What Makes Joanthan Franzen Angry

I should say at the outset that I like Jonathan Franzen as a writer. I would not go so far as to say that I am his fan; however I have enjoyed reading his last two novels. I have reviewed Freedom, Franzen’s most recent novel, on this blog. I liked it; it was a well written, witty, and wise read that, while not exactly a page turner, still kept me very interested till the end. Freedom, without doubt, was one of the better novels I read last year. A few years ago I read Corrections, which, I believe, won a prestigious literary award in the USA. I remember enjoying Corrections, although (probably) not as much as I enjoyed Freedom. It was hilarious in parts; also thought-provoking; but there were also sections where the novel dragged a bit. That’s how I remember it.

Corrections and Freedom are the only two novels of Franzen that I have read and, on that basis, I’d say that he is a very good writer whose next novel I’d have no hesitation in buying, no matter what the critics say. (Doesn’t always work. Last year I bought Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil despite the roasting it had received, because I had loved his 2002 Booker winner Life of Pi. Beatrice and Virgil was a disaster from the beginning to end. The book was about as interesting as—to paraphrase Clive James—a conversation between two not very bright drunks.)

I have also heard Franzen talk (and, as seems the norm these days, take questions from the audience) on two occasions. The second time was when he was promoting Freedom. I can’t remember the first occasion, but I think he was, at that time, promoting a non-fiction (possibly a memoir) he had written between Corrections and Freedom. In both the programmes Franzen came across (to me) as an intense, brooding anal retentive, who took his vocation oh so seriously, and believed that because he wrote books it put him on a higher plane than hoi polli. (He is probably not the only writer who thinks about himself and his vocation in this manner. Although I have never heard him speak, I have read interviews of V.S. Naipaul, my most favourite writer, which suggest (to me) that Sir Vidia holds himself in very high regard and also holds the view that by dint of producing however many novels and works of non-fiction he has written,  he is the possessor of the noblest profession in the world. Was it Nietzsche who said that we all need our illusions to sustain us, without which we would simply collapse (as indeed he did and spent the last twenty years of his life in a catatonic state in a mental asylum)?)

In the literary programme where he was promoting Freedom, Franzen first read out an excerpt from the novel in a monotonous voice, his body language suggesting that he was not at ease doing it. He then took questions from the audience. He gave a good impression of being thoroughly irritated by almost every question that was asked. He nevertheless answered each question in detail. In great detail; in more detail than was necessary; in too much f**king detail, if you ask me; in a tone that suggested he was dictating an important letter; and there was the ever-so-slight air—so I felt—of condescension. (Again, I have no problem about it. I should wager that on the whole there are more mediocre than intelligent people in the world, and, from my (admittedly limited) contacts with intelligent people I have come to the conclusion that intelligent people—because they are removed from the Gaussian mean—find it difficult to adjust to the level of stupid people.)  There was one particular question—I can’t now remember what it was—which Franzen answered so sarcastically that the interviewer (a pallid looking man with a slight paunch and an air of an underperforming salesman) felt obliged to intervene and stop Franzen just as he (Franzen) was warming up to whatever it was that he was animadverting.

I thought of all this after I came across an article by Franzen in the Guardian. It is a long article, the first half of which Franzen devotes to questions that irk him the most when he goes on a literary tours (presumably promoting his novels) or is a speaker at literary festivals.

It would appear that most questions—questions that are most commonly posed, at any rate (based on my limited experience), in such programmes—raise Franzen’s hackles.

One of the questions, according to this article, which annoys Franzen is: who are Franzen’s influences? Franzen says he is annoyed by this question because it is apparently frequently asked in the present tense. He has obviously reached, having written two critically acclaimed novels, the level where he feels insulted by the notion that people might think he is still influenced by dead (or living) authors. They might have influenced him once, when his mother was still wiping his nose, but now? When he has written Corrections and Freedom, and has been on the cover of Time? The thought of it! He then reiterates the point (as if it was not already impressed) by saying that if he were still influenced by, say, E.M. Forster, he would certainly pretend that he wasn’t. Why, you might wonder. I think that is because Franzen now considers himself in the league of, for want of a better phrase, ‘established authors’, and considers any admittance of ongoing influences on his writing as injurious to his reputation. (As an aside, why on earth would anyone want to be influenced by E.M. Forster, an overrated British novelist, who wrote boring novels in the first decades of the twentieth century and would have sunk into well earned obscurity had the Merchant-Ivory film company not made two of his unreadable novels into semi-tolerable films? I have read A Room with A View and Howard’s End, both tiresome in the extreme. Reading a railway timetable would be more pleasurable than ploughing through the crap Forster writes.) I have to say that I am with Franzen on this one. I have never really understood the point of this question, unless, as Franzen points out, it is—depending on the ‘seniority’ of the writer—in the past tense. What difference does it make to you if the writer was influenced by X or Y? Are you going to start reading X (or Y) just because Franzen (or any other suitably famous writer) was influenced by him (or her)?

Onward to the second question that annoys Franzen. What time of the day he works, and what does he write on? He correctly guesses that people ask this question when they probably can’t think of anything else to ask. Yet this knowledge does not stop him from considering the question ‘disturbingly personal and invasive’.  The question—Franzen would have you believe—triggers horrendous images of –what?—him sitting down at his computer and writing at eight o’clock in the morning. I can see why Franzen considers such questions pointless (because they are; what difference does it make to you whether writer wrote his novel in his kitchen or in the garden shade or in the loo?) But for the life of me I do not understand what is there in this harmless question to get so disturbed about? Maybe there is something in the adage that artists have different temperaments from those of you and I (provided you are not a talented artist like Franzen). If you are tempted to call Franzen neurotic I’d urge you not to do that and consider, instead, the phrase ‘delicate sensibilities’.

Question number three: Do Franzen’s characters ‘take over’, ‘speak to him’ etcetera when he writes his fiction? This question sends Franzen’s blood pressure soaring through the outer stratosphere.  If you want to increase the chances of Franzen getting an instant coronary ask him this question, and it will induce in him in a state just this side of apoplexy. Why? Franzen explains. Firstly he traces what he calls the myth of characters taking over to E.M. Forster. (Is there no limit to this man’s crimes? Firstly he wrote novels reading which is akin to adding Mogadon to a pint of lager –he was also a ‘nasty homosexual who knew nothing about India’, according to an interview I remember reading,  of—you have guessed it!—V.S. Naipaul—he also started a myth which, hundred years after he (Forster) wrote his crap novels, runs the grave risk of sending a talented American writer to an early grave by raising his (the talented writer’s) blood pressure to dangerous levels.) There then follows—in the Franzen article in the Guardian—a long speculation as to what might writers mean when they claim that once they start writing their novels, they become slaves to their characters.  Franzen’s guesses are: the writers are mistaken; they are flattering themselves; or the eventual novel turns out to be different from what the writers had planned when they (the writers) began writing them (novels). Franzen would like to declare categorically, so that there is no ambiguity left on this very important matter and posterity does not make a mistake about his writing process and he does not even inadvertently contribute to the wholly unfounded myth started by a ‘nasty homosexual’, that his (Franzen’s) characters do not take over or start ‘talking’ when he writes his novels. He is in complete control. OK?

We now come to the final question that poses risks to Franzen’s circulatory system. How much of his fiction is autobiographical? Franzen answers this question in a curious fashion. He says that he would be immediately suspicious of any novelist who would honestly answer no to this question. (This raises, in my mind, a philosophical question: how does one judge someone’s honesty? And if you conclude—by whatever means available to you—that the person is answering the question honestly, why would you be suspicious? You would be suspicious if you are not wholly convinced of the honesty.) Yet his own answer to this question is no. Franzen does not clarify—at least not directly— whether this is an honest answer or a dishonest answer. (However, going by what he himself says, he ought to be suspicious of himself, as his answer is no. But then, if you study his first sentence, he would become suspicious only if the no is an honest answer. If it is a dishonest answer, presumably Franzen would not become suspicious (although, as we have seen, that would not be the response of most people who—I would put it to you—would become suspicious if they suspect dishonesty.) There then follows (again) a long explanation of what Franzen means when he says his fiction is not autobiographical, which, to quote from a Harry Belafonte song, makes the matters clear as mud.

It seems to me that Franzen is being disingenuous. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to promote his career by going on promotion tours; he wants to promote his novels by accepting invitations of literary programmes (and, in all probabilities, charging fees for his appearances); but he does not want people in the audience—who have parted with their cash which line Franzen’s pockets, well part of it anyway—to ask him questions which he thinks are stupid. It is like a criminal lawyer (by that I mean a lawyer who practises criminal law) saying he does not want to mingle with sleezeballs (and the clients).

Here is what Franzen could do. He ccould do what V.S. Naipaul (I think) does. Naipaul does not go on book promotion tours at all (although that could at least partly be because Sir Vidia is going deaf—so I have read somewhere—which would make it impossible for the interviewer to make himself (or herself) heard unless he (or she) sat in Sir Vidia’s lap and used a megaphone).

Franzen could follow Naipaul’s example (or of the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon, Franzen’s compatriot, who does not go on any promotion tours or attends literary programmes).  Franzen could do that; but then he would be deprived of the opportunity to write a whining article in the Guardian.

E-Books, Jonathan Franzen and Corroding Values

Jonathan Franzen is concerned. He not happy. He is more unhappy than George W Bush was when he was informed that the deadliest chemical weapons the Americans found in Saddam Hussain’s palace was a packet of aspirin. He is complaining. He is in a grumbling mood.

Having heard Franzen on two occasions in literary programmes I have formed a view that the writer of what many consider to be masterpieces of the 21^st century (The Corrections and Freedom) is an inspired and creative grumbler. He is a first rate moaner. He is one of those chaps (I think) who are forever dissatisfied with the state of things. He is the sort of chap (I think) who goes to a restaurant and moans about the cleanliness of the cutlery or the decor of the restaurant or the curtness of the waitress or the lack of choice in the wine menu (he strikes me as a chap who considers himself a wine expert but is shocked if you call him a wine expert and responds by saying he is most certainly not an expert but he does not know a lot but he knows what he likes and likes what he knows). He will go to a cinema and complain about the lack of leg space or the uncomfortable recline of the back rest. On his way out he will moan about the film. He will go on a book promotion tour and agitate that he is compromising his integrity by selling himself. During the question answer session he will be irritated by the stupid questions posed by people who, he will complain after the session, must be made to take a test before they are allowed in. If he is invited to Ophra Winfry show, he will worry that he might get pigeonholed as a writer of Chick Lit. 

Give Jonathan Franzen any subject—the invasion of Iraq, the decline of socialism, queen of England, bourgeois affectations of the bourgeoisie, right-wing press, literary awards—and he will grumble a hypothesis into being.

That is the sort of chap Jonathan Franzen strikes me as (from the two literary programmes of his that I attended, during the entire period of which I kept my mouth shut as Franzen read out from his books, and with great forbearance attempted to answer stupid questions from people who ought not to be allowed within a five mile radius of a literary programme.)

I was therefore not surprised to read in The Guardian and in The Telegraph that Franzen is not impressed with the craze of e-books.

Franzen is not impressed with e-books. They are not the Real McCoy. The serious reader, Franzen claimed, while speaking in a literary festival in Columbia, wanted a sense of permanence. Handling a book, a ‘real object’ according to Franzen, is an essential part of the reading experience. This experience of ‘handling a specific object in a specific time and place,’ explained professor Franzen, is as essential to reading as Garam Masala is to an Indian curry. Can you make an Indian curry without turmeric and ginger-garlic paste? You can, but it won’t be an authentic curry. What is the point of eating a curry that does not burn your tongue? You might as well eat toad in the hole.

What is wrong with e-books? Professor Franzen explains: ‘A screen always feels like you can delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it is not permanent enough,’ he says.

Franzen will not read e-books. Forget it, he won’t do it. You have more chances of persuading Julian Assange to wear a condom while having sex with Swedish women than of convincing Franzen that it is not possible to delete (or change or move) e-books.

Maybe no one will care about books in fifty years time but Franzen does. Will the books  become obsolete in fifty years? Regrettably Franzen is unable to enlighten you on the matter; because he does not have a crystal ball. But if the books do become obsolete in fifty years, he will console himself with the knowledge that he will be dead by then.

In the Hay Festival Franzen also lamented the fact that ‘the combination of technology and capitalism that has given us a world that really feels out of control.’

So, to summarize: (1) Jonathan Franzen does not like e-books. (2) Joathan Franzen believes that e-books do not impart a sense of permanency. (3) Jonathan Franzen believes e-books represent the worst aspect of technology and Capitalism. It is not the unrest in different parts of the world or the clash of civilizations (as one mendacious British prime-minister put it to justify his war-mongering) that has given us a world that feels really out of control; it is the Kindle editions of The Corrections and Freedom (that’s right, both of these Franzen novels are available in electronic format) that are to be blamed for the disturbing deficiency of reality in our world. (4) Jonathan Franzen believes serious readers should avoid e-books with the alacrity of an upper caste Hindu who has spotted a lower caste person from fifty yards. (5) Jonathan Franzen thinks he will be dead in fifty years.

I consider myself a serious reader. I take my reading very seriously. I read literary fiction about which I talk to my friend John when I meet him once a week (over an authentic Indian curry), and try to convince him that there is more to reading than Lee Child and Jack Higgins. I can rattle out all the Booker Prize winners in the last 25 years, and I am learning the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (a much longer list). I order books of Nobel Prize winners and place them prominently on my bookshelf. I can speak for ten minutes non-stop on the magic realism in Salman Rushdie’s novels and how he might have been influenced by the magic realism of Mikhail Bulgakov. I have managed to read the first 25 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow without becoming comatose and I tell myself every few months that I ought to read Ulysses. Last month I bought at a second-hand book-fair Goethe’s Faust: Part 1 and 2 (one pound each).  I am seriously considering ordering all the novels of Jean Paul Sartre, and I am outraged that Philip Roth has not yet won the Nobel.

I think I have said enough to prove my credentials as a serious reader of serious fiction.

Have I got a Kindle (or any other e-reader, such as the Sony e-reader)? No I haven’t.

My friend David bought a Sony e-reader last year, which, while it is thirty pounds costlier than the Kindle Fire, is far better value for money (he claims) because Kindle apparently does not allow you to borrow e-books from your local library, but Sony e-reader does.

‘Kindle is a rip-off,’ David declared. ‘Amazon wants you to buy books from them, and that’s why they don’t allow you to borrow e-books. Don’t bother buying Kindle.’

I assured David that I wouldn’t bother with Kindle.

‘Buy Sony e-reader, the best value for money,’ David advised.

I had to disappoint him. I told him that I had no intention of buying a Sony e-reader either.

‘Why?’ David gave a very credible performance of initial incredulity and incomprehension, followed by dawning comprehension, succeeded by dismay that quickly mutated into withering contempt. ‘Don’t tell me, you plan to stick with physical books,’ he spat out the words along with a half-chewed cardamom pod in the chicken biryani we were sharing in the local Indian (with two male waiters sporting moustaches the size of an adult rat hovering in our vicinity, in case we decided to order extra poppodums; we didn't).

Now, if I had read the Guardian article, I could have told David that e-books did not give me a sense of permanence; that I liked to have a specific object in my hands at a specific place and time; and that e-books made the world unreal, even though I did not fully understand how they did it.

But I had not come across the article in The Guardian when the conversation with David took place. So I merely said, ‘I like reading books.’

‘Physical books are dead. They are on their way out. In fifty years no one is going to read anything other than e-books.’ David delivered his verdict on the future of books (not very different, clever readers will have noted, from that of Jonathan Franzen, except that David would very much want to be alive, unlike Franzen, to see that day).

‘If I am alive in fifty years time, and in control of all my faculties, and books are really obsolete by that time, I shall happily read e-books. However, I don’t expect to be alive in fifty years. I have a family history of heart disease and high blood cholesterol. I fully expect to die in the next thirty years. Thirty five at tops,’ I gave David my own prediction.

‘I gave Sue a Sony e-reader for Christmas,’ David said. Sue is David’s partner. A pointy woman with insubstantial chest and prissy little opinions. And a snob. She reads Jane Austen and George Eliot, which she thinks makes her cleverer than me because I read Jonathan Coe. I am confident that she won’t be able to tell the Booker Prize winners in the past five years, let alone twenty-five; and I will bet my mortgage that she has never heard of Jean-Marie Gustav Le Clezio who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008.  

‘And now Sue will not read anything except e-books,’ David continued. ‘When Sue was converted to e-books, I knew the books were finished. No one would want to read books anymore.’ David gave me a challenging look.

‘That is axiomatically untrue. I am sitting right in front of you and I read only books.’ I took David’s challenge.

‘What have you got against e-books? Why wouldn’t you give them a go?’ David appealed to me, spreading his arms over the table, palms upwards, for emphasis.

The thing is I have nothing against e-books. I have even read a book on Kindle. Another friend of mine lent me his Kindle over last Christmas and I read a book (written by an Australian chancer about how to build up a property portfolio and become a millionaire in less than a decade, accumulating eye-watering debts along the way, and repeating to yourself the mantra that your property is going to quadruple in value in seven years. You can always hang yourself when the things begin to unravel). It wasn’t too bad, I have to say. However, the resolution of the screen was not the same as a paperback (although considerably better than a laptop and reading it did not tire my eyes). The Kindle on which I read had a smaller screen than your average paperback. The navigation was a bit slow.

As far as I am concerned, Kindle or other e-readers don’t offer any advantage over physical books. True, Amazon has cunningly priced Kindle editions of books at a level lower than that of paperback editions. Which means you stand to save money if you buy Kindle editions of books instead of paperbacks. However, if, like me, you borrow books from the local library and don't buy them, you save even more money. I don’t really see the advantage, unlike my friend David, of Sony e-reader, which allows you to borrow on-line from the library without having to go there to borrow or return books. That is because I don’t mind going to the library (and neither should David seeing as his BMI is in the range of clinically obese), but mainly because the e-books collection in the local library is meagre; not a single one of the last fifteen books I read was available in the library in electronic format. True, all these books are available on Amazon in Kindle editions. But here is another thing. Of the fifteen books I read, only one (A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan) had a ‘repeat value’ for me. I wouldn’t mind having this novel in my collection (it has also won the 2010 Pulitzer award for fiction), and I shall buy a paperback rather than Kindle edition (but not from a high-street book shop or Amazon. I am sure that in a couple of years, if not earlier, I shall see the novel in second-hand book shops. If I don’t spot it, I won’t bother. I have read the novel. If I am suddenly consumed with an overwhelming desire to read it again in future (though I doubt it) and if I haven’t still got it in my collection, I can always borrow it from the library.

Another alleged advantage of e-books is that you can take as many as you want when you go on a holiday, whereas paperback books will clutter your suitcase, which you could otherwise put to good use by packing them with cheap wine you buy on the continent.  Maybe if you go on two month-long holidays at a time and your speed of reading is such that you work your way through two books in a day, e-books will be an advantage over paperback books (although, if all that you are doing on a holiday is to bury yourself in books, one might wonder whether you couldn’t do it at home). When I go on a holiday, it is never more than a couple of weeks, and I read a book a week at most.

So, I won’t buy an e-reader any time soon. Not because I am not a serious reader (I am a very serious reader. I am currently hand-to-hand struggling with Michael Frayn’s memoir, My Father’s Fortune, which, I won’t lie, is a bit heavy going; but I will not give up; I will continue with my struggle until the book finishes or my life ends (whichever is earlier). This shows my commitment to reading.) I won’t buy an e-reader because I think it is a waste of my money. I don’t need it. I am very happy reading paperback books. I do not think they put a strain on my resources.

Jonathan Franzen doesn’t like e-books because he believes they are corroding values. Perhaps he will put his money where his mouth is, and not allow his novels to be available as Kindle editions.

Book of the Month: Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)

Last year I heard Jonathan Franzen in a literary programme being asked what he thought of the literary courses purporting to teach would-be fiction writers the tricks of the trade. Franzen heaved a deep sigh (which would have been heard at the back of the auditorium even without the microphone), his body posture suggesting this precisely was the sort of dross he was afraid he would be asked. His answer was surprisingly sincere and unironic. He said that the literary courses would not make a writer of you if you did not have the requisite talent; however they could teach you the technical aspects of novel writing which you would otherwise take a long time—as he did—to learn. He concluded by saying that he did not enrol in any literary course but taught regularly in several.

Franzen was on a promotion tour of Freedom which was published with a tempest of media hype not seen since Ayatollah Khomeini took out a fatwa against Salman Rushdie after the publication of Satanic Verses. The interviewer was fawning over Franzen in a manner that was disrespectful to her age, receiving every utterance of the writer as if he was revealing the secret   formula for the elixir of life.

Franzen then read out an extract from Freedom. If I remember correctly it was about a telephonic dialogue between someone called Joey and a woman named Carol. Joey used to go out with Carol’s daughter but had not called her since he went to university and Carol was (rightly) thinking that he was planning to ditch her daughter and was unhappy about it. I did not find the extract particularly riveting but that could have been down to Franzen’s peculiarly leaden and monotonous style of reading aloud.

Franzen’s 2001 novel, The Corrections, catapulted him to the position of a literary star. Accolades were showered on him like confetti by the critics; the novel won the National Book Award for that year (though not the Pulitzer), and was an international best seller.

I read Corrections during summer holidays a few years ago, and while I liked the novel a lot I wasn’t sure that it was the greatest novel I had read.

Freedom is Franzen’s first work of fiction after a long hiatus of nine years since Corrections was published. This time round the media frenzy was even more. (The word ‘frenzy’ should be interpreted advisedly. The frenzy surrounding the publication of a literary novel is not to be mistaken for the frenzy outside White Hart Lane when Spurs play Arsenal in Premiership Football; no one gets hurt. A few gushing Interviews in the culture sections of broadsheets and ‘lively discussions’ on book blogs qualify, in my view, for literary frenzy. To be fair Franzen’s mug did appear on the front cover of the Time magazine, the first novelist to do so in ten years since Stephen King; and that’s supposed to be a big deal.)

I read Freedom after it came out in paperback, thinking, as I started reading the novel, let me see what the fuss is about. In my experience the ‘long awaited’ follow-ups to literary masterpieces rarely live up to expectations. Donna Tartt’s début novel, The Secret History, was sensational. She followed it, more than a decade later, by The Little Friend, which was a damp squib.

I was therefore not sure that I was going to like Freedom; but tell you what, I loved it; I loved it more than The corrections.

In Freedom Franzen tells the story of a middle-class Midwestern couple—Walter and Patty Berglund—, their two children Joey and Jessica, and their friend Richard Katz. These are the main characters. There is a raft of secondary, peripheral, characters that enrich this magnificent novel.

The novel is divided into several sections. In the opening section Franzen introduces the reader to Walter and Patty, the baby-boomers who once lived in St Paul, Minnesota, a run-down district before it was gentrified by the likes of Walter and Patty.  The novel opens with the omnipresent narrator (whose presence is felt in all sections save those which are memoirs of Patty Berglund, entitled ‘Mistakes were Made’) informing the reader that Walter, who now lives in Washington D.C., has made a mess of his professional life by getting embroiled in projects of dubious ethicality. The minor notoriety Walter has attracted, the reader is informed, is in stark contrast to the liberal, left-of-the-centre views the neighbours of the Berglunds in St Paul associated him with.

The panoramic introduction gives the readers some idea as to the direction the novel will take. In the subsequent sections the reader is treated to a grand tour, via various detours in the marriage of Walter and Patty, and lives of other protagonists, the state of health of American society, including but not limited to (as I understood it) the slow yet steady decline of liberalism. It is also a compassionate commentary on the struggles and foibles of the developed-world middle classes. At the heart of the story is the family of Walter and Patty Berglund; Freedom is a family saga. Both Walter and Patty have their baggages to carry. Patty is the eldest child of a New York Jewish mother with left-leaning political views and ambitions, and an ‘exceedingly gentile’ father who is a barrister. Patty, who had a potential career as a basketball player—never encouraged by her parents—that was thwarted by an injury, wants to put as much distance—physical, emotional and cognitive—between herself and her mother. Her ambition is to be a good housewife and mother. Walter, a third generation Swede, is the middle child of his parents, and has spent his whole childhood disliking his alcoholic father and sociopathic brothers. He too wants to lead a life different from his parents. Walter and Patty meet first in college and Patty is secretly attracted to Walter’s best friend and roommate Richard Katz (a colonel Gaddafi look-alike), another product of a dysfunctional family, who has musical ambitions. Richard whose friendship with Walter—as Walter acknowledges at one point—is characterized by brinkmanship covets Patty, but it is the slow and steady Walter whom Patty marries and settles into what she hopes to be a life-time of marital bliss. In due course they have two children—Jessica and Joey. Patty comes to have such intense relationship with Joey that his only way not to be suffocated by the possessive love of his mother is to rebel in a manner calculated to enrage his parents. Joey starts a relationship with the next door neighbour’s daughter who Patty thinks is ‘totally unsuitable’ for her son, not least because of the difference in the social status of the two families. Walter, a devoted conservationist, gets entangled in morally questionable schemes of a multi-billionaire coal baron (with close links to Neo-cons) who is apparently obsessed with creating a protected habitat of the rapidly declining songbird, which necessitates shady dealings with other multinationals and involve blowing off mountain tops. Walter, hired by the coal baron at dizzying salary, convinces himself that what he is doing is going to be of benefit in the long run even though it may make him look like a conscienceless hypocrite in the short run. Walter is ably assisted in maintaining this mirage by his attractive Indian assistant Lalitha. Lalitha, engaged to an Indian neurosurgeon, has clearly fallen for her boss; and Walter whose marriage to Patty, who is sinking deep into middle-age depression and problem drinking, is floundering, is also attracted to Lalitha; however he is not going to be waylaid into an affair because of his notions of fidelity to his spouse. What Walter and Patty definitely do not need is trouble that would jeopardize their relationship further. The trouble arrives in the form of Richard Katz who, after years of obscurity as a musician, has, to his discomfort, hit the popularity jackpot. Patty sleeps with Richard in the Berglunds’ holiday cottage, bequeathed to Walter by his mother, while Walter is running the busy schedule of enabling multinationals to inflict further damage on nature and fending off come-ons from Lalitha. This will, in due course, precipitate a crisis in the Berglund marriage. Walter’s son, in the meanwhile, is running his own profiteering schemes, in partnership with other unscrupulous characters, which involve fleecing the US army in Iraq with faulty army vehicles for exorbitant prices. Joey has Republican sympathies and Walter’s own lucrative dealings with the Neo-cons do not temper his horror at his son’s betrayal of the ideology.

It all ends well, you will be pleased to know, for the Berglunds (well, more or less). When the novel ends Walter and Patty are back together (Lalitha having the decency to die in a tragic road crash), and their children are settled.

Freedom is a neat novel. Despite its various strands and the vast expanses of time covered (a large part of the novel focuses on the years after 2001, but the time period stretches from the 1970s to present day), Franzen brings everything neatly together towards the end, yet succeeds in not making it appearing too neat or formulaic.

Via the Berglund  family saga Franzen touches several contemporary issues relevant both to America and wider world: the atrocities at the World Trade Centre in 2001 and the ill-advised invasion of Iraq; destruction of the natural habitats of birds and animals (a subject apparently close to Franzen’s heart; he is particularly fascinated by the songbird—as mentioned in his 2007 memoir The Discomfort Zone—which Walter so valiantly tries to protect) and the effect on environment; and fatigue and decline of liberal thinking in America (Franzen presumably is a Democrat, but Walter, the fictional democrat, opines at one point that there is nothing wrong with his wife’s mental state that a job wouldn’t resolve). All these themes blend so well in the narrative structure of the novel that at no stage do they seem like an unnecessary add-on.

That is not all. One of the many reasons why this novel has struck a chord with wider book-reading public (I think) is that it touches upon and gives sometime-ironic-sometimes-sincere comment upon many contemporary issues close to the heart of the developed world middle-classes. In that sense the novel is similar to The Corrections, only better, as it is not as inward looking as The Corrections.

Ultimately, though, the novel succeeds because of Franzen’s eminently believable, well-rounded and compassionate portraits of the worlds of his protagonists. The story of Walter and Patty and their children and their friend Richard is the story of you and me. And it is told in a manner that is funny, witty, compassionate, humane, and, above all, utterly absorbing. (Not easy, this; Ian McEwan could not pull it off in Solar which is on the theme of global warming; there is a cheeky nod to McEwan’s Atonement in this novel, when Joey struggles to interest himself in the descriptions of rooms and paintings.) Freedom is a very well-written novel. At almost 600 pages it is humongous, but it is also a literary page-turner.

In her memoir Patty Berglund mentions that she is reading War and Peace; she even compares herself at one point to Narasha. Has Franzen written a modern day War and Peace? I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t read War and Peace.  Is Freedom the Great American Novel? I wouldn’t know about it either, because I haven’t read many American novels. What I can say is Freedom is a smashing good read, one of the most enjoyable novels I have read so far this year. Unhesitatingly recommended.