Finished Franzen's Freedom. Didn't want it to end, but it did, and I feel now like I thought I would--not like there's been a death in the family but tending in that direction. Some people consider themselves too smart to fall for it but not me.
More than one reviewer has taken note of the part played in the novel by Tolstoy's War and Peace. Patty reads it, partly to impress Walter but also because she enjoys it, especially the way in which the narrative seems to reflect aspects of her own life: she's Natasha to Richard Katz's Anatol while Walter is Prince Andrei. By these allusions Franzen I think calls attention to his high ambition, the effort to compose a sweeping chronicle of the United States in the years, roughly, 1978 to 2008, by telling the stories of two families, the Emersons and the Berglunds. One aspect of this ambition is the geographic sprawl, from Minnesota's Twin Cities and the Iron Range towns to points distant and eastward: New York City, Westchester County, Georgetown, West Virginia, and Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the University of Virginia. Franzen, master of the American scene, provides rich renderings of all these locales, their flora and fauna, from which locales (except for West Virginia and Hibbing, Minnesota) you might surmise that none of the principal characters is in foreclosure--and you'd be right. In that way it might be argued that Freedom is not true to the American scene, but something similar could be said against War and Peace, and, anyway, toward the end of the novel, when Walter is living by a lake in a mostly hardscrabble region of northern Minnesota, his solitude is encroached upon by a new upscale subdivision whose residents, it is revealed, are not all paying their bills.
About those neighbors: they are studying Walter and Patty just as, at the very beginning, Walter-and-Patty were the objects of their neighbors' attention in their gentrified St. Paul neighborhood. So we see the two of them first through other eyes, darkly, and then in the long and mostly satisfying middle sections, directly, before at the end they blur out in the eye of a different set of neighbors. The desired effect, I believe, is to give the impression that one has come finally to the apt and necessary conclusion of a bulging epic. Perhaps by the end, however, the memory of the parallel beginning is not distant enough for this effect to be fully realized. I will finish where I began by saying that--excepting the sequences concerning Walter's work with the Cerulean Mountain Trust, which he finally renounces in a somewhat corny scene involving a speech he ad-libs before the right-wingers with whom he had made implausible (considering his intelligence) common cause--I wished the novel longer.
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