Franzen’s “Freedom” and the importance of fun

Beyond the beautiful writing and the smart observations, here's one more reason to love this book: It's not dull

By axelrod

Reading along through this brilliant champagne tumbler of a book, I began to sense a mental dissonance in the way people are talking about it. The situation is a mirror image of my MFA workshops. As we discussed people’s work we could mention the “show versus tell” conundrum, notice instances of “image patterning,” praise a nice description or a sense of place. If we didn’t like a piece, we could talk about anything but the one thing that mattered, the awful, dreaded taboo word: boring. One professor — he was a newbie — said something unguarded once about how he couldn’t imagine why anyone would actually want to read the story we were discussing. “It’s dull!” he exclaimed, as if everyone would understand.

He was gone soon after.

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The "Freedom" author discusses "Franzenfreude," Obama's reading choice and the criticism that really hits home

By Salon Staff

Jonathan Franzen

Topics:Salon Reading Club, Jonathan Franzen, Our Picks, Books

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.

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Yes, white male writers are too dominant in highbrow literature, but the "Freedom" author is one of the good guys

By Ester Bloom

Why Jonathan Franzen is the wrong face for "Franzenfreude"

Topics:Salon Reading Club, Jonathan Franzen, Writers and Writing, Books

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.

: Ester Bloom's writing has appeared in the Apple Valley Review, Conte: A Journal of Narrative Poetry, The Morning News, PANK, Bundle, Nerve.com, and Salon.com, and is collected on her website, esterbloom.com. She is currently at work on a book of comic essays entitled "Never Marry a Short Woman." More Ester Bloom

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Richard isn't a stand-in for the author, but the character's irresistible negativity is what makes the novel work

By Juliet Waters

"Freedom": Which character is Jonathan Franzen?

Topics:Salon Reading Club, Fiction, Jonathan Franzen, Books

“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.

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The Salon Reading Club concludes its discussion of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom"

By Laura Miller

Road trips, political rage and catnapping

Topics:Salon Reading Club, Jonathan Franzen, Books

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?

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

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Why are so many writers, including Jonathan Franzen, so obsessed with creating "likable" characters?

By ridesallyride

Reading Club: Why we want likable characters

Topics:Salon Reading Club, Jonathan Franzen, Books

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).