Franzen, Freedom

The second excerpt from Jonathan Franzen's forthcoming novel Freedom is just as piquant as the first (which I wrote about here). In this one, titled "Agreeable," Franzen narrates a searing adolescent episode in the life of Patty (who, as an adult, is a central character in the other excerpt), an episode that cements her estrangement from her family.

Judging by his memoir The Discomfort Zone, Franzen is not someone who's experienced a lot of family love. Perhaps for that reason, he is expert at anatomizing familial dysfunction.

In this passage, Patty's mother talks with her about how her father will respond to a difficult and painful experience Patty's recently had:

“He’ll want to do whatever’s best for you. Sometimes it’s hard for him to express it, but he loves you more than anything.”

Joyce could hardly have made a statement that Patty more fervently longed to believe was true. Wished, with her whole being, were true. Didn’t her dad tease her and ridicule her in ways that would have been simply cruel if he didn’t secretly love her more than anything? But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

"Agreeable" is a devastating piece of fiction, one that's left me eager to read the novel in its entirety when it comes out in August.

Advance Thoughts on Freedom

I'm still looking forward to reading Jonathan Franzen's upcoming novel Freedom, although this critique from NPR sounds all too familiar:

... despite the brilliance, or maybe even because of it, I found the novel quite unappealing, maybe because every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didn't want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to. His book just has too much brightness and not enough color.

Thinking back on the two excerpts from this novel that have been published in the New Yorker, I can definitely see what the reviewer means. Franzen satirizes his protagonist, Patty Berglund, pretty sharply in "Bad Neighbors," along with every other character in the piece. Yet even though "Agreeable" certainly stands aloof from its events and showers its characters with the film of disdain mentioned in the review, I thought I detected in that snippet the possibility of some real empathy for Patty, a desire to understand her as a human being—which I hope comes to greater fruition in the novel as a whole.

I guess I'll have to wait and see for myself.

Brownstein on Franzen & Goodman

This Gabriel Brownstein essay, a side-by-side comparison of recent novels by Jonathan Franzen and Allegra Goodman, gets it exactly right. I have read only parts of Freedom and none of The Cookbook Collector, but Brownstein's evenhanded discussion matches exactly my feelings about Franzen in general, and the contrast with Goodman matches the one I see between Franzen's memoir The Discomfort Zone and Kathleen Finneran's less-known masterpiece The Tender Land.

The essay is well worth reading in its entirety, but here Brownstein sums up his point:

Franzen is dancing with you, sure, and with Walter and Patty as well, and his moves are wild and Tony Manero dazzling—but he’s not wholeheartedly on the floor with his partners. Allegra Goodman loves her characters—they absorb her attention as if she could wish for nothing more, and she offers them intimately to her readers, so much so that the author herself all but vanishes. Franzen’s characters meanwhile exist somewhere beneath the glory of his prose. His book is not so much addressed to the intimate reader, it’s addressed to the judges and the crowds. His characters are anxious, but he is supremely confident. He has managed to shuck the difficulties of postmodern fiction while retaining much of its cool and distant pose.