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Uh-oh. I didn't like it. Review coming up faster than you can say ...

Would you think me a nutjob if I told you that Franzen's Freedom reads less like a novel than like an extremely articulate gossip column?

Hear me out.

I admit that it can be difficult for me to appreciate the kind of undiluted realism that Franzen favors, because so much of what I value in art is tied into one form of defamiliarization or another. Simply putting a mirror up to the world can be interesting, even enlightening, but it rarely stirs my blood or makes me feel anything beyond purely intellectual admiration. It's also true that I have no love for the drama of suburban disaffection and infidelity. That I still kind of admired the book despite this heavily stacked deck is a testament to Franzen's writerly professionalism. When I say professionalism rather than something like brilliance I don't mean to damn him with faint praise -- well, I do, but the praise is sincere despite its faintness. Based solely on Freedom -- I never finished The Corrections, to my embarrassment -- I think Franzen is more a skilled (but overreaching) craftsman than the epochal artist he's being sold as, if you'll forgive a tired dichotomy. See, just about everyone, hagiographer and agnostic alike, has noted that the book is thoroughly readable and absorbing. Franzen's craftsmanship lies in his mastery of the fundamentals -- how to structure a story, introduce a character, craft prose that speeds along with momentum, etc -- that lead to prime readability. But why is it that, each time I put the book down after being reasonably absorbed, I felt a bad taste in my mouth?

Despite his vaunted observational acumen -- which, to be honest, I found kind of blinkered and basic -- Franzen's treatment of his characters is too often tainted by he-said she-said superficiality. This book reads like your smartest friend talking smack about your other friends. Or, perhaps, given Franzen's fixation on familial resentment, a better metaphor might be your cranky uncle kvetching eloquently about your bratty cousins. Which might sound like a bit of bitchy fun, but remember we're talking about 500+ pages here, and that shit gets old. Yes, Franzen relishes wading into the muck of his characters' twisted and morally corrupt psyches, but what he finds there seems less like authentically messy human complexity than a prefabricated, prescriptive mechanism of misbehavior.

I didn't even realize what the missing ingredient was until Franzen made a belated stab at inserting it. What's missing is compassion. Without authorial compassion for his troubled characters, those characters' development gets arrested at a half-baked, shallow level, no matter how frantically Franzen limns their consciousnesses. Franzen keeps digging and digging, but he never gets past the surface, because he's using the wrong shovel. When he finally tries a little tenderness at the end, it's like the deathbed conversion of a lifelong atheist: sincere, but untrustworthy.

Where the New York Times sees a genius who uses his "profound moral intelligence" to "illuminate the world we thought we knew," I see a good writer who has crafted a cynical soap opera against a ripped-from-the-headlines Bush-era backdrop (ensuring baseless "Great American Novel" hosannas from the press). Melodrama would, I suppose, be a kinder term than soap opera or gossip column, but that genre designation carries certain associations -- blatant artificiality, crying-on-the-outside catharsis, stylistic opulence -- that don't apply here. And yet the book does, at times, feel like little more than a bad melodrama, a dour monotony representing neither the real world of emotions nor a freshly imagined authorial perspective on same.

And you know, if Franzen wanted to explore how Americans abuse their personal and political freedoms, I'm not sure why he chose such a blandly familiar cycle of jerks-hurting-jerks to express this potentially interesting theme. Mistakes are made; resentment simmers; betrayal explodes; lather, rinse, repeat, pass on to younger generation. Marriage is hard, depression is insidious, infidelity can be a moral gray area, children shape their lives in reaction to their parents' lives, etc. I don't claim to be the world's closest reader, but I just don't see the profundity in that. Not that profundity is a requirement of good fiction, but apart from the finely crafted prose I'm not sure this book even justifies its existence. Franzen buries his would-be thesis in an aside about somebody's immigrant grandfather: The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage. OK, that has a nice aphoristic ring to it. But who are the personalities susceptible to limitless freedom -- all Americans? If Franzen is saying that all Americans are prone to misanthropy and rage, I have three responses to that: 1) No shit, Sherlock. 2) That's not unique to Americans. 3) What exactly does freedom have to do with misanthropy? What's the causality there? If that's the question you tried to answer with your book, Franzy, I don't think you pulled it off. Frankly, I'm more convinced by that glib David Cross bit about how watching an episode of The Simple Life made him realize that he hated our freedom as much as George W. Bush said the terrorists did.

I don't regret reading this (though I do regret buying the hardcover). I've now done my due diligence with Franzen and can safely ignore him from now on. He goes on the I Don't Get It list, alongside such other beloved-by-people-who-aren't-me artists as Hayao Miyazaki and Joy Division.

But hey, my hometown of Oak Park, Illinois gets name-checked in spectacularly bizarre fashion, so let me reproduce that by way of closing: Walter’s sophisticated Chicago cousin Leif told informative and harrowing stories of the big-city suburbs; most memorable and worry-provoking, for Walter, was the one about an Oak Park eighth-grader who’d managed to get naked with a girl and then, unsure about what was supposed to happen next, had peed all over her legs. Hell yeah, motherfucker. That's how we roll.