Jonathan Franzen, Freedom: A Novel, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, 576 pages, $28.
Freedom is either the biggest punking of liberal dogma perpetrated in a long time or the best written inadvertent debunking of liberal assumptions ever. Jonathan Franzen doesn’t much like conservatives and misunderstands America, but try as he might, Freedom — which he intends as an ode to the European vision of rights originating from government — ends up with a fairly conservative message in support of markets, marriage, and unalienable rights. That’s not to say it’s enjoyable to read, and in a way its apparently unintended conservatism is on par with the rest of the book.
Nobody in the book cares much about religion as a way to know God or develop a moral sense — or if his characters have deeper motives, Franzen does not care much about them. The unthinkingly liberal Berglund family and their friends experiment with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, though without much rebellion in it. They have no deeper sense of anything other than themselves. The shadowy corrupt right-wingers are just assumed to exist, with no motives given for their scheming. Even the author’s self-conscious references to War and Peace are superficial.
The family man, Walter, gives up his lefty, anti-growth ideals to raise a family and work at 3M, though there is no mention of what his job entails. Eventually he returns to his youthful idealism before getting snookered by an Earth-raping natural resources company during the Bush years.
In the overly long section on Walter’s unintended job as a front man for mountaintop removal, Franzen, again seemingly inadvertently, provides a too-conspiratorial version of Bruce Yandle’s “Baptists and Bootleggers” policy model. Said corporate planetary rapist just happens to fund a pro-Israel, right-wing think tank while holding a no-bid contract to supply unsafe vehicles to troops in Iraq. When Walter’s estranged son, Joey, rebels against his parents by embracing conservative politics and showing an interest in his mother’s Jewish background in pursuit of money and status, he (naturally) works first for the think tank and later as a subcontractor in the company’s Iraq war machinations.
Unfortunately, Franzen wants his novel to be what the book jacket calls “an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time,” using the contrived plot devices to round out his indictment of America in the 2000s. Fortunately, the dreadful political and socioeconomic commentary is merely background to Franzen’s much better portrait of a troubled family.
Even so, Freedom really is dreadful. Walter’s future mother-in-law calls him “conservative” because he argues for zero population growth and Club of Rome-style limits on economic growth. At one point, Walter’s best friend and rival for his wife’s affection gives a Barack-Obama-campaigning-in-San-Francisco summation of the difficulty marketing zero population growth: “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. … That’s what Bill Clinton figured out — that we can’t win elections by running against personal liberties. Especially not against guns, actually.”
A more honest accounting of the Left’s priesthood would be hard to find: Decide where the poor should go to school, how they should get health care, and what they can eat, take away their guns, and ridicule their beliefs all in the name of protecting the planet.
In the end, the book is best read for its insight into the author’s cramped worldview. As such, however, it provides an accurate picture of the reflexive Left — those who hate Charles Koch and Art Pope while having no problem with George Soros and Jim Goodmon.
Franzen does not understand or care why people are conservative, religious, entrepreneurial, or even successful. He does not understand or care about people who are not white, upper middle class, Northern, and urban. The low income and rural inhabitants of this fictional world are caricatures, generally more sympathetic than the main characters, but still caricatures. You can imagine that if somebody had a Gadsden flag on his lawn, that person would be on Medicare. The only non-European person in the story is Walter’s star-crossed lover, the young South Asian Lalitha, whose Otherness seems inserted for a set piece on racism in rural West Virginia with a few comments on her enunciation thrown in for good measure. All of which presents America as an unattractive left-leaning caricature of itself.
So how does this mess eventually affirm conservative values and — despite Franzen’s stalwart efforts — America? The troubled marriages all remain intact instead of falling into divorce. The rebellious children reconcile with their parents. Friendships are restored. Barbecues, family visits, and normality win out. After half a century of floating from dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction, the Berglund family falls into America.
But that is where Franzen ends his story, at the very point where the characters actually might become likable.