Freedom

I just finished reading Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom. I should probably let it just sink in for a bit before any declarations, but my own sense, from the first page, was that it was a big soap opera of a novel and not particularly notable except for the pace of its narrative. It's a quick read. It's a family saga, and it has lots of references to contemporary America. The characters are not uninteresting, but I never found myself caring much about any of them. And so from beginning to end I found myself wondering what the appeal was. Now that I've finished the book, I'm still wondering.

Of course, one explanation is just that everyone has his own taste in fictions. I was struck right away by similarities to John Updike, especially the Rabbit saga, but Franzen doesn't seem to me to have the writerly skill of Updike. Neither his story nor his characters seem to resonate the way Updike's do. There appears to be much more depth to Updike's fictions. But this book is obviously appealing and has sold well, and many people seem very impressed with it. I've heard some suggest that his introduction of the World Trade Center attacks was significant, but even that seems to push the book in a direction it doesn't really want to go.

Having said that much, I will admit I was entertained for a few days and was not especially disappointed even in the somewhat predictable and rather contrived happy endings for nearly all of the novel's many characters. Perhaps that's its appeal. It's a sort of contemporary American romance in which everything eventually does work out and most folks can find a way to live more or less happily even after going through a certain amount of trauma. I can't decide whether that should be comforting or offensive, whether the book is meant to be realism or satire. As I said, none of the characters are really very sympathetic. In fact, I thought most of them were pretty scary. If that was intentional, then perhaps the book is really much darker than I realized, and the superficiality I sensed wasn't in the novel but in me.

Anyway, I read a more or less current American novel, something I probably wouldn't have done if my wife hadn't checked it out of the local library. Libraries really are a great thing. I hope they last a while longer. Some books you just would never read if you had to buy them.