The next Great American Novel

By Alex Buckey     9/30/10 7:00pm

According to Wikipedia, a Great American Novel is one that, when it is published, insightfully captures the zeitgeist - "the spirit of the times," also according to Wikipedia - of the nation. Time magazine pegs Jonathan Franzen as this generation's Great American Novelist, and his new book Freedom is the work that clinched the title for him. That kind of instant canonization makes reading Freedom an interesting challenge: Not only do readers have to think about whether they like or understand the book, they have to decide whether their zeitgeist has been captured.Franzen has been on the unofficial Great American Shortlist since 2001, when his novel The Corrections earned the National Book Award and got him into an infamous public dustup with Oprah. Freedom came out in August and has already gained truly stunning amounts of critical praise, a #2 spot on The New York Times best-seller list and a path back into Oprah's good graces - the hardcover carries an Oprah's Book Club sticker.

Of course, a novel this big is bound to have detractors, and Freedom has generated a large, if ideologically jumbled, backlash. Commercial fiction powerhouses Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner used the novel's publicity blitz as an opportunity to air their grievances about critical coverage of fiction by women, while other writers skipped politics in favor of the standard literary gripes. Even so, when compared to the usual critical reception of a new 576-page novel - complete critical indifference and dismal sales - Freedom is a superstar. The book has earned the right to have its claims to social relevance taken seriously. And what ends up emerging from the novel is a brilliant story about a few very flawed, competitive and dissatisfied humans that end up sagging under the weight of great American expectations.

The plot of Freedom is simple, and the reader is given the gist of the book's central conflict in the first few pages. Walter and Patty Berglund are a young married couple who gently gentrify a St. Paul neighborhood in the 1980s and proceed to raise children in the haven they create. Walter is an environmental lawyer and Patty is a stay-at-home mother. They are attractive, smart, determined and are admired by their neighbors, though mostly from a polite distance. They raise two children, and their young son rebels. The family becomes destabilized, the Berglunds move to Washington, D.C., and years later the mystery of the couple deepens when Walter becomes involved in an environmental scandal and his name gets splashed in The New York Times. Meanwhile, Richard Katz, a talented musician who is Walter's best friend and the object of Patty's fascination, moves in and out of their lives. The book is devoted to solving the mystery of what happened to Walter and Patty. Along the way is the exploration of three generations of Berglund unease, Patty's careful, striking memoir and a lot of silliness about environmentalism, capitalist entropy and the Iraq war.

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The novel suffers from an overabundance of florid sex scenes (if you like your porn grammatically neat and extremely earnest, try literary fiction) and symmetrical pairings that track each parent's failures to a corresponding dysfunction in his/her child. Its focus on the inter-familial transmission of neuroses and personal heartbreak like so many head colds is at once revelatory and annoying. But the book's excesses of personal emotion can be forgiven because it manages to spin the type of plot you might pick up at a particularly boozy and indiscreet neighborhood cocktail party - Walter and Patty Berglund were the block's premiere couple, and there has been a fall from grace - and turn it into more than 500 pages of utterly absorbing reading. Franzen takes the inner lives of people whose middle-aged affluent dramas would normally be treated with either prurient contempt or the patience that only a therapist can provide, and he turns them into objects of rapt and sympathetic interest. That is no small feat, but it is not ultimately what the author had in mind.

The things that make Freedom a successful novel are the things that disqualify it as a Great American Novel. As an intense and sympathetic study of a tight cluster of unsatisfied people, it is moving. As a work of social criticism, it is maudlin. Freedom suffers from an ambition that outstrips its scope, a desire to say something that strains the limits of the characters' credibility. They work as people but not as archetypes. It is too much of a burden for two or three main characters and 20 years of life experience to represent the ills of the American middle class. And Franzen is either an overly subtle parodist or his social observations aren't as fresh as he believes them to be. There is, for example, an up-and-coming musical act in the novel called Tutsi Picnic - a name choice that isn't funny enough to be a joke indie band name but just so slightly tone-deaf that it belies the author's unfamiliarity with the subject at hand. This type of jarring near-miss is typical of the Franzen mode of social criticism. His endearing closeness with his main characters is in contrast with the awkward yet knowing distance he keeps from popular culture, like the posture of an uncle who smiles indulgently and asks if your iPhone comes with Twitter.

It's easy to push back at a book that is such an unqualified success. The truth is that Oprah and The New York Times like it for a reason. Franzen's novel is compelling, beautifully executed and written with the kind of brave intelligence that doesn't define itself in opposition to human frailty. If Freedom fails to capture the zeitgeist, the fault may lie with the zeitgeist and not the book. Who started the idea, so well-worn in the world of fiction, that one couple's strained marriage or one family's dignified despair could capture the spirit of the times? Maybe it would be truer to the American zeitgeist to simply immerse ourselves in the personal details, forget the big picture and realize that every American is unhappy in his own way

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