In including Jonathan Franzen's new novel in this blog I must put my hands up and declare openly that this represents something of a bending of the rules. Strictly speaking, Freedom was not in the original five wine boxes that travelled from Edinburgh to Manchester. Knowing how highly I rated The Corrections, Gregory bought Freedom for me for Valentine's Day (much better than a bunch of flowers) before I had started this blog. The temptation proved too much for me, especially when I realised that I could take it away with me as a holiday read. Last week we were in rural Shropshire, trying in vain to understand the workings (or non-workings) of a wind turbine in an "eco-cottage" we had rented in hopes of a relaxing Easter break. It turns out that constant worry about whether the lights are going to stay on and whether the woodburner will stay lit is no friend to relaxation. The need for back-up in the form of a diesel generator also compromised the eco-credentials somewhat: ironically, the generator had to run for four hours continuously to jump-start the turbine into action. Still, the landscape was beautiful, and we managed to get some good walks in. In a way, though, we spent our most enjoyable day snowed in. A blizzard had raged overnight, and when we woke up the ground was several inches deep in snow, with more blowing horizontally, building up deep drifts. There was nothing to do but remake the fire in the woodburner and settle in for a long day of reading.
Gregory had David Mitchell's latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (much recommended), through which he proceded at a phenomenal rate. I, in between obsessing about the fire and constantly rearranging its logs to no good purpose, made good progress with Freedom. It's not always the case that a novel hooks you from the very first paragraph - most take a bit more getting into than that, I find - but when one does it is a particular pleasure. Within a few chapters I found myself being drawn into the same territory as The Corrections - disfunctional family life in modern America - and revisiting the somewhat choppy emotional sea of dismay and fascination in which I had read it, on a trip to Edinburgh in 2003. The uncertainty I felt at the time about whether I wanted to leave London for the Athens of the North is now inseparable in my mind from the heavily ironic, tragi-comedy of manners which made Franzen's name when it first came out in 2001. Freedom has been a long time coming - Franzen has been occupied with essays and journalism in the meantime - but it's a weighty successor, both in terms of its content and its length: it's a big ole' 600-pager.
At the centre of the novel is, as you might expect, a family - Patty and Walter Berglund and their children, Jessica and Joey. Walter's college roomate, Richard Katz, also plays a pivotal role. Franzen begins by approaching his subjects obliquely, from the perspective of their erstwhile neighbours in Ramsey Hill, a now fully gentrified neighbourhood of St Paul, Minnesota. We learn that Patty and Walter moved into the area as a young married couple, a symptom of as well as a vital force in its transformation, and have spent twenty or so years there, bringing up their children and enduring a complex feud with their neighbours, the Monaghans. During the course of this long, inexhaustible war of attrition, Patty morphes from a cheerful neighbour with never a bad word to say about anyone into an embittered and disappointed woman, given to absenting herself to the family's lake house up-country for extended and unexplained stays. When the novel opens, the Berglunds have relocated to Washington DC, where Walter has become embroiled in some similarly obscure scandal involving the US coal industry and its enthusiasm for blowing the tops of mountains; their former neighbours are at a loss to understand how this could have happened, given Walter's impeccable green credentials.
So much for the bare bones of the story. For the rest of the novel, Franzen fills in the gaps, taking us deep into the heart not only of the Berglund family but also of the forebears responsible for its existence. In the first substantial section, Patty, in the guise of a third-person narrative, tells the story of her East Coast upbringing, her considerable talent for basketball and her ill-treatment at the hands of her parents, who persuade her not to press charges against a boy who rapes her at a party because it will cause tension between themselves and his parents. Patty then goes on to recount the events of her college years, marriage to Walter and years of motherhood, which reveal among much else that she has failed to learn certain key lessons from her own parents about the importance of giving all one's children equal attention. Patty loves her daughter, Jessica, but it's her son whom she really adores. Feelings which should be focused on Walter have been misdirected somewhere, with the result that the real emotional intimacy in the Berglund household is between mother and son, and not between husband and wife. Hence Patty's distress when Joey breaks ranks in the dispute with the Monaghans, the next-door neighbours whose daughter, Connie, has become his girlfriend, and moves in with them. The Berglunds are disintegrating, and all it takes is the reappearance of Richard Katz, Walter's closest friend and the long-ago object of Patty's lust, to complete the slide into chaos.
There are so many strands to this novel that it is difficult to give a full picture of its richness in a brief plot summary. Each member of the family has his or her time in the spotlight: we move from Patty to Joey, Jessica and Walter, meeting also Patty and Walter's parents, grandparents and siblings. The generational mine-shaft is deep and full of undigested events, unhealed wounds and unresolved conflicts. The tragedy of Freedom is in the damage we inflict on our children without meaning to, within the infinitely wide field that opens up once we've covered the basics of feeding them, clothing them and providing them with somewhere safe and warm to live. When Patty asks her mother towards the end of the novel why she never came to any of her basketball games, Mrs Emerson is at a loss for an answer: clearly distressed, she can nonetheless come up with nothing better than vague speculations about how it wasn't really her thing. Finally, heartbreakingly, she admits, "I guess my life hasn't always been easy, or happy, or exactly what I wanted. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they'll break my heart". The narrator continues, "and this was all Patty got from her, then or later. It wasn't a lot, it didn't solve any mysteries, but it would have to do". There are very few neat or easy answers in Freedom about why people behave as they do: we are left contemplating the dispiriting fact that sometimes we just can't help but hurt the people we love. Our better selves are not always operational, and that's just how it is. Yet despite all this, there is still a gentleness and hopefulness in the novel. As it draws to a conclusion, and the narrative voice opens out once more to view the Berglunds from a greater distance, we see that Franzen has taken pity on his readers and allowed something to be salvaged from the wreckage. I found Freedom a hard read as well as a compulsive and very enjoyable one, and was grateful for some solace after 600 pages.
Less reassurance is on offer to mitigate the novel's other important undertow, the environmental chaos which results from America's insatiable quest for non-renewable energy resources. Motivated by a deep desire to make a difference, Walter leaves his job with the Nature Conservancy to work with oil baron Vin Haven, who combines his friendship with senior members of the Bush administration and intimacy with the big energy companies with a passion for the cerulean warbler, a near-endangered bird that migrates between North and South America. Convinced that only a pragmatic approach can win the day, Walter hands over the rights to mountain-top removal in an area of West Virginia in exchange for the space to create a protected reserve for the warbler. Unsurprisingly, all does not end well. In the end, Walter is forced to confront the impossibility of imposing limits on our freedom to mess things up in whatever way we choose. The family mess and the environmental mess intersect in subtle and complex ways in this novel, with the title finding a range of resonances as the story progresses. I was reminded at times of Ian McEwan's Solar, but found Freedom a vaster and more profound work. For anyone who is a parent or has one, it makes for very thought-provoking and challenging reading.
