Jonathan Franzen: one of America's greatest living novelists?

Jonathan Franzen is almost alone in his willingness to tackle America's big issues, argues Benjamin Secher.

Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom, is being hailed as one of America's greatest novelists
Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom, is being hailed as one of America's greatest novelists Credit: Photo: REX FEATURES

The man on the cover of last week’s Time magazine looked out of place. His tidy demeanour – sensible spectacles, neatly ironed shirt, a far from unruly degree of stubble – was undermined by the awkward, somewhat unsettled expression on his face. His was the look of an audience member who has crept out of a theatre mid-performance, taken a wrong turn into the backstage gloom and, expecting to encounter the cool porcelain of the urinal, found himself faced instead with the unforgiving scrutiny of a packed house. It was the look of a man who is thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?”

Well might he wonder. The man in the picture is Jonathan Franzen, a 51-year-old Chicago-born writer – or, as Time’s headline insists, a “Great American Novelist”. In the 87-year history of Time, only a handful of US novelists have graced its cover: among them J D Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison and John Updike (twice). The last living specimen to make the grade was Stephen King, a full 10 years ago.

All those writers produced at least one work of fiction that became something more than a book, that took on the stubborn significance of a cultural monument, that etched its author’s name into the history of American letters. What has Franzen done – a writer from whom we’ve heard barely a peep since his dazzling 2001 portrait of a disintegrating family, The Corrections, tickled critics, seduced readers and went on to sell more than 2.85million copies worldwide – to find himself in such lofty company?

The answer lies in Freedom, Franzen’s fourth novel, and his first since The Corrections. It won’t be published here until late September but it comes out in the US this month and is already being greeted as the literary event of the new decade. Even Michiko Kakutani, fearsome critic of The New York Times and a woman notorious for being about as generous with her praise as Ebenezer Scrooge was with his cash, has declared it “an indelible portrait of our time”.

So what is all the fuss about? Freedom is at once a lavishly entertaining account of a family at war with itself, and a brilliant dissection of the dissatisfactions and disappointments of contemporary American life. At its heart are the Berglunds, Walter and Patty, a middle-class mid-western couple: he’s a lawyer, she’s a housewife and former Varsity basketball star. Like the Lamberts in The Corrections, the Berglunds have everything going for them – privilege, popularity, education, money, marriage, kids – and yet somehow contrive to fashion from their lives, and those of their children, Joey and Jessica, a million types of misery and rage.

The narrative swoops back and forth through the years between 1960 and 2010, poking its beak into the faultlines between Patty and Walter, faultlines forced wider by the presence of a would-be rock star named Richard Katz, who both Patty and Walter love in different and damaging ways. In careful, compelling sentences, it roots out the contradictions between their thoughts and their behaviour, their past and present selves, moving always with the apparent ease of a bird in flight.

One moment, its gaze is intensely intimate, homing in on one of Walter’s secret desires, “imperfectly hidden at the back of his mind”. Other times, it will take us to a vantage point from which we can appreciate the ridiculous gulf between the small worries that these characters spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about (“Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy, brilliant kids while working full-time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning?”) and the big ones that we all do our best to ignore (“WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH!”).

Where The Corrections took pleasure in its characters’ disasters – its presiding image, played for laughs, was that of Alfred, the Lambert patriarch brought low by dementia, rootling around in his own excrement before plunging off the side of a cruise ship, a comic blur glimpsed through a porthole – Freedom, though frequently funny, is ultimately tender: its emotional currency is both the pain and the pleasure that that word implies. Franzen’s characters still fail here, and fail spectacularly, but the writer’s final instinct, having given complex life to the Berglunds, is now to catch them when they fall, to forgive even their most monstrous qualities, where once he would have mocked.

The whole package, unashamedly generous of heft (it weighs in at over 550 pages) and heart, adds up to a rare pleasure, an irresistible invitation to binge-read, to devote the kind of time to a book that we tend more often these days to reserve only for work, sleep, or marathon viewing sessions of DVD box-sets. That it also grapples with a fundamental dilemma of modern middle-class America – namely: Is it really still OK to spend your life asserting your unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, when the rest of the world is in such a state? – is what makes it something wonderful.

If Freedom doesn’t qualify as a Great American Novel for our time, then I don’t know what would. When novelist William DeForest coined that dreadful phrase back in 1868, in an essay for The Nation in which he agonised over the relative merits of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, he defined it as the achievement of “painting the American soul within the framework of a novel”.

In the nine years since The Corrections was published, the American soul has been bothered in ways that nobody could have seen coming – the Twin Towers were brought down; Bush invaded Iraq; the global economy fell off a cliff; America elected its first black president. And so, too, have the ways of representing it. Young American novelists such as Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, a close friend of Franzen’s who committed suicide in 2008 and whose name appears without fanfare in Freedom’s list of acknowledgements, have mostly turned their back on the conventional “framework of a novel”, seeking more experimental ways of representation – a fractured mirror with which to reflect their fractured times – or else turned their eye to resolutely small-scale narratives, or non-fiction.

Franzen is the exception. The reason to celebrate him is not that he is doing something new but that he is doing something old, presumed dead – and doing it brilliantly. Freedom bids for a place alongside the great achievements of his predecessors, not his contemporaries; it belongs on the same shelf as John Updike’s Rabbit, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. It is the first Great American Novel of the post-Obama era.

A man who insists on writing his books on an old computer, unconnected to the internet, and whose maladroitness with the media once resulted in him get himself disinvited from Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, Franzen is in many ways a man out of time. But he proves that whatever else has been swept away in the past few years, rumours of the literary novel’s demise were exaggerated. Welcome back, Jonathan Franzen.