Welcome to the first session of the Salon Reading Club, everyone! For those just joining us, we’re going to be discussing Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom,” for the next three Saturdays, beginning today with the first part of the book, “Good Neighbors,” which takes us through the end of Patty’s “autobiography” (Pages 1 through 187). Next Saturday, we’ll consider half of the second part, “2004,” reading through the end of the chapter titled “Enough Already” (Pages 191 to 382). On Sept. 18, we’ll talk about the conclusion (See the sidebar to the right for more information on the Salon Reading Club.)
I’m going to kick off the discussion with a few questions and observations, but please feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments thread. Just remember to restrain yourselves from discussing anything that happens after Page 187, so you don’t spoil the story for everybody else. And it should go without saying that if you haven’t gotten to Page 187 yet and don’t want to be spoiled, then don’t read any further. (Personally, I’m not the kind of reader who minds being tipped off to future plot points, so if you’re like me, dive in.) And remember, if you have questions for Jonathan Franzen himself, don’t forget to post them, since we’ll be interviewing him at the end.
It may seem a tall order to ask that you polish off 187 pages of a literary novel in a week, but I, for one, found myself gobbling up Patty’s autobiography. (Granted, I was on vacation, but it still took me all of two days.) One of the peculiar qualities of “Freedom” is how hard it is to summarize the novel’s appeal. “It’s about a marriage,” I remember telling a friend before getting stuck. And that doesn’t sound terribly exciting, I know. Nevertheless, I was completely entranced by this book.
I suspect that’s one reason why the reviews for “Freedom” might strike some people as over the top; hyperbole is difficult to resist when a novel this low-concept has such a powerful effect. Why did I care so ardently about what Patty makes of her life? I suspect that the answer is because Franzen does, and he surpasses most other contemporary novelists in instilling that investment and that conviction in his readers.
Still, it wouldn’t be a new Jonathan Franzen novel without the backlash — the grousing from less-celebrated authors and from those perplexing individuals who are reflexively opposed to any fiction that’s widely praised. To my mind, it’s precisely because Franzen is able to impress critics and sell millions of books that he stirs up such kerfuffles; for an author with a reputation for sticking to old-fashioned realism, he’s a stealth violator of conventional boundaries. Is anyone in the club finding it hard to approach “Freedom” without grappling with all this extraneous baggage?
As for our first selection, I was especially charmed by the decision to make Patty a jock. Such characters are pretty rare in literary fiction, and Franzen gets so much out of this aspect of her life. There’s Patty’s yearning to belong, perpetually rebuffed by her hypocritical family, and her mistrust of groups arising from the same source. It makes sense that anyone made so acutely aware, so young, of the conflicting interests in most human relationships would be drawn to the relatively clean, straightforward alliances of what she calls Jock World.
Yet Patty can’t help but get entangled in one weird, ambivalent situation after another. Eliza, that borderline personality, zeroes in on her like a heat-seeking missile. (A terrific depiction of the bizarre, overwrought female friendship that often blossoms during the college years, there.) And that leads her directly into the novel’s central triangle.
I happened to be reading “Freedom” while listening to an audiobook of Anthony Trollope’s “Can You Forgive Her?” and despite Franzen’s many allusions to “War and Peace,” Trollope’s was the 19th century novel I kept being reminded of while considering the Patty-Walter-Richard nexus. (Trollope was, after all, the author of “The Way We Live Now,” a title that so many of Franzen’s reviews have also referenced.) “Can You Forgive Her?” recounts two linked romantic triangles in which a young woman wavers between a man who seems “too good” — that is, so moral and admirable that she feels extraneous and inadequate by comparison — and his more alluring, bad-boy rival: much like Patty Berglund.
Several reviewers have linked the title “Freedom” to contemporary political trends and consumerism, but for me it’s also about the often-made claim that the sort of long, realistic novel written in the 19th century can’t speak to modern American life. Once, a woman could be destroyed by choosing the wrong husband, or by committing adultery, as Madame Bovary and Tess of the D’Urbervilles do. Now, people simply shrug and move on to another partnership.
Without those old social constraints, the argument goes, the stakes are too low in stories about contemporary courtship and marriage. We are simply too free for our everyday lives to matter as a subject for realistic fiction, and so the limitations of realism itself became the paramount subject. As the late, great experimental novelist W.G. Sebald once said of Jane Austen, “Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, then I think it is legitimate, within that context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions. But I think these certainties have been taken from us in the course of history.”
Franzen, it seems to me, is bent on proving that, even without those certainties, this kind of novel can still work, can still feel important. Over the next three weeks I hope we will discuss whether or not he succeeds.
OK, folks, have at it. Post your thoughts, questions, answers, predictions, complaints — whatever — in the comments thread.
As you know, we really liked Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” Over the past month, as part of the second edition of the Salon Reading Club, Laura Miller and Salon readers have been discussing everything about the book, from the characters we loved — or loved to hate — to our favorite sentences or the most memorable moments. Over the past month, we’ve also collected your questions for Jonathan Franzen (in the letters section and via e-mail) about everything from the “Franzenfreude” backlash to his own personal writing process.
What do you think of the phrase “Franzenfreude”?
I think in German it literally means “joy in Franzen.” But I’m no stranger to literary envy and am in no position to deplore it in others.
There’s been discussion in the Salon Reading Club about which character in “Freedom” most represents you. Which one is it?
All four characters draw equally on my experience of life, though I admit to having a particular fondness for the youngest of them.
The characters in “Freedom” appear to make decisions, but they’re all rooted in their experience and biology. It’s striking, for example, how much like Patty’s father Walter turns out to be, and her relationships with both Walter and Richard make all sorts of sense on the basis of her upbringing. Where do you come down, ultimately, on the question of free will?
This is exactly the kind of question I want to leave to the reader. The novelist is responsible for creating an experience, not for interpreting it.
The book has received a tremendous amount of publicity. Is there another book that you really liked that has recently come out, that you think might have been overshadowed by your own?
I’ve been so busy with publicity that I haven’t been able to read any recent releases, but reliable friends have told me that Jennifer Egan‘s and Gary Shteyngart‘s new books are very good.
Of the criticisms you’ve read of the book, which hits home the hardest?
Well, I don’t read reviews, so I’m not familiar with the criticisms. But I’m sad when I do a public event and somebody tells me — as if an author would want to hear this! — that my characters are unlikable. I feel like I’m being told that I myself am unlikable.
A lot of writers really suffer through the experience of writing. Do you have fun when you write?
I have fun when I finally crack a problem that’s been dogging me for months or years, and there were about a hundred such problems between the start and the finish of the project of writing “Freedom.” When I’ve solved an especially knotty problem, I stride around the office smacking my hands together in excitement. I wouldn’t describe making pages as “fun,” but during a year when pages are being made I’m conscious in a larger way of being genuinely happy.
Obama famously was photographed with a copy of “Freedom.” If he read it, what do you hope he took away?
I hope he was so preoccupied with urgent national affairs that he wasn’t able to take away much more than a general enjoyment of the experience. I didn’t vote for him in expectation of his mooning around pondering literary novels.
In a way, the book is about watching flawed humans during the downturn of an empire using their glorious “freedom” to do damage to those they love, to animals, to other countries. In writing the book, were you thinking of George W. Bush’s use and misuse of the word “freedom”?
I was indeed.
Having finally released three books back into the wild of the Brooklyn Public Library system — “Freedom,” “Catching Fire” and “The Passage” — I feel the time is right to weigh in on the literary meme of the moment, “Franzenfreude,” a term that, loosely defined, indicates that author Jonathan Franzen represents all that is wrong with the contemporary highbrow book world.
Is that stupid? Quite! Except there’s a caveat. The phenomenon referred to by “Franzenfreude” — the idea that the highbrow book world reserves its highest praise and most fawning attention for the works of men — is absolutely true. It just happens that Jonathan Franzen is a terrible poster boy for that problem.
Franzen writes gorgeous women. Fleshed-out, interesting, three-dimensional, vivid women, women with brains. He writes for them, too, and perhaps most important of all, he reads them. When, at a Brooklyn Book Festival panel, someone asked him what he was reading, he replied, “Edith Wharton.” To the follow-up question of what should we, his audience, be reading, he listed several books, all by female authors, including the “Ms. Hempel Chronicles,” of which, up to that point, I hadn’t even heard. (Then I read it. It was good!)
A friend and I cornered him after the panel to ask whether he’d realized he’d been promoting work by ladies. He blinked for a moment, then laughed and said it honestly hadn’t occurred to him.
Thus, “Franzenfreude” is the wrong label for this particular can of worms. (As a language nerd points out, it’s also stupid for other reasons.)
That said, let’s address the can of worms itself. Yes! Fiction by women is customarily and routinely dismissed by the intelligentsia in favor of fiction by men. Because why should fiction be any different than anything else? The most exalted spaces in any pantheon are reserved for men. So it has been, so it will be. This is because women can have babies, whereas men can only have egos, and also testicles, or something.
However! The less important the pantheon, the more likely it is that you can find a woman at the top of it.
The highbrow book world also dismisses almost all genre fiction. Genre fiction is where women reign supreme or, at the very least, hold their own: romance, mystery, young adult, sci fi, fantasy. Having just ingested the “Hunger Games” trilogy, a sci-fi Y.A. extravaganza that took not just me but America by storm, I feel particularly drawn to this point right now.
Even in most genre fiction, there remains an idea that boys won’t read books about girls. Hence the sad-but-true fact that J.K. Rowling couldn’t publish under the name “Joanne” for fear of frightening off huge numbers of young male readers. But this to me feels wrong. Step on the NYC subway right now and look around — I guarantee you that someone on that car is reading not “Freedom” but “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” That book is about, as you’ve perhaps heard, Lisbeth Salander, one of the most kick-ass female characters in any book of any genre. The “Golden Compass” books didn’t suffer for focusing on Lyra, another quite impressive young woman. Even Dan Brown’s idiot bestseller “The Da Vinci Code” was a feminist conspiracy theory.
Best of all, perhaps, is Suzanne Collins, whose hugely popular “Hunger Games” books center around Katniss, who doesn’t want to get married and doesn’t understand why having leg hair is bad. Written by a lady! Starring a lady! Yet everyone’s reading them. Hopefully the next J.K. Rowling can be inspired by this and publish under her full name.
This doesn’t, of course, solve the problem of the white male tastemakers — and the sufficient numbers of female tastemakers who concur — giving all the plaudits that matter to white male authors. As Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker author I admire, put it just this year in his tribute to J.D. Salinger: “In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ ‘The Great Gatsby,’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’”
What Gopnik meant to say, no doubt, was, “Here are three books I really dig!” He’s hardly the first intellectual to fall into the tar pit of generalizing from his own experiences. But it’s a disturbingly prevalent trend among white male tastemakers: assuming that what they relate to and find meaning in, the rest of us must as well, and that those books must be “the best.”
It’s crap, and I’m glad people are finally beginning to realize that. But leave Jonathan Franzen out of it, would you? He’s one of the good ones.
“There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.” This is the general consensus among the Berglunds’ former neighbors when, long after they’ve moved, Walter Berglunds’ name suddenly resurfaces in an unfavorable New York Times feature. “Freedom” is Jonathan Franzen’s 500-page exploration of just what that “not quite right” something is; and how it is that Walter went from left-wing ideologue “greener than Greenpeace” to lackey for a West Virginia coal mining company and figure of national media contempt.
This is not, however, as much Walter’s story as it is his wife Patty’s. One of the great ironies of the Oprah Book Club scandal of 2001 is how devoted Franzen actually is to creating complex female characters. “Freedom,” I would argue, is written very much for women readers, much more than “The Corrections” ever was (so I’m not surprised that Oprah has picked it for the her next Book Club), and much more for those readers than it is for the critics who are falling all over themselves to praise it (and I’m not bucking that trend).
But there’s also plenty in here to like for readers who hate Oprah and/or mistrust critics. Curmudgeons will love the character of Richard Katz, former alt-rock star and perennial post-punk girl magnet. He is best friend to Walter, but ultimately lover to Patty. In a world teeming with lifestyle missionaries, Richard is a grounding reminder of a brief moment in the ’90s when cynicism had a certain integrity. As Richard explains, “I don’t do belief. I don’t do vision.”
Yesterday, Curtis Sittenfeld argued in The Observer that Richard was something of a stand-in for Franzen who, like Richard, toiled in obscurity for decades until achieving commercial success in 2001. Franzen, however, does “do” belief and vision. It might seem like depressive realism isn’t actually a vision, but it’s the one that’s been keeping psychiatry going for over a century. I don’t think Franzen is Richard, but this book would be nothing without the balancing force of Richard’s irresistible negativity. He, Walter and Patty are the love triangle that keeps this novel as philosophically balanced as a geodesic dome.
Patty seems apolitical. But she is really only in a rigid state of rebellion against an intensely liberal family. She is a gentrification pioneer, and daughter of a famous public defender and feminist politician. Patty pushes strollers though “broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow.” She cooks from “The Silver Palate Cookbook” and uses cloth diapers. “She was already fully that thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.” So much so that the people who end up emulating her seem to have always disliked her.
There’s a hashtag popular on Twitter right now, #franzenfreude, that is unfortunately being used by women writers envious of Franzen’s current literary success. But franzenfreude is also a perfect description of just exactly what it is Franzen is so good at. He creates characters that you can’t help wanting bad things for. Only to turn around and make you love them as though they were part of the same tangle of rage and affection that people often usually only feel for members of their own family.
Bad things do happen to the Berglunds. Terrible things. And at a certain level they are undeniably, and often, terrible people. Patty loves her son, Joey, to a point creepily close to incest. Joey, barely a teenager, starts sleeping with the girl next door, and then moves in with her trashy cougar mom and her redneck boyfriend, because unlike his parents, they let him do whatever he wants. It’s easy to write him off as your garden-variety teenage sociopath. But gradually, using satire like paint stripper, Franzen patiently exposes the humanity that is almost always there if you get to know people well enough to let it emerge.
At one point Richard looks at Walter and sees exactly how Walter has “snapped under the pressure of thinking in too much detail about the fuckedness of the world.” Franzen writes like someone who has snapped like that countless times, but then, every time, beaten the path back to sanity a little wider.
Welcome to the third and final session of the Salon Reading Club for Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom.” Last week, we took the discussion up through Page 382, and now it’s time to consider the book’s conclusion. If you haven’t finished yet and are spoiler phobic, read no further. (See the sidebar to the right for more information on the Salon Reading Club)
As always, I’ll toss a few topics out in this introduction, but please feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments. Now’s your last chance to get in any questions you may have for Jonathan Franzen. He’ll being answering them next week.
I’m a little ambivalent about the ending of “Freedom.” While it was definitely satisfying to see Walter and Patty reunited, part of me thinks it’s not very realistic. But perhaps that’s the point; if those characters had done what most divorced couples do and kept moving on to new lives, they’d be exercising the American-style freedom about which Franzen is clearly so ambivalent. He doesn’t really show us how they manage to patch things up, which I find a bit mysterious, but I assume that it has something to do with both of them (but especially Patty) wanting to make right what they’d gotten so terribly wrong. Walter got the chance to fall apart (formerly Patty’s job) and Patty got to rescue him. (And poor Lalitha got a bird sanctuary named after her.)
What did you think of the way Franzen depicts the political climate of the mid-2000s? Walter’s road trip with Lalitha to promote Free Space is a Magical Hysteria Tour of the endemic rage of the period, which Walter regards as “loony,” even though it is, in a fashion, a reflection of the repressed anger he’s been nursing since his boyhood in the motel. There’s a strong sense that Americans have been making their politics carry an emotional load displaced from their personal lives — it’s a lot less destabilizing to rant on the Internet about Dick Cheney or Bill Clinton than to get into it with your spouse and parents, let alone your own messed-up self — to the detriment of public life.
Among the many delightful touches that I savored in this last part of the book was the way Jessica keeps flinging the authority of her youth in Lalitha’s face — “Did Lalitha not understand anything about young people’s new relationship with music?” — although the age difference is, what, seven years? A much less sympathetic character in the very last chapter, Linda, deploys a not dissimilar rhetorical tic whenever she thinks she’s losing the moral high ground in a conflict: She starts talking about her children, whom she clearly regards as a free pass for every selfish and vindictive thing she does. I’m sure some readers will call Linda a caricature, and I wish it were so. Alas, I have met people exactly like her.
In fact, the whole little neighborhood drama about the cats and the songbirds at the end deftly encapsulates the themes of the book: Walter is right, but in the wrong way. Linda is a monster, but taking her cat to the pound only makes him one, too. But, again, I’m not sure I’m optimistic enough to believe in Patty’s solution — even if I’d like to.
What do you think?
Likability is indeed just another word for “morality.” A huge section of the American reading public does not want art for art’s sake, or even realistic characters; it wants the books we read and the movies we see to be clever public service announcements, meant to uphold public morality.
Naturally, these unrealistic modern Achilles types must have some “likable” flaw, which is almost worse. It leads to the aesthetic of “quirkiness,” which has brought such success to Jonathan Safran Foer and Wes Anderson (probably the two masters of the modern safe-quirk genre).
I might point out that “The Corrections” was in some sense a morality tale, the classic American story of trying to get all the kids home for one last Christmas with the family. Well, not all literature has to be dangerous or extremely challenging, but frankly when I think of most modern American “literary” books, the epithet “cowardly” comes to mind. Paul Auster is a good example of an obviously talented (or even very talented) writer who simply can’t break free of certain strictures. All of his books have good sections and the prose overall is enviable, but the end result is unsatisfying.
It all reminds me of a classic defense mechanism, “You’re weird!” This epithet is used by many young people whenever they are confronted with a challenging person or a person with a challenging thesis. Having read many literary reviews on Amazon in order to get an idea of what the average person thinks about fiction, I’ve come to believe that half of the negative literary reviews can be broiled down to those two words: “You’re weird.”
The sad truth is that most American writers are professionals first, artists second. We need a Mark Twain to make all these Horatio Algers look ridiculous. The case of Nirvana and ’80s rock is also instructive.
Jonathan Franzen 
