Everyone seems hot for Jonathan Franzen these days - his new book, Freedom, is due out soon and his publicist has to be wetting him/herself over the Time Magazine cover proclaiming Franzen "The Great American Novelist," (no pressure, I'm sure). And then there is his profile in Vogue - and if not for his seemingly obtuse (or extremely strategic) comments back in 2001 (when he panned the Oprah Book Club even as his best selling book The Corrections was being fitted with an Oprah sticker) I'm sure he'd even show up on Oprah.While “The Corrections” attested to Mr. Franzen’s discovery of his own limber voice and tamed his penchant for sociological pontification, the novel was something of a hybrid in which the author’s satiric instincts and misanthropic view of the world sometimes seemed at odds with his new drive to create fully three-dimensional people. It felt, at times, as if he were self-importantly inflating the symbolic meaning of his characters’ experiences, even as he condescendingly attributed to them every venal quality from hypocrisy and vanity to paranoia and Machiavellian conniving.
In the opening pages of “Freedom,” this dynamic seems even more exaggerated, as we are introduced to members of the Berglund family as an assortment of disagreeable caricatures, who perplex and perturb their neighbors in St. Paul. Known for his “niceness,” Walter Berglund is a weak, passive-aggressive husband and father, who weirdly sells out his nature-loving ideals to work with an evil coal company. His wife, Patty, also seems “nicey-nice” on the surface, but turns out to be an ill-tempered shrew, who rages at Walter and inexplicably slashes a neighbor’s new snow tires. Their cocky teenage son, Joey, is so unhappy at home that he moves out of the house and in with his girlfriend’s family next door.
"In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to [expletive] in somebody else's children's sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it. There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries? How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood? Was it true that the glaze of old Fiestaware contained dangerous amounts of lead? How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be? Did your 240 sometimes not go into overdrive when you pushed the overdrive button? Was it better to offer panhandlers food, or nothing? Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy, brilliant kids while working full-time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning? Had anybody in the history of St. Paul ever had a positive experience with a roofer? What about a good Volvo mechanic? Did your 240 have that problem with the sticky parking-brake cable? And that enigmatically labeled dashboard switch that made such a satisfying Swedish click but seemed not to be connected to anything: what was that?"That said, with the proclamation of Franzen as the Great American Novelist, you can bet his books (from first to last) will be more highly sought out and discussed. His signed first editions are selling for upwards of $400 over on Abebooks.com, and signed Advance Reading Copies are selling for even more than that. He'd prefer, I'm sure, that you buy his books solely to read and ponder, but the fact is, he is collectible.
Labels: Freedom, Greatest American Novelist, Jonathan Franzen, Time Magazine