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Harlan Lewin's Reviews > Freedom
Freedom
by
by
Okay, I've finished Freedom (sounds ominous). (The graph below the line was written before I finished.) The following is a note I wrote in Facebook as a reply to a friend's comment about my noting that the Beatles' Get Back Jojo seemed to me to be a good anthem for Franzen's book.
My response:
I liked your book review at bookblogs, Fred. As you point out, one great thing about a book as rich in events, relationships, and characters as this is that it offers a lot of fertile soil for thought, discussion and analysis and so it's go...od to have such novels. As you point out, in trying to leave a long term record of what it was like in recent America, one has to resort to "types," like rock star, environmentalist, etc. My beef was that Franzen skirts too close to making them marble statues and neither flesh and blood people capable of really surprising us with their complexity nor out and out "oddities" that could really entertain us. You mention Obama's summation that the book was "entertaining" (a word he used to avoid controversy, probably). And you mentioned Gravity's Rainbow as a serious book. I totally agree that GR is serious-I consider it one of the great novels in our canon-but it is also thoroughly entertaining with its macabre and comic situations, characters, and events. GR is funny and cosmic in the vein of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. In contrast, I felt burdened by Franzen's midwestern humorless (mostly) style hammering on guilt, duty and sexual sin. I know he's only fringe midwestern (Illinois, Missoouri). I don't know whether he's related to Jewish diaspora culture in some way (he has enough Jewish stuff in the book to make me think he is) but the dark, midwest Lutheran outlook has similarities to the oy, vey, victim outlook of diaspora Jews.
As in the movie, Other People's Lives, the O. Henry twist at the finish in Freedom ticked me off. Probably not, but I can see the publisher's handlers trying to persuade Franzen that his book has to have a "comic" rather than "tragic" ending for Americans and especially in this difficult economic time for publishing. I was so sad for Katz (RK for rock and there are so many cats in the book), that he had to be the "normalized" artist, i.e., castrated in the end with regular clothes, a steady relationship and success.
Sorry, I'm not going to re-read this screed, so I'm not responsible for logic or sense of what I've written here. But one last thing: The one character that interested me in the book was Lalitha (Lillith, Lolita), who seemed to me to be at once a combination of desire and of reason and to introduce the "exotic" (very bad word) in the otherwise rather static cast of characters. In a "nation of immigrants" the immigrants have always ended up saving the nation (though they always kill the previous immigrants like the imported cat population kills native birds), or, they get killed as cannon fodder in wartime or otherwise sacrificed to our culture wars and capitalism. She was totally sympathetic to me and totally tragic. Significant that Walter, the ultimate obsessive, calculating, strategizing, guilty Lutheran American could not connect one wee bit to Lalitha's foreign parents.
The book raises a lot of questions, but I wish it had been written by Pynchon.
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About half-way through. Mixed feelings. Something keeps me reading, perhaps my sympathies for the dysfunctions in the characters and their lives. Patty's husband, Walter and Richard Kats the rock singer seem to me rather unsubtle and symbolic. They are just too purely what they are to be extremely interesting. In fact, sometimes the book reads more like a psychiatrist's notes than a novel that deals with the unpredictability and uncertainty in life and character. But maybe that changes around page 400. One friend, a fiction author, said he really despised this book. And I can see why an author looking for some experimentation and challenge would be disappointed in the book. Too often it reads like a popular psychology magazine laced with interpretations of how the political and ecological milieu interact with character. There's a lot in the book about mistakes people make. Since I'm not big on replaying hands, I just find this annoying and, again more amateur therapy than literature. For example, I liked Parrot and Olivier in America, which gave me some joy learning about the characters' weaknesses and strengths, took a stab at pushing the style envelope, and gave me an interesting interpretation of the mentality of an 18th/19th century French aristocrat. I think I learned more about what it was like to be an aristocrat from Parrot than all the history books I've read.
My response:
I liked your book review at bookblogs, Fred. As you point out, one great thing about a book as rich in events, relationships, and characters as this is that it offers a lot of fertile soil for thought, discussion and analysis and so it's go...od to have such novels. As you point out, in trying to leave a long term record of what it was like in recent America, one has to resort to "types," like rock star, environmentalist, etc. My beef was that Franzen skirts too close to making them marble statues and neither flesh and blood people capable of really surprising us with their complexity nor out and out "oddities" that could really entertain us. You mention Obama's summation that the book was "entertaining" (a word he used to avoid controversy, probably). And you mentioned Gravity's Rainbow as a serious book. I totally agree that GR is serious-I consider it one of the great novels in our canon-but it is also thoroughly entertaining with its macabre and comic situations, characters, and events. GR is funny and cosmic in the vein of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. In contrast, I felt burdened by Franzen's midwestern humorless (mostly) style hammering on guilt, duty and sexual sin. I know he's only fringe midwestern (Illinois, Missoouri). I don't know whether he's related to Jewish diaspora culture in some way (he has enough Jewish stuff in the book to make me think he is) but the dark, midwest Lutheran outlook has similarities to the oy, vey, victim outlook of diaspora Jews.
As in the movie, Other People's Lives, the O. Henry twist at the finish in Freedom ticked me off. Probably not, but I can see the publisher's handlers trying to persuade Franzen that his book has to have a "comic" rather than "tragic" ending for Americans and especially in this difficult economic time for publishing. I was so sad for Katz (RK for rock and there are so many cats in the book), that he had to be the "normalized" artist, i.e., castrated in the end with regular clothes, a steady relationship and success.
Sorry, I'm not going to re-read this screed, so I'm not responsible for logic or sense of what I've written here. But one last thing: The one character that interested me in the book was Lalitha (Lillith, Lolita), who seemed to me to be at once a combination of desire and of reason and to introduce the "exotic" (very bad word) in the otherwise rather static cast of characters. In a "nation of immigrants" the immigrants have always ended up saving the nation (though they always kill the previous immigrants like the imported cat population kills native birds), or, they get killed as cannon fodder in wartime or otherwise sacrificed to our culture wars and capitalism. She was totally sympathetic to me and totally tragic. Significant that Walter, the ultimate obsessive, calculating, strategizing, guilty Lutheran American could not connect one wee bit to Lalitha's foreign parents.
The book raises a lot of questions, but I wish it had been written by Pynchon.
----------------------------------------------
About half-way through. Mixed feelings. Something keeps me reading, perhaps my sympathies for the dysfunctions in the characters and their lives. Patty's husband, Walter and Richard Kats the rock singer seem to me rather unsubtle and symbolic. They are just too purely what they are to be extremely interesting. In fact, sometimes the book reads more like a psychiatrist's notes than a novel that deals with the unpredictability and uncertainty in life and character. But maybe that changes around page 400. One friend, a fiction author, said he really despised this book. And I can see why an author looking for some experimentation and challenge would be disappointed in the book. Too often it reads like a popular psychology magazine laced with interpretations of how the political and ecological milieu interact with character. There's a lot in the book about mistakes people make. Since I'm not big on replaying hands, I just find this annoying and, again more amateur therapy than literature. For example, I liked Parrot and Olivier in America, which gave me some joy learning about the characters' weaknesses and strengths, took a stab at pushing the style envelope, and gave me an interesting interpretation of the mentality of an 18th/19th century French aristocrat. I think I learned more about what it was like to be an aristocrat from Parrot than all the history books I've read.
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Freedom.
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Reading Progress
January 14, 2011
–
Started Reading
January 14, 2011
– Shelved
January 26, 2011
–
Finished Reading
