Review
JP O’ Malley examines why Franzen’s newest novel had the critics slavering…
- Freedom
- Fourth Estate
Land of the Free
It’s rare that the release of a novel of literary fiction achieves such status in the mainstream media, but Jonathan Franzen’s latest mammoth of a novel, Freedom, has had everyone - from thieves stealing his glasses on his book tour, to president Obama choosing it as his holiday reading - helping to create a hype that is nothing short of brilliant for the publishing industry and lovers of literature around the world.
They say every true genius really only has one story to tell, for Franzen, it would seem the fascination of the nuclear family, and all its failures and flaws, is something that he revisits time and time again to make sense of the human condition.
With Freedom, just like his three previous novels, Franzen reels the reader into the comfortable, leafy, middle class comfort zone of the American Suburbs. Slowly, over the course of the book, Freedom takes a satellite snapshot of the dysfunctional makeup of the Berglund family.
The success of this book lies in the narrative technique that Franzen works from.
Written from the point of view of Patty Berglund, yet ambiguously also as Franzen as the third person narrator.
It’s Franzen’s ability to pace the novel and take his time at developing the story, yet still keeping the reader interested at all times, which makes this novel work so well.
Just like The Corrections before it, War and Peace is referenced several times in Freedom. Following in the tradition of Tolstoy and the 19th century novel, Franzen does a perfect job in Freedom at analysing the public sphere and the state of world order through the microcosmic lens of the Berglunds and the daily struggle of their family life.
Freedom is a book that addresses several issues in American culture over the last decade: The Iraq war, misanthropic rage on the left and right, environmentalism, the question of the growing world population, and the moral questions that lie deep at the heart of American imperialism.
Perhaps what makes Franzen stand above his peers in the literary world, what elevates this novel to what can undoubtedly be called a masterpiece, is his ability to cut to the core of what human relationships are all about, most notably the relationships between families, the fulcrum from where our societies values are based.
Franzen is not afraid to delve into some of the more difficult questions that a novelist should dare to ask such as: is the notion of family a failed entity in itself from the start? Has the notion of a liberal, free, society, created more problems than we could have ever possibly imagined?
The answers do not arrive by the end of the novel, but in tackling these questions head on, Freedom has secured its place alongside the greats in the canon of literature.
