This book grabbed me from the first page in my living room and did not let go until the last page in the tub. In between, my supply of clean shirts and groceries dwindled but my interest did not. This is a fascinating study of a dysfunctional American family in the 21st century. The characters tear into each other with savage love and hatred, and the reader watches as if this were a slow-motion train wreck. Each characters biography has so much detail and flavor that you feel as if you know them as well as a close acquaintance. While reading this, my wife was reading another book and having trouble relating the names of the main characters. Not the case with 'Freedom'.
The book begins with an overture that relates the history of Walter the 3M and Nature Conservancy attorney and his wife, ex-basketball star Patty, in their St. Paul neighborhood. They raise two kids, fight a lot with neighbors and each other. Walter is such a greenhead that his conscience does not allow him to drive to work, rather he walks or bikes. Next the book moves into an autobiography by Patty, in which she confesses her love for Richard, the Dionysian musician, and ex-college roommate of Walter. Richard spurns Patty, she runs to Walter, they subsequently marry, but she cannot get Richard out of her head. Richard in turn has some borderline homo-erotic thing for Walter, though not overtly....he admires Walter's intellect, whereas Walter is envious of how cool Richard is. A second-tier of characters, Jessica and Joey who are the children of Walter and Patty, Joey's girlfriend Connie, and Walter's young assistant Lalitha round out the cast.
What we essentially have here is a 21st century update of 'No Exit'. Or the plot of the J. Geils song 'Love Stinks'. The dialogue is accurate and unflinching. Not a false note is struck until the novel's denouement, in which things wrap up a bit too neatly.
The idea Franzen explores here is the nature of freedom. Freedom is an ideal state that secular Western Democracies enshrine, yet the more free we become, the less happy as well. It seems happiness does not lie on the road to freedom, but what lies on that road is a sort of resignation. The novel pushes this point when Joey takes a trip to South American with a beautiful woman to buy junk parts to sell to the US military. Joey suddenly develops a conscience; he cannot have sex with this woman as he is married, and he does not want to sell the junk to the US military. This return to marriage is echoed in the closing of the novel, in which Walter and Patty, separating after each one has an affair, return to one another and learn that they are better together, even with all the fighting and arguments, than apart.
For the person for whom Freedom is an ideal, what lies inside the heart of the man who pursues it? Neither religion nor love have any power to illuminate the lives of the characters. 'Love' in any manifestation is not present, neither in the bond of matrimony between Walter and Patty, nor the bond of friendship between Walter and Richard (their bond is a complex weave of envy and admiration). The bond between a parent and child is also strained; Patty's children hardly speak to her as Patty's smother love drove Joey away and her indifference left Jessica cold. Walter and Joey barely speak to one another since Joey left home at 16 to live with his girlfriend. Neither does the ideal of an ennobled higher calling have any power. Walter's passion in middle-age to save a small migratory bird from extinction leaves him bitter and angry and advocating a policy of depopulating the countryside. Finally, the artist Richard has drugs and music to vent his rage.
This is an honest in-depth portrayal of a modern American family. The sweep and breadth of the book is marvelous. I am just glad it is not my life.
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