FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen (HarperCollinsCanada), 562 pages, $34.99 cloth. Rating: NNNN
If you’re going to refer to War And Peace in your novel, you better have the talent to back it up. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom might not have a big war to focus on like Tolstoy’s, but his insights into how humans behave (or don’t) with peacetime freedom are hugely entertaining. Like The Corrections, this is a domestic literary page-turner.
[rssbreak]
Walter Berglund and Patty Emerson couldn’t be more different when they meet in a Midwest college. She’s a star basketball player who grew up in a wealthy New York suburb, while he’s a hard-working country-born intellectual lefty. Between them is Walter’s roommate and best friend, the glamorous, womanizing musician Richard Katz, whom they each come to love (and hate) throughout their decades-long marriage.
Playing with chronology, point of view and narrative form – Patty’s sections are written as an exercise for her therapist – Franzen embraces many themes: deforestation and overpopulation, corrupt government contractors, post-9/11 anxiety, even the aging indie rocker scene.
But mostly he digs deeply into his characters, outlining their intergenerational grievances and the archetypes families force them to assume: hero, martyr, rival. No scrap of egotism or petty complaint escapes his satiric eye.
Sometimes Franzen tries to squeeze too much exposition in dialogue, and if he has one weakness as a writer, it’s his inability to paint pictures. We know his people inside out, but we don’t really know what they or their surroundings look like.
Still, these are quibbles in a book that’s as emotionally rich and full of life and ideas as any recent American novel.
Franzen reads with Sara Gruen, Steven Heighton and Jack Hodgins on October 28.
By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.
