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“Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, like his previous one, The Corrections, is a masterpiece of American fiction, Sam Tanehaus, in “Peace and Love,” his review of Freedom in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
With a title that could not be more American in concept, Freedom (FSG Books), is rooted in that collective bedrock belief in our inviolate personal freedom—a romanticized “spiritual” faith in the importance of our lives, our choices, our inalienable right to happiness—to be, have, own all that we dream. The conflict, of course, occurs when reality intrudes on the American freedom dream. We really can’t be, have, own all; and our freedoms endlessly intersect, often not happily, with the freedoms of others. Eventually, the dream sours—leaving the dreamer susceptible to “misanthropy and rage.”
The novel’s main characters, Walter and Patty Berglund of St. Paul, Minnesota, twenty years and two kids into a solid marriage, are people you know. Socially conscious, smug and self-congratulatory, they give themselves credit for their lot in life and judge those with less rather harshly. (It’s the new American way.) Admired citizens of the enlightened suburbs, the Berglunds are, frankly, a little annoying. You will turn the pages awaiting their comeuppance. Then you discover Patty’s memoir going back to her college years when she had a secret relationship with Walter’s best friend Richard, a rock musician—and that is just the beginning of the revelations ahead.
Franzen Glorified is surely his inspiration for the Richard character who also found fame in 2001 and turned into a scornful critic of the American scene. You may recall that Franzen dissed Oprah in 2001, that The Corrections was summarily un-chosen for Oprah’s book club—and that the whole brouhaha was obscured by 9/11. Yet the book survived all to become a critical and marketplace success including winning the Natioal Book Award—as well it should have. We needed truth in the form of good story-telling and bracing social commentary, then more than ever even if surprisingly it came from a prissy-mouthed man so lacking in supreme confidence that he didn’t want his friends to think he was happy about being an Oprah pick.
But, dear readers, Franzen didn’t become a snarky boy with fame. He got there like so many Midwestern boys I know—We are both natives of the St. Louis area—via expressing his insecurities through contemptuous critiques of everyone else, no doubt beginning in high school. Typical of the breed, Franzen is a bit of a misogynist and more than a little uncomfortable with sex. (My guess—no better than average, if that good, in bed.)
Sex? You ask. Where is the sex? It seems Mr. Franzen and I have a bit of a past.
In “Anti-Climax,” as A Critic At Large, The New Yorker, April 21, 1997, Jonathan Franzen wrote:
“This winter I embarked on a survey of contemporary popular sex books and was confronted with evidence that I am one of the few heterosexual men in American who are not turned on by elaborate lingerie…”
My book Sexational Secrets: The Ultimate Guide To Erotic Know-How, an international best-seller particularly beloved in Italy!, was one of the sex books he “surveyed,” read "put down" in the manner of a passion purist who doesn't think people need sex advice. He hung the lingerie fetish on me, insisting wrongly that I endorsed Victoria’s Secret or, worse, Frederick’s of Hollywood, when my readers (and lovers) know that by “lingerie,” I mean—the good stuff, the real silks and laces like French women wear. He also challenged my assertion (since upheld in various studies) that rich people have better sex. Sexual satisfaction improves with increases in education and income levels. People who aren’t embarrassed to buy the books and have the money for toys, workshops, lingerie, trips—and perhaps call girls and rent boy—are likely to have a better time in bed. Raise your hands and clap with Tinkerbell if this is a surprise.
If I were invited to lunch with the man, I probably wouldn’t go. He is, however, our greatest living author and deserved the Time magazine cover, the rapprochement with Oprah, leading to Freedom as a book club pick, the reviews that often read like the reviewer has just come up from his knees where he kissed the hem of Franzen’s jeans before opening a document to type. Ironically, I was an early fan, an admirer of The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992.)
If I can take only two books with me into outer space when aliens kidnap me to become the galaxy’s First Chief Advisor On the Orgasm, I will grab F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom—the two great American novels.
An Excerpt from FREEDOM--
For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee. She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said she expected to be "beheaded" someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she'd replaced. Her children were "probably" dying of trichinosis from pork she'd undercooked. She wondered if her "addiction" to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her "never" reading books anymore. She confided that she'd been "forbidden" to fertilize Walter's flowers after what had happened "last time." There were people with whom her style of self-deprecation didn't sit well - who detected a kind of condescension in it, as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers. But most people found her humility sincere or at least amusing, and it was in any case hard to resist a woman whom your own children liked so much and who remembered not only their birthdays but yours, too, and came to your back door with a plate of cookies or a card or some lilies of the valley in a little thrift-store vase that she told you not to bother returning.
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