In Freedom, I've advanced to the section, about half-way through the novel, concerning Joey Berglund's freshman year at the University of Virginia. I hope it doesn't seem perverse if I persist in my quirky attention to the novel's chronology and the fact-checking of small details, such as whether it is indeed possible that Joey's mother's college basketball games were played before the alternate possession rule eliminated almost all jump balls.
On page 251, Joey and his roommate are watching a World Series game on television. We know that it is a few weeks past the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which occurred just as Joey was starting college. The game, we are told, is between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees--check, those two teams were indeed the 2001 contestants. The Diamondbacks, behind Randy Johnson's pitching, win the game 4-0--check, that was indeed the final score of Game 2, played on Sunday, October 28, in Phoenix, with Johnson the winning pitcher. At the bottom of the page, our omniscient narrator reports that "On Jonathan's TV, Derek Jeter lined out to second base, and the game was over"--check, that is how the game ended, according to the batter-by-batter summary supplied at the above "Game 2" link.
Even Homer nodded but it's hard to catch Franzen. Maybe the characterization of Patty Berglund, nee Emerson, is not all of a piece. Here she is speaking with Joey on the telephone, Thanksgiving 2001:
"But you don't have any religion."
"Exactly my point. That was one of the few things that my parents and I agreed on, bless their hearts. That religion is stoopid. Although apparently my sister now disagrees with me, which means that our record of disagreeing about absolutely everything is still unblemished."
"Which sister?"
"Your aunt Abigail. She's apparently deep into the Kabbalah and rediscovering her Jewish roots, such as they are. How do I know this, you ask? Because we got a chain letter, or e-mail actually, from her, about the Kabbalah. I thought it was pretty bad form, and so I actually e-mailed her back, to ask her please not to send me any more chain letters, and she e-mailed me back about her Journey."
"I don't even know what the Kabbalah is," Joey said.
"Oh, I'm sure she'd be happy to tell you all about it, if you ever want to be in touch with her. It's very Important and Mystical--I think Madonna's into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there."
"Madonna's Jewish?"
"Yah, Joey, hence her name." His mother laughed at him.
All very enjoyable, like so much else in this long book, but, by this point in the narrative, the reader has gotten to know Patty pretty well, her flattened affect, for example, and how she is supposedly the stupidest person in her eccentric, flawed family of origin, and it therefore seems that some of the intelligence and wit displayed in the above conversation is on loan from Jonathan Franzen himself.
Carping complaint, not even really a complaint, just something that occurred to me while I was reading along with great pleasure. There are two Pattys. One can't figure out that her drug-addled college friend does not really have leukemia and the other is the sophisticated author of the "autobiography," written at the suggestion of her therapist, which is included in the novel and displays throughout Franzen's own effortlessly elegant, but still conversational, prose style.
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