An American family

In this ambitious if too somber follow-up to ‘The Corrections,’ Franzen shows how our notion of freedom tears at ties that bind

September 05, 2010|John Freeman, Globe Correspondent

The giant armadillo, the blue whale, and the Great American Novelist all have something in common. All of them, the watchers say, are critically endangered. Largely due to what’s euphemistically called displacement.

And since Great American Novelists were singular, even in their supposed heyday, the ones who stand to that claim today are as easy to spot as, well, an armadillo in your front yard. They rather have a way of announcing themselves.

Jonathan Franzen will be hard to miss these days, emerging from a nine-year absence on fiction shelves with a novel whose ambition outstrips even his 2001 National Book Award winner, “The Corrections,” the work that transformed him from a talented but obscure novelist to a household name.

As well it should have, for that novel managed — in a country obsessed with the family — to tell us something we didn’t already know, or know quite so simply, about American life, which is this: Many Americans start families to correct the mistakes of the ones they grew up in. “Freedom,” against all odds again, finds an even more alarming basic truth at the heart of American family life: that this country’s notion of unfettered freedom is deeply corrosive to the things that keep a family together, namely self-sacrifice and loyalty. Or as Franzen writes of one of the characters in this new book: “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

It’s a fine summary for what happens to the Berglund family of St. Paul, Minn., over this fraught, occasionally maddening novel. It’s a book full of bad decisions and regrettable incidents, kaleidoscopically replayed. Franzen’s characters marry the wrong man (or woman) and vent their frustration in affairs. They accept jobs beneath them and then reward themselves by giving in to greed.

In fact, all bugaboos about readers wanting to like characters aside, it’s quite a thing to ask a reader to spend 550 pages with the Berglunds. They bicker, indulge in competition, betray one another, and seem driven by a grinding need to win, as if life were some terrifying bonus round of “Jeopardy.”

This agitated competitiveness makes the Berglunds’ fall from grace, announced in the novel’s brisk opening pages, all the more painful for them, and delicious for those around them. Walter Berglund, formerly of the Nature Conservancy, had always wanted to do the right thing, to have a meaningful life. Instead, he has earned himself an article in The New York Times that notes he has been “conniving with the coal industry and mistreating country people.”