In the first pages of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, he touches on liberal guilt, the fact that adults are children in the U.S., and the American belief that it is a right to make unbridled profits. He not only has a finger on the pulse of the nation, he has his foot on the country’s throat (metaphorically).
I’m not sure even Franzen could articulate this, but his opening scene to Freedom made me see one social trend that might help explain one aspect of the conservative backlash. In the late 1970s, inner cities were dangerous, and many who stayed did so because they had the working class’s equivalent of a trust fund: a house that was paid for by previous generations and on which they were only paying taxes. In the 80s, gentrifiers came in and put sweat equity into inner city neighborhoods, and the people who were already there now were sitting on houses worth more but also with a higher tax burden. Perhaps this partly explains the many working class voters electing those who cut taxes for the wealthy.
As far as narrators go, Franzen has give us some of the best and the bitchiest. The book grinds to a halt when he decides to change the form to the diary of a main character. Without Franzen’s guiding incisiveness, the tension falls out of the story. To take himself out of the story telling is to rob it of its power.
The “plot” is really just the lives of the main characters living out, but the theme each situation they find themselves in share is how capitalism (and its relationship to politics) taints every interaction in our society. The “main” character is Patty (the diary portion is hers), whose wealthy family decides to sweep under the rug her rape as a teen at the hands of the son of a local politically powerful friend of her father’s. She goes to the University of Minnesota to get away from her family and meets her eventual husband Walter. From a poor, dysfunctional family in Hibbing, Walter wants to do good rather than do well and chooses to do so through politics. But the environmental trust he is hired to run turns out to be a shell game to net its corporate overlords more money. She also meets Richard. An iconoclast musician disdaining mainstream culture, he is (of course) eventual made a cult hero by the mainstream, putting him in a no-win situation artistically. Patty’s son Joey develops a passion for unbridled money making early in life, much to his parents’ dismay. But he (like his father) enters into a business deal in which his partners sacrifice him for their own profits.
In the end, pursuit of these ends causes the family to break apart. When Patty’s dad dies, she has to negotiate the inheritance with her siblings. The management of wealth and passing it on to future generations is maybe the big theme here (“wealth” in many meanings; Walter’s trust is to preserve forest habitat for a rare bird). And it affects the politics of each family and the Family of Humans. How to negotiate that and manage our impulse for greediness is the big question of our day and of this novel–a book of its day.
Poet and Scholar 