In recent times, two guardrails have been established, it seems to me, beyond which lies the writerly abyss. On the one hand the profane, badly written, misogynistic fare in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and absurd treacle on the other in Eat, Pray, Love.
In Freedom, Franzen achieves the sweet spot between those two guardrails, and accomplishes what a good novel should do - give us fully formed characters (whether we actually like them or not).
The opening chapter of Freedom is not like the rest. Its style is almost like a report, a journalistic report. Looking back, one realizes that the author has established a number of markers that evolve throughout the book. But it is difficult to spot them in the first reading, since they are so integral to the narrative itself.
The second chapter is a tour de force. It is in one of the three main characters Patty's, voice (only). This chapter fully explores her personality and psyche and is a beautiful explanation of the markers that were laid out in the first chapter. You develop enormous empathy with Patty, not because Franzen is yanking emotional levers, but because of where the character is placed.
The middle part of the book fully explores the main characters. Clearly there are primary and secondary characters in the book. Because this is a novel and there is room to breathe, everyone of them is given a chance to grow, explore and express. The character of Walter (Patty's husband) grows from a sketch of an eccentric and cranky individual to a fully formed human being one can relate to.
As the book was approaching the end, I was filled with a tad bit of anxiety. Here was a very recognizable world that Franzen has created, but with a depth that we fail to perceive as hurried live-rs of our lives. In the last chapter, Franzen clearly had a choice. He could have opted for any trajectory - comedy, tragedy, or guns blazing. But to my utter delight, he allows the world that he has created (and observed) develop organically. There is an internal logic to his plot that has a trajectory - and he lets the trajectory build without blocking it. In Mihlayi Czitzenmihalyi's prescription, he finds 'Flow' not only for his writing but for his characters - a twofer!
Some observations on the writing itself: Somewhere in the middle of the book it occurred to me that Franzen explores psychological and relationships terrain only. What I mean is that his characters find themselves in NY, MN, DC, abroad. But he never writes anything about the surroundings. Any other writer would record the sights and sounds of the environment and be evocative. Franzen (willfully?) ignores this and saves all his energies for character development.
Also, his language is contemporary. Sometimes in a riff, he gets to poetic lines. But then again reverts to the journalistic and the banal. If I had one complaint, that would be it. The language he employs is not consistently spectacular. It is uneven at best. A good summary might be that his ear for the language is contemporary, no more no less.
The title of the book Freedom, is more than appropos. The theme is freedom. The plot is about freedom. And the characters are about exploring freedom. It is also a poke at our thoughtless use of the word in modern society sometimes. It is also a meditation on what the word really means. The novel gives plenty of scope to explore this in cynical, aggressive, ruminative and psychological terms. A real reward for the reader.
Is this a great novel? Is Franzen a great writer? In the blush of reading this terrific novel, I am most tempted to say yes enthusiastically. Then in a sober moment I think of Coetzee and Naipaul, and have to conclude not yet. But clearly Franzen's writing trajectory is headed in the direction of Coetzee and Naipaul. And I can't wait!
In the meantime, please run, buy and read Freedom.
7 comments:
Enjoyed the piece very much. I particularly liked how in a sentence you explained what serious fiction writing (and even, on occasion, nonfiction) is all about: “But to my utter delight, he allows the world that he has created (and observed) develop organically.” Created… and observed. Nice.
Being the kind of guy I am, however, your burlesque tease concerning Franzen’s perspective of the central theme, freedom, was frustrating. But I suppose your theme was ‘read the damn book!’, so it was consistent with your objective.
Also appreciated your placing it in the wider context of literature today and taking a leap as to Franzen’s artistic trajectory.
Just got it this week - looking forward to it - thanks for the review!
The blogger in you will be taking you to wide readership. Truely a professional review!
Very Interesting Commentary. Will Check It Out.
The Last Great American Novel
Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” at 25
by Ed Simon
The Corrections is among the last genuine claimants to the status of the Great American Novel, the honorific for the chimerical and quixotic multi-generational, narratively complex, largely social realist work that explains the nation in all of its complexities to itself. […]
The Corrections is a novel about many things—the passing of generations and the internal incomprehensibility of families, the Internet and gentrification, the economics of finance and technology, struggling writers and celebrity chefs, and the place of the United States in the world. Which is to say that it is a novel of 2026 as well as of 2001. […]
Appropriately enough, one reason the Great American Novel cannot be written anymore, by Franzen or anyone else, is the death of what we call “middlebrow culture.” Part of Franzen’s anxiety over the Oprah Book Club selection was his fear of being thought of as middlebrow. Yet, in 2001, that is precisely what The Corrections was. And there should be no shame attached to that fact. Franzen’s readers are the same ones who were drawn to Updike and Bellow rather than the arch postmodernists. His fiction was meant to be accessible and to speak to a community of readers. “A novel is a compact between the writer and the reader,” Franzen wrote in a 2011 piece in The New Yorker, whereby “Fiction is the most fundamental human art.”
That essay, “Mr. Difficult,” details in a loving way his own wrestling with the experimental work of Gaddis, but the broader point that Franzen makes is about the democratic utility of literature, a humanistic argument about why we read books—back when we read them. During the mid-century, the middlebrow was the domain of Masterpiece Theatre and Leonard Bernstein, the “Book of the Month Club,” and public television. Now that there is only lowbrow and ever-shrinking highbrow, we can’t even recognize the venerable middlebrow when it appears. (Nowhere is this more obvious than the category errors plaguing Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey.) In his essay, Franzen wrote that a “difficult novel just sits there on your shelf unread,” and he wasn’t wrong. Now, when according to The Atlantic only 38 percent of Americans read a book in the last year, it appears that easy novels sit unread on shelves as much as difficult ones.
The Corrections is not the last Great American Novel because great American novels have ceased to be written. Plenty have been published, many as good as or better than The Corrections, including Philip Roth’s speculative but personal The Plot Against America, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead with its quiet spiritualism, Michael Chabon’s spectacular The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, George Saunders’s mystical Lincoln in the Bardo, and the unforgettable The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.
Franzen’s is the last of a type because the cultural circumstances in which such a thing could even be understood have disappeared in an increasingly disparate and atomized society. Now, when middlebrow has completely collapsed and Oprah’s Book Club has been replaced by BookTok—on which novels are just as likely to be used as props as to be read—then how fortunate that The Corrections, in its own inadvertent way, acted as a kind of auto-obituary for the very form, an astute and moving elegy on all that was being lost. […]
Highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow - that itself is a troubling classification. But, as the article you shared points out - that’s from a bygone era already!
I myself have gone stereophonic :
I’ll read on Kindle (rarely paper)
I’ll continue on audible (folks like Tom Hanks are doing the reading now!)
Switch back to kindle
Hop over to a book review
Hop over to an author interview
Hop back to the book
Jot down notes along the way with my AI muse and have a discussion with the AI on questions such as
- does this book or author remind me of someone or something else
- are there incidents in my experience that connect to this book
- what episodes standout
- observations on various aspects of the writing
—-
As you can see from the above I’ve gone from reading to …. shall we say … absorbing and internalizing?!
I guess my memory didn’t ‘serve’, to reference a cliché. Sorry about that.
Well, hopefully you at least enjoyed this perspective on the author in general. I did. And the reason was that I’d just finished reading John Carey’s book “The Intellectuals & The Masses” and am now on the last chapter of his book “What Good Are the Arts?”.
Carey’s first book spent a lot of time discussing the advent of distinctions such as ‘low, middle and highbrow’. It strongly suggests that ‘modernism’ in literature was a way for the elites to distinguish themselves from the bougie ‘masses’ who spent their time reading such ‘middlebrow tripe’ as newspapers and popular novels. Modernist literature was, in Carey’s view, meant to distinguish the upper class’s tastes from that of the masses. In short, to follow T.S. Elliott’s advice – ‘be difficult’.
At any rate, it puts the novel into some sort of cultural criticism perspective in general and Franzen’s concern over being lauded by that great sherpa of middlebrow taste, Opera Winfrey.
Also, as you’ve probably noted, I’m still clinging to less-IT-fluent mediums, such as paper. Though I do at least read books at my desk with Google just a arm-reach away. As an old fogey I’m just not interested (in fact am trying to avoid as much as reality will allow) in further entangling myself in the ever-tightening grip of all these IT networks – especially now that we’re in early stages of the ever-grasping attack of AI.
But perhaps I should just get off my own ‘high horse’ (in so far as it echoes the reaction of the early 19th century elites Carey criticizes). And especially now that Franzen has himself apparently thrown in the resistance-towel (h/t; A&LD):
Jonathan Franzen used to consider TV the "enemy." Now it looks like an ally: He's working on a script to adapt The Corrections... more »
As the saying goes…
P.S. I want to congratulate you for having “gone from reading to …. shall we say … absorbing and internalizing”. That’s the right goal. And if IT helps you do that, well, perhaps that’s a persuasive argument for ‘giving in’
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