Bourgeois burdens

Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen
(Vivid Publishing, 2010, 240 pages)

Rarely is Jonathan Franzen's name mentioned in the absence of fawning praise.

Since the critical and commercial hit of 2001's The Corrections, taste-makers have hailed him as ''the voice of a generation'', a novelist who ''uniquely reflects the way we live now'', and, without the barest hint of restraint, a ''genius of Tolstoyan proportions''.

In an era where the novel is apparently on its deathbed, Franzen has become what many of us believed extinct -- a bona fide literary superstar.

Franzen's much publicised spat with Oprah in 2001 catapulted his name into mainstream consciousness, and ensured healthy sales amongst cultural elites who viewed Oprah's Book Club as a blight on the literary landscape.  Meanwhile, The Corrections continued to notch up awards and acclamation.  By the end of 2003, his work had wormed its way into popular culture, and Franzen had become one of the biggest names in the American literary scene.  But rather than bask in his celebrity, Franzen went to ground.  Readers desperate for a new novel had to content themselves with a few titbits of criticism, a collection of personal essays, and a reflective piece on the joys of bird watching.

Nine years later, he has re-emerged with Freedom, a gargantuan work of realist fiction which, like The Corrections before it, purports to tell the story of modern America as reflected through a dysfunctional modern family.

With Freedom, Franzen further pitches himself as the biographer of America's middle class by chronicling the intimate relationships of the Berglunds, an impossibly polite, unfailingly moral Midwestern family -- or so it would seem.  When the novel opens, their ideal suburban domesticity has fallen spectacularly to pieces -- committed environmentalist Walter has inexplicably taken a job with a destructive coal mining firm in West Virginia, perfect homemaker Patty has spiralled into alcohol dependence, and golden child Joey has abandoned his family to move in with the uncouth Republicans next door.  Franzen spends the next 500 pages of the novel painstakingly reconstructing the events which have led the Berglunds to the brink of collapse through a series of extended set pieces rendered in exacting detail.

But Franzen's ambition extends well beyond the family saga.  He manoeuvres his characters through a world where the personal is inextricably connected with the political in an attempt to produce a document of the post-9/11 era.  The Berglunds' spiritual crumbling and the manner in which it occurs is a reflection of the crippling collective uncertainty of the liberal middle class following the fall of the.twill towers.

With their family unit fractured, the Berglunds each embark on a journey to satiate their emptiness -- Patty begins an affair with Walter's best friend;  Walter immerses himself in a futile quest to save a threatened species of bird;  and Joey chases further emotional and financial independence from his parents.  This desire for radical reinvention has disastrous consequences as the Berglunds are forced to confront the tyranny of choice.  Freedom shows Franzen at his most political as he crushes his characters underneath the weight of their decisions, attempting to construct a clumsy allegory of the supposed failures of the free market.  The freedom Franzen affords the Berglunds throughout the novel is contingent with giving them enough rope to hang themselves.  They are portrayed as being at the mercy of choice in a world where mistakes are not only a possible consequence of such liberation but an inevitability.

This is most startlingly exposed by Joey's misadventures in New York.  Imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit that puts him at odds with his father's relentless liberal moralising, Joey falls in with a crowd of ''frat boy Republicans'' and leverages this into employment with a warmongering right-wing think tank.  He suppresses his nagging reticence about the validity of the Iraqi conflict to engage with unscrupulous, profit-driven defence contractors with an appropriately devastating outcome.

As Freedom progresses, Franzen increasingly struggles to suppress his authorial voice.  Much of the second half of the novel is hijacked by his personal prejudices -- Walter's anti-population rants read increasingly like the author's own personal diatribes, and Franzen's talent for creating rich, fully-formed characters evaporates whenever he is forced to portray a businessman or Republican.  That a writer of such skill and ambition should allow himself to succumb to political stereotyping is unforgivably lazy, and the quality of the work is diminished by its lopsided perspective.

It is Franzen's contention that the obsession with freedom in the wake of 9/11 has stunted American society.  He writes that ''the personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage'', as if this is reason enough to avoid pursuing such an ideal.  It is a defeatist mantra not uncommon to the liberal middle class about whom Franzen writes, and who are most fervent in their praise for Franzen's work.  He has succeeded in reflecting their world view, but it is an insular view, a self-obsessed view, and it constrains a novel which becomes increasingly unsatisfying as it progresses.

With Freedom, Franzen has indeed captured a voice, but it is the voice of a privileged subset of society, rather than a generation.  Although a storyteller of considerable talent, Franzen's reluctance to step outside of his personal perspective inhibits his ability to make an enduring statement about the realities of modern American life.  Ultimately, it is what prevents Freedom from being a truly great work of art.

Post-script:  Perhaps the greatest irony surrounding the release of Freedom is that, despite their previous acrimony, both Oprah and Franzen have assented to the novel being selected for the latest instalment of Oprah's Book Club.

It seems capitalism really does heal all wounds.