You may have heard from, oh, I don’t know, the Time Magazine cover or the Vogue profile or the rave reviews or the Picoult/Weiner spat or the author video where Franzen says he doesn’t like author videos or the fact that the President of the United States was spotted with it….. anyway, you might have heard that Jonathan Franzen has a new novel out today, his first since The Corrections, and it’s a pretty big deal.
I haven’t yet read Freedom, but from the early reviews this novel is everything that our Internet-manic, high concept craving, supposedly dumbed down culture is not. It “[deconstructs] a family’s history to give us a wide-angled portrait of the country as it rumbled into the materialistic 1990s.” (NY Times) It explores “the unresolved tensions, the messiness of emotion, of love and longing, that possesses even the most willfully ordinary of lives.” (LA Times).
You can’t exactly Tweet a summary of what this book is about. Whether you like Franzen’s books or not (as you can probably tell: I’m a big fan), it’s a novel that punches a gaping hole through the remarkably persistent idea that the publishing industry, and the culture as a whole, is only interested in high concept schlock and the lowest common denominator.
On the other hand, Freedom, in its bigness, in its You Must Read This To Be a Thinking Person in America, is already a novel of the times – the big books getting steadily bigger, accumulating hype with gravitational pull, and then there’s everything else fighting for attention.
We seem to be a culture that is simultaneously craving books that fit our exact specifications at the same time that we want the shared experience of reading something, loving it, and sharing that experience with our friends (virtual and real life). Culture seems to be moving two contradictory ways – fracturing into ever-smaller niches at the same time that it’s coalescing around a few massively popular books and movies. We normally think of the blockbusters in terms of James Patterson, Suzanne Collins, and Stephenie Meyer, but even in literary fiction you have your Freedoms and Oscar Waos.
And in a still further sign of the time, even though Franzen once said of his disdain for novels in e-book form, “Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too,” Freedom is available for sale as an e-book simultaneously with the hardcover.
What do you think? Will you be reading Freedom?
Ever read Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills? What a fun read, or listen in my case, especially if you happen to have Hollywood experience and live down here. The book is comic, literary, a personal political platform, and just crazy fun. Like the Franzen novels, it's a cultural snapshot at a historical point in time. I'm going with Jane on the fun though. He doesn't strike me as fun.
I strongly doubt I'll read it. Whenever I see this much hype for a book I run screaming from it. Not literally, of course, though I'm sure I'd amuse my husband and terrify the other browsers at B&N or Borders if I did that. I remember skimming through Franzen's last book and thinking, "This guy's lame."
That opinion hasn't changed much.
Terin,
Franzen may write literary fiction, but his prose is pretty straightforward – none of Joyce's linguistic gymnastics to be found. He's also less willfully obscure than Hemingway. So I wouldn't let some of the stigmas of so-called "lit fiction" preclude you from reading Freedom.
Not to say you're guaranteed to love it, but just so you're aware that Franzen is in fact very "readable".
I will definitely read it. But I'll get it from the library.
Hank: thanks.
I'll give him a try.
In the words of the Clairol Herbal Essences shampoo ad of the 90s:
Yes! Yes! Yes!
I've come to a point in my life where I value kindness over talent and intellect. Some people may believe it's okay for those qualities to be mutually exclusive in a writer, but I don't. I don't think this makes me anti-intellectual. I work hard for what little money I earn and I'm not parting with it to spend time with a writer who has—so far, at least—shown he has a one-star personality. There are plenty of other writers—Cormac McCarthy comes to mind—with whom I can spend time and from whom I can learn.
So, we must read FREEDOM to be thinking people in America? Amazing how the vast majority seem to think well enough without reading FREEDOM, or anything by Mr. Franzen. Like other commenters, the more I hear I must read something, the less inclined I am to do so.
Nina, you're not alone. Most of the human race will never hear of Mr. Franzen.
Mira, magic, lost princes and trolls? YES! Imagine the mash-ups! THE CORRECTIONS AND THE FARM BOY WHO SAVED THE UNIVERSE! FREEDOM AND THE MATERIALISTIC TROLLS FROM THE NINETIES! You have to mumble them, of course…
Fulton, hype might get an awful movie a good opening weekend, but no more. Bay/Bruckheimer movies always do better than that.
fyi, Nathan (and speaking of angst) Franzen was interviewed by Terry Gross today on Fresh Air and he talked about using his writing to work through psychological stuff (at least I think he did–he's waaaay smart and I'm not). Audio isn't up last I looked, but I bet it will be soon.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129747555