The Book Sill - Freedom

Anybody who has read Freedom has noticed the references to War and Peace. I counted three. Enough to make Tolstoy’s novel the main reference in Franzen’s.

Why? Most reviews published in British newspapers focus on Franzen’s attempt to become the Great American Novelist – the way Tolstoy is the Quintessential Russian Novelist and War and Peace the Great Russian Novel. Referencing it would be a mandatory exercise for any US writer aspiring to this status, following on Saul Bellow and John Updike. Contenders are lining up, chroniclers say. Franzen is one – and this, as Jonathan Jones puts it, at a time when Philip Roth is still alive...

This might be true. I am not familiar enough with the intricacies of American publishing politics to appreciate the cold and concealed war for the new Number One seat. Unfortunately.

This is unfortunate in more than one sense. Franzen’s novel swarms with nudges to New York liberal intelligentsia, to America’s internal politics, to the zeitgeist of the East Coast in the Bush years. America, in Franzen’s novel, appears as two motorways linking St Pauls Minnesota, New York and Washington (we catch a glimpse of Chicago along the way). The rest of the planet is an echo to American concerns: Baghdad is a phone call away, Argentina is nothing more than “Spanish-speaking civilization”, Paraguay looks like any dirty scrap yard in redneck country. It is all the treatment the outside world gets in Freedom. Everything else is East Coast civilization or Canadian border wilderness. Needless to say, most of this world view is completely lost to the forty-something French citizen of Europe that I am. In a sense, Freedom is a novel which managed to make me feel ignorant and naïve whilst failing to teach me anything I could relate to.

And though, I read through its six hundred pages like through a novel by John Irving. What is it with these American story tellers that hooks us up to lives so foreign to ours?

There is actually no mystery. Writing is a skill. To some extent, it is like any other skill. It can be taught and learned. And it is taught well on the other side of the ocean. Most of the reviews missed this point. Literary chroniclers have become impervious to the American skill of writing. They seem only concerned about the sociology of publishing: position, attitude, posture. But while sociology provides powerful tools to understand the mystical powers of stories and writers, it is also a dry bitch, bathing in and exuding cynicism. There is nothing in it that nourishes a reader’s soul. The debates around the politics of Freedom are only meaningful to those who spend their lives in literary salons, book opening cocktail nights and publishing argy-bargy (“All literature is political” someone recently told me during such a discussion. I forgot his or her name and face. Probably another of these beings who never reads fiction but knows everything about it). For us readers, who buy books because we intend to read them, who base our judgement on the books story, universe, characters and style, it matters little whether Franzen seeks to replace Updike or to better Roth, it matters little whether in our post-Obama world the political stance of Walter, Freedom lead male character, is lamely naïve. There is already enough myth in twenty-first century America to give Freedom the epic dimension it aspires to.

For this is how the reference to War and Peace must be understood. Like Tolstoy, Franzen sees his book as the painting of the new world he lives in (post Napoleon there, post Bin Laden here). He also uses the open form of the novel as a frame for his ideas. This is a very risky exercise. Only the greatest writers go through it unscathed. But such is the sheer essence of novels, their core property: the ability to mix genres, to give space to an exposé about Soukourov’s strategies and the art of war, to an essay about overpopulation and the scandal of American Corporates Empire, while unfurling a family saga.

I am not persuaded by Franzen’s attempt. His story, as compelling as it is, is too flawed. Franzen struggles to think outside his head. His characters never escape his East Coast liberal mindset: at twenty-one, Richard the self-centred womanizer punk singer (who should, to quote Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, only care about getting high and getting laid) entertains with his ecologist friend Walter discussions belonging to high-brow TV political programmes. Patty’s autobiographical sections sound like a Woody Allen’s script. Patty is an ex-athlete and competitive to the extreme. She was also raped by a schoolmate as a teenager and persuaded by her parents not to do anything about it. This surely is enough to develop in anybody some form of obsession, if not madness. Not in Patty though, who, apart from bearing a grudge to her mother for the next twenty years, grows into a perfectly sane and functional woman – albeit not without her problems. Even her daughter Jessica is, at merely twenty, as politically aware as Franzen himself – and probably more of an adult!

Franzen’s characters over-analyse everything. Through their constant reading of their daily situation we hear only one voice: Franzen’s depressive cynicism. Lalitha, the young and stunning Indian girl who falls in love with Walter, seems different at first. I would have loved to learn from her about her torrid and irrepressible attraction to Walter. But Franzen is incapable of giving this beautiful character the voice she deserves. As a result, despite the wide range of personalities he brings on stage, his cast feels one dimensional. This wouldn’t be important in a genre story. For a social novel however, it is a fatal flaw. John Irving might be a lesser intellectual, but his characters are flesh and blood – creeping flesh and boiling blood. They feel as much as they think, they react more than they act. They stand in each other’s way with their whole body and soul, their past, their desires, their doom.

Despite being a well-built page-turner, Freedom is no Owen Meany. It is not even In One Person. But I will redeem it on account of the lineage it claims for itself: the great European novel and its freedom of form.