Jonathon Franzen's Freedom will definitely find its place on college syllabi as soon as its published in paperback. The theme is right there in the title and any time you stop to remember that, you chuckle, because there it is, in the novel, being fiendishly costly and soul-crushing. Only those who lack freedom seem really free and yet seem maddenly flat, as characters. I'm thinking of Connie and Lalitha here, fellow readers. Freedom's political extremism and wacky family politics recall White Teeth, without having the freshman over-achieving silliness that novel had. Franzen deserves the comparison to Gatsby, if only because a body of water at its center is the locus of the main characters' dreams and aspirations, and so much goes awry for people for whom the reader feels so ambivalent.
Anyway, I'm being vague because the novel is too complex to summarize, and because I only finished it 10 minutes ago and haven't digested it completely. Two thoughts: Clarence Darrow said, "Freedom is a hard thing to preserve. In order to have enough, you must have too much." Freedom, the novel, holds a mirror to that, and makes me wish that it weren't so. I wish we could be freer with less.
1 comment:
I'm 1/3 way into book. Finally got involved in it, so much so that had to get out of bed at 11:15 pm to fetch peanut butter and crackers (twice!) to carry me through another half hour of reading.
Was skeptical at first but now am both enthralled and horrified by this story. I see the mistakes of so many of my friends and myself, even though we knew better.
MIL
Post a Comment