path pretty clear for Walter to do that without any worries on his part or Patty's -- which maybe is the point Franzen was trying to make, that people only make some choices when they're free to do so; Walter and Patty's life really began when Walter's mother died and he was free (more or less) of his family; their life then grinds forward inexorably with the two of them locked in a sort of marriage-as-judo-combat role for a lengthy period of time, always joined together but never really together, and then, at the end, after Patty's father dies and Lalitha dies, the two of them are free to get back together, again... and begin a new life near where they started their first life, for a while, a life that we're told is supposed to be remarkably similar to the life they had back in that hurried first chapter.
All of which doesn't so much hit home with me. Freedom is a book that feels like it's supposed to have a message -- from that too-portentous title to the sprawling feel of it to the many lectures that Franzen has his characters inflict on us: It's hard to go a chapter without a character spouting off about wildlife or birth control or Republicans or the War in Iraq or, at one point, 9/11, which shows up here as well, and which should, as I've said before, be entirely off limits as a symbol, as a place-marker, as any sort of literary device period because it just doesn't work...
... I'll go off on a tangent here. In Last Night In Twisted River, which just keeps coming up, doesn't it?, Irving mentioned 9/11, too, and I'm led to believe that 9/11 is going to show up more and more, and I think that readers and writers and TV show producers and everyone else ought to just stop and not do that.
Maybe earlier generations of writers and readers could handle momentous events without inevitably cheapening them or making them laughable or somehow mishandling them. Maybe people could write about Lincoln getting shot or Pearl Harbor or some other national tragedy without having the effect be hamhanded and ludicrously, over-the-toppedly-symbolic, but the current population can't, not with 9/11.
I have yet to see any popular depiction of 9/11 -- any reference to it in any thing -- which doesn't come off like a 9th grade symbolic poetry exercise. Every single reference to 9/11 might as well have a young girl in a white dress with a sad unicorn and a dead bluebird in her hand sitting right in front of the Twin Towers, for all the good it does them, and Franzen, who's a semidecent writer, is no better at it than anyone else: He has Joey affected by 9/11, and the reflections on it, the reporting on it, every single reference to it, dragged the story down into the muck of overwrought 9/11isms.
We as a culture right now provide grief counselors for everything. I would not be surprised if there were grief counselors available in North Dakota to help people upset over the Chilean miners. We do not handle tragedy or grief well and 9/11 was about as tragic and grief-stricken of a day as can be had. Given that our current psyche as a nation makes us completely unable to handle even a modicum of bad news or inconvenience -- how often do you hear people complaining about plane delays as being hell -- I think that we as a nation need to stop writing about 9/11 in our books, plays, comics, and the like. Let a future generation take care of that, and everything we write will be better.
... anyway, as I was saying, you're never very far from a lecture in Freedom, and that bogs the book down, too, and Franzen spends so much time hectoring people that he has to cram in the actual story, which is part of why it feels rushed, too.
It's not a bad book. It's not a great book, either, but it's not a bad book. There were a few parts I liked, and I read it more or less eagerly. I liked Patty as a character and I imagine that I'll remember her for at least a while. I really liked Richard, too, and I think he deserved his own book, as he was at least as complicated as any other character there but wasn't the primary focus. I didn't like Joey at all, but that might have been the point of his character -- which makes it dicey to make about 1/3 of the book focus on him; it's tough to write a book about someone you don't want to read about, so Franzen did an okay job pulling that off.
(One other thing he didn't pull off: song lyrics. Anytime a writer puts fake song lyrics into a book, it comes off as cheesy and lame. Song lyrics work only within the context of the song, generally -- and divorced from a memory of the music, they may fail. If you've heard a song, and read the lyrics, your mind puts in the music mentally so that
It's the honky tonk woman
Gimme gimme gimme the honky tonk blues
Which would look stupid on paper standing alone doesn't seem as stupid when you can "hear" the music in your mind. But writers who make up the songs they then put lyrics into the book for don't have the music in the background, so the lyrics almost always look idiotic.)
But for whatever good qualities it had, here's my final word on it: I've said before that a mark of a really good book is that when I finish it, I set it aside and don't want to go on to read another book right away, trying to savor the really good book I just read.
When I finished Freedom, I wanted, instead, to move onto something else almost immediately. And, worse, as I was deciding what book to buy next, I had this exchange with Sweetie:
Sweetie: Did you buy a book yet?
Me: Not yet.
Sweetie: What's holding you up?
Me: I want to buy a book that's at least as good as Kraken.
Kraken was the book I'd read before Freedom. I wanted to make sure the next book I read was at least as good as Kraken -- because Freedom was already fading from my memory.
Read the wrap-up -- my response to two comments about this review -- here.
