By whom? Jonathan Franzen.

Published when? 2010.

Read why? 1. I loved The Corrections (2001). I read it in 2004, which is when a lot of the action of this novel is taking place. According to my trusty diary, I began ambivalent: "On one level I find it too zany, too wacky, too much of a caricature. I would want those parts toned down, made more 'realistic'. But his observation -- his ability to record those awful remarks parents make, for example -- is superb." I finished totally convinced: "A very moving book. A sad, sad, horribly real account of marriages and family life. All the little cruelties, all the little acts of neglect. And oh, the miseries of old age, that great big stock market correction to the vigour and confidence and arrogance of life... Family values. What a cruel, sad joke." 2. Freedom was available in the book sale a little while ago, the one where you get 10 books for MYR 20...

About what? The state of America (corruption, environmental damage, rage-fuelled culture wars, dubious military expeditions, volatile economics...), but also the way all this seeps into our personal lives, as seen through the experiences of two couples from two generations. James Ley puts it really well: "Freedom is concerned with the various ways in which its characters are not free. Its point is not simply that they are undone by their choices and their innate weaknesses, but that there is an almost systemic aspect to their failures and disappointments... [The book conveys] a sense that the boundary between its characters’ private lives and the unhealthy political context is porous."


This will have been one of the last books I read in this recliner looking at this view...

***

The first chapter is brilliant. We're in St Paul, Minnesota, and we're told straightaway that something has gone badly wrong for Walter Berglund. We don't know what, and as the chapter proceeds, we're more and more intrigued, as he seems to be a nice guy, and part of a picture-postcard family. He works hard at 3M; and wife Patty apparently revels in her role as archetypal stay-at-home mother. True, there's a big kerfuffle when teenage Joey (the son -- we hear only very occasionally of Jessica, the daughter) moves in with his slightly older girlfriend, Connie, a member of the terrible (lower-class, right-wing) Monaghan neighbours whom Patty and Walter look down their nose at. Patty sees this as a "stunning act of sedition", and starts falling apart at this point. People blame Walter for being too nice. He should have been harder on both wife and son, they say. But there's nothing yet that's big enough to merit the dark warnings of the opening paragraph.

The next section consists of three chapters entitled Mistakes Were Made, which is the "autobiography" of Patty Berglund, written at the instigation of her therapist. OK, so things have gone badly enough for her to need a therapist... Then again, therapists do seem terribly common in America. They crop up in books everywhere.

This section was one of the first things I found problematic about Freedom. The issue is not that the autobiography is written in the third person (presumably to give Patty a sort of distance from herself). It's just that it somehow never sounds like Patty... It sounds authorial, literary. Dan Geddes and the We Can Read It person agree. This lack of voice contributes to the broader problem of figuring out Patty's character, more on which below.

Anyway, via this autobiography, we learn about Patty's life to date. The least favoured child of busy professional parents; a rape victim who was never allowed to seek redress; a basketball star whose career is cut off by injury; a slightly gullible person who falls under the influence of Eliza, "a disturbed girl who was basically her stalker"... It's not easy being Patty, by this account.

It's in her college years that Patty meets both Richard Katz and Walter Berglund. Richard is cynical and exploitative towards everyone except Walter (the two have a platonic, competitive, and remarkably strong friendship). Patty falls in love with Richard; Walter falls in love with Patty.


In August 2010, when this book came out, we were in Adelaide, Australia, visiting the zoo (among other things). Should we make this pair Patty and Walter?

Luckily for Patty, Richard is too loyal to Walter to take up with the girl he knows his friend also wants. So Patty ends up with Walter. Walter the Loyal. Walter who has already given up his acting and film-making dreams because of his financial obligations to his parents and their run-down motel; and who now gives up "his planet-saving aspirations" to go and work for 3M, and become a provider.

Eventually -- I suppose we could all have predicted this -- Patty and Richard do indeed hook up. Both are wrung out by guilt afterwards. Patty goes back to St Paul, and goes into a terrible depression. Richard gets famous, having written lots of songs about his lost love. And Walter (still not knowing anything about the Patty/Richard thing) starts to compete back. The Berglunds (minus Joey, who remains with his girlfriend) move to Washington D.C. so that he can pursue his career as an environmental lawyer.

***

Then begins the section entitled 2004. The chapters here switch between the points of view of Walter, Richard, and Joey.

Richard has not heard from Walter in two years, but he gets a call when Walter wants publicity help with his environmental campaigns.

The headline project is the Cerulean Mountain Trust, aimed at using millionaire money to protect the cerulean warbler. The only trouble is that in the name of saving the little blue songbird, West Virginia is "about to get the shit drilled out of it".

In one sense, the plan is a pragmatic compromise between industry and conservation. But the trade-off is harsh:

-- "the obliteration of dozens of sweet wooded hilltops and scores of miles of clear-running, biotically rich Class III, IV, and V streams", and the widespread use of an environmentally reviled technique called Mountain Top Removal
---- versus ----
--"an endangered species 'stronghold' that you could cover with a postage stamp on a road-atlas map of West Virginia"


Not this blue bird...

Then there are the people who don't want to be moved out of the area... Whom Walter calls stupid. To their face. Oops... ("What Joey liked about the Republicans was that they didn't DISDAIN people the way liberal Democrats did.")

Walter then gets his evicted folks jobs with a dodgy defence contractor (the one that Joey turns out to be mixed up in). We're starting to see the groundswell of anger in nice Walter: "His entire personality had been formed in opposition to the backcountry he'd come from," and the truculent resister guy's "poor-white unreason and resentments" hit Walter in a particularly vulnerable spot. He started working for environmental organizations precisely to "safeguard pockets of nature from loutish country people like his brother". More generally, because he's concerned about the natural world, "the unclouded serenity of his countrymen's indifference made him wild with anger."

Meanwhile, the charms of Lalitha, Walter's smitten assistant, are winning out against "poor competitive lost Patty" (who's racked by guilt about Richard, but Walter doesn't know that). Lalitha's ambitions and life-goals theoretically make her "a genuine kindred spirit" for Walter (whose underlying Big Cause -- the one he turns to when the bird thing seems too compromised and dirty -- is overpopulation).

Richard, drafted in to be Walter's celebrity drawcard, is now back in Patty's orbit. He sees what is starting to happen between Lalitha and Walter, and he spots an opening with Patty. But she's not having any of it. "You already made your choice," she tells him. "You made it very clear to me which one of us's happiness you cared more about. You had your chance with me, and you chose him." She gives him her "autobiography". Which he reads, and then leaves on Walter's desk... Why, actually? Because he thinks the honest thing is for his friend to know the truth? Because he thinks that Patty's narrative will show Walter how much she really values him? Because he thinks this might bring things to a head? Not sure. In any case, Walter reads it, and asks her to leave. She goes to Richard's, but not for long.

Joey, meanwhile, is now secretly married to Connie, whom he had planned to break up with. He hankers after his friend's rich sister, Jenna, and their secret assignation has some comedic moments (think: swallowed wedding-ring). But at the end of the day, Connie is the one for Joey, just as Patty is the one for Walter.

There's a lot more to Connie than Joey sometimes recognizes, although she too is prone to depression. She happily lends him her trust fund for what will turn out to be a dodgy scheme (supplying crap weapons to the forces in Iraq). And when Joey realizes quite how much this business stinks, and bails, he's careful to do it in such a way that he can repay her (and support his dad's birds into the bargain).


Connie and Joey?

Dad needs all the help he can get. He comes clean in a spectacular fashion at a big presentation, where all his project's key people are gathered. He tells the audience: "I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world." Drummed out of the Brownies, he becomes a hero to grassroots environmentalists.

So Patty is not going to get together with Richard. And Walter is not going to stay with Lalitha, as Franzen writes her out in a road accident. So it only remains to be seen whether Patty and Walter get back together again...

***

At this point we have the next instalment of Mistakes Were Made, a "Sort of Letter to Her Reader", by Patty Berglund. This time it's written at the suggestion of Richard. And this time she's addressing Walter specifically.

She reflects that neither she nor Walter could escape that other corner of the triangle. She and Katz were inevitably disappointments to each other, "because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to both of them".

She's now 52. And though they've been separated for many years now (six?), she can't forget "this yearning for her mate".

He doesn't read it.


Richard?

***

And finally, we have a section called Canterbridge Estates Lake. It's a view from the residents who live near Walter's cabin, and it acts as a bookend to match the first chapter.

At opposite ends of the spectrum, we have:

-- Walter, the environmentalist, who's just a tad OTT and in-your-face in his passion for birds -- as, for example, in his spirited campaign to stop the free-roaming activities of domestic cats (Amy Adams wonders if this is a metaphor for the predatory Katz, as in Richard -- don't know)
---- versus ----
-- Linda, the evangelical ("God gave this world to humans and that's the end of the story as far as I'm concerned"), who's also a little wild in her obsessive resistance to Walter, and isn't much liked by the community either

Then Patty turns up. He doesn't want to let her in. So she installs herself on his porch, and won't budge. Nearly freezes to death. And he can't let her die...

Reconciliation. Patty becomes a good influence on him as far as the neighbours are concerned. But then the couple leaves, and have their property turned into a bird sanctuary (with anti-cat fence). The end.

I wasn't so impressed by the close. I mean, I didn't want Patty to die on the step... But somehow it felt a bit schmaltzy...


Maybe this is more Richard?

***

Whereas I loved The Corrections, I ended up on the fence about this book. My ambivalence reflects quite a split in the critique.

The first question is this: Who actually IS Patty?

Walter tells her she is a nice person, but Patty herself is not sure: "Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right." She feels more herself with Richard, in fact. Fair enough.

But there's this disconnect between what the neighbours see in that first section (someone who's outwardly nice, but also feisty, capable, and sorted) and the person that emerges in the autobiography (someone who's competitive on the sports field, but vulnerable and needy off it, someone who says she's not nice, but then just comes across as a bit blah...). I know others' perceptions of us can contrast markedly with our perceptions of ourselves. But somehow this whole thing didn't gel.

Before they decide to get married, she's telling Walter that she wants to stay at home to look after her children: "I want to be a really, really great mom." This is apparently because her mother wasn't. Is that remotely convincing...? I'm not sure.

Somehow all that confusion expresses itself in her excessive love for Joey: "She loved Jessica an appropriate amount, but Joey she loved way too much. She knew what she was doing and she didn't stop, because she was mad at Walter for not being what she really wanted, and because she had bad character and felt she deserved compensation for being a star and a competitor who was trapped in a housewife's life."

What she definitely is, is manipulative. Lalitha complains to Walter: "Everybody's world still revolves around your wife. What is so special about her, I will never understand. She spends her whole life upsetting people." Yeah...


Hippos are famously good mothers...

I'm not the only one failing to get Patty. Curtis Sittenfeld is also puzzled by the contradictions in her portrayal, and comments: "The males in Patty's life frequently remark on how interesting and funny she is, but I didn't find her much of either, which was notable in a book that's interesting and funny on just about every page." Geddes, on the other hand -- in one of those contrasting judgements that Freedom seems to spawn -- finds Patty "totally believable, and her dialogue dead-on accurate".

What is undeniable is that she's high-maintenance. In fact, you can't help but notice that the women in this novel are all somehow needy (Patty's depressed; Connie's depressed; Lalitha is relentlessly cheery, but attaches herself like a limpet to the older Walter; and let's not even talk about bit-part head-case Eliza...)

***

Like Ross Browne, I also didn't find Richard a three-dimensional character. Curtis Sittenfeld, on the other hand, thinks he's the book's best character, and wonders whether he's a stand-in for Franzen himself...

Conversely, Walter rings true. Conscientious, long-suffering, generous, with an underlying streak of anger that has been long suppressed and we watch emerging, he somehow makes sense in a way that Patty never did. The dynamic he shares with Richard is fascinating. They're like brothers -- but who's the big brother and who's the little brother? The roles keep swapping as the story progresses.

Walter also has his struggles with Joey. He can't accept that his son is very different from him. He can't understand why Joey would go over to the Republicans. And yet when they're both shafted by corporate America, they start to understand each other.


This can be Mountain Top Removal guy

***

Another element that divided opinion was the backstory technique. I was neutral about it. It worked, I thought. It wasn't confusing.

Sittenfeld argues that Franzen's structure "allows for tantalising foreshadowing and cliffhangers in which one character's story is interrupted just as something terrible or delicious or deliciously terrible is about to occur". But the same feature is a red rag for the We Can Read It person: "That’s what Franzen does in this book, back story. From the opening paragraph about Walter 'making a mess of his professional life', which has taken two-thirds of the novel to start to be explained, Franzen has got into the habit of swishing back a curtain to reveal some tasty morsel, then spending a very long chapter (or two) painstakingly explaining how it got there. I wish he’d stop..."

Then there's the central theme of Freedom -- which is, of course, freedom. How much we have, and how little we have.

Overbaked, says the Kirkus person: "Every invocation of the titular notion of 'freedom' seems to flash 'theme alert!': 'He was at once freer than he’d been since puberty and closer than he’d ever been to suicide.' 'She had so much free time, I could see that it was killing her.' 'People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily.' 'But it didn’t feel like a liberation, it felt like a death.' Such ideas seem a lot more important to the novelist than the characters in which he invests them."

Yet for Ley, as we saw above, the concept of freedom -- and the fact that we actually have so little of it -- is the jam that sticks the personal to the political. And as Christopher Willard points out, the first step in realizing freedom is a recognition of what it is that fetters us, which Franzen exposes, in spades.

With so much controversy over the individual elements, it's not surprising that the overall verdicts also diverge. For the Kirkus reviewer, it's an "ambitious yet ultimately unsatisfying novel", in which "the characters fail to engage"; for Adams, on the other hand, it's "a wonderful book"; and Geddes has it down as a better novel than The Corrections.

For me, it was interesting but flawed. I enjoyed the read, but it didn't blow me away in the way The Corrections did.

The bottom line, though, as ever, is that I would definitely read more.