(no subject)
I. Older reading
I finally finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It's difficult to know what to say about the book, how to approach the task of reviewing it. It's difficult in part because the book is huge, sprawling, complicated, and messy. And because so much as been said (and said so passionately) about the book already--Franzen is apparently either a self-important asshole or the second coming, and every writer and critic in America seems to have very strong opinions about which one he is. And then there are all of those comparisons to The Corrections that are just crying out to be made...
So let's get the comparisons to The Corrections out of the way first. The similarities are obvious: both novels are big and ambitious, stuffed with large casts of characters and up-to-the-minute cultural references; both concern troubled midwestern families, exposing the full range of their dysfunction in squirm-inducing detail; both take generational conflict as one their major themes. And let's get this out of the way too: The Corrections is better. Maybe even a lot better. It's funnier and looser, Franzen manages his large cast better, and the whole just seems to mean more in the end. But Freedom, even if it never took flight for me in the same way that The Corrections did, is still a good book.
I think the key to the strength of Freedom lies in its primary difference from The Corrections. Despite the large cast, despite all the blurbs that describe it as a novel about a family, it is essentially a two-character book. Freedom is the story of Walter and Patty Berglund, of their marriage, of their love for each other, of the ways that they cause each other pain every single day. Walter and Patty are great characters--they're complicated, they're flawed in really significant ways, they do good things, they do awful things, and even if the reader doesn't particularly like them, it would be hard to deny their essential humanity. Franzen also does a great job of giving us a very long view of the relationship between Walter and Patty, the way it evolves and is changed by the force of time.
The trouble with this is that it makes the book feel uneven. None of the other characters come to life the way Walter and Patty do. The only one who comes close is their long-time friend Richard Katz. The others mainly feel like automatons who have been programmed to play a particular role and then plugged into the story. The plot seems to lose focus whenever it wanders too far from Walter and Patty. There were long chapters devoted to the trials and tribulations of their son Joey, but in the end those chapters seemed not to add up to much. The book could have been two hundred pages shorter (and possibly better) without of Joey's convoluted plot lines.
So it's a flawed book, but it's also a highly engaging and readable book.
II. Newer reading
Wanting something quite different from Freedom, I went to my to-read shelf and took down Liza Dalby's memoir East Wind Melts the Ice. I've only read a little bit of it so far, but Dalby's conception of the book is fascinating. In studying the history of Japanese and Chinese calendrical systems, Dalby learned about an ancient Chinese calendar that divides the year into 72 segments of five days each. Each segment is a tiny little season, and has a name reflecting what happens in the natural world during that small span: "Fish swim upstream, breaking the ice," or "Bitter herb grows tall," or "White dew descends." Dalby's book is a year-long journal written in concordance with these calendar segments--each miniature season has a miniature essay, an easy, flowing reflection on whatever Dalby notices or thinks about during that phase of the year.
I thought at first that reading the book straight through might be the wrong approach--that I should, instead, spread it out over the course of a whole year, reading each little section during the appropriate five-day period. And perhaps that would be a good way to read it, but right now I am going to read it straight through. I read the introduction and the first few sections last night, and the whole thing spoke so clearly to the frame of mind that I'm in right now. The idea of noting seasonal change in such an infinitesimal way seems just right to me in this moment when I'm watching the progression of plants blooming across my garden. First the camellia, then the azalea, soon the lilac. Last week I took a picture of new buds on my neighbors' tree; today I am looking out the window at a tree in full leaf. So I'll stay with that feeling and read the book right now. And maybe, if it bears rereading, someday I'll try it the other way too.
I finally finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It's difficult to know what to say about the book, how to approach the task of reviewing it. It's difficult in part because the book is huge, sprawling, complicated, and messy. And because so much as been said (and said so passionately) about the book already--Franzen is apparently either a self-important asshole or the second coming, and every writer and critic in America seems to have very strong opinions about which one he is. And then there are all of those comparisons to The Corrections that are just crying out to be made...
So let's get the comparisons to The Corrections out of the way first. The similarities are obvious: both novels are big and ambitious, stuffed with large casts of characters and up-to-the-minute cultural references; both concern troubled midwestern families, exposing the full range of their dysfunction in squirm-inducing detail; both take generational conflict as one their major themes. And let's get this out of the way too: The Corrections is better. Maybe even a lot better. It's funnier and looser, Franzen manages his large cast better, and the whole just seems to mean more in the end. But Freedom, even if it never took flight for me in the same way that The Corrections did, is still a good book.
I think the key to the strength of Freedom lies in its primary difference from The Corrections. Despite the large cast, despite all the blurbs that describe it as a novel about a family, it is essentially a two-character book. Freedom is the story of Walter and Patty Berglund, of their marriage, of their love for each other, of the ways that they cause each other pain every single day. Walter and Patty are great characters--they're complicated, they're flawed in really significant ways, they do good things, they do awful things, and even if the reader doesn't particularly like them, it would be hard to deny their essential humanity. Franzen also does a great job of giving us a very long view of the relationship between Walter and Patty, the way it evolves and is changed by the force of time.
The trouble with this is that it makes the book feel uneven. None of the other characters come to life the way Walter and Patty do. The only one who comes close is their long-time friend Richard Katz. The others mainly feel like automatons who have been programmed to play a particular role and then plugged into the story. The plot seems to lose focus whenever it wanders too far from Walter and Patty. There were long chapters devoted to the trials and tribulations of their son Joey, but in the end those chapters seemed not to add up to much. The book could have been two hundred pages shorter (and possibly better) without of Joey's convoluted plot lines.
So it's a flawed book, but it's also a highly engaging and readable book.
II. Newer reading
Wanting something quite different from Freedom, I went to my to-read shelf and took down Liza Dalby's memoir East Wind Melts the Ice. I've only read a little bit of it so far, but Dalby's conception of the book is fascinating. In studying the history of Japanese and Chinese calendrical systems, Dalby learned about an ancient Chinese calendar that divides the year into 72 segments of five days each. Each segment is a tiny little season, and has a name reflecting what happens in the natural world during that small span: "Fish swim upstream, breaking the ice," or "Bitter herb grows tall," or "White dew descends." Dalby's book is a year-long journal written in concordance with these calendar segments--each miniature season has a miniature essay, an easy, flowing reflection on whatever Dalby notices or thinks about during that phase of the year.
I thought at first that reading the book straight through might be the wrong approach--that I should, instead, spread it out over the course of a whole year, reading each little section during the appropriate five-day period. And perhaps that would be a good way to read it, but right now I am going to read it straight through. I read the introduction and the first few sections last night, and the whole thing spoke so clearly to the frame of mind that I'm in right now. The idea of noting seasonal change in such an infinitesimal way seems just right to me in this moment when I'm watching the progression of plants blooming across my garden. First the camellia, then the azalea, soon the lilac. Last week I took a picture of new buds on my neighbors' tree; today I am looking out the window at a tree in full leaf. So I'll stay with that feeling and read the book right now. And maybe, if it bears rereading, someday I'll try it the other way too.