Very few novels make clear and provocative arguments about American life anymore, but Jonathan Franzen’s important new book, “Freedom,” makes at least two. First, he argues that American culture is overobsessed with personal freedom. Second, he portrays an America where people are unhappy and spiritually stunted.
When I saw the excerpt quoted above, I went to the link expecting the NY Times to give us another lecture on how individualistic we Americans are and to (however subtly) suggest that we’d be happier if we gave up that “freedom” for some kind of socialist paradise.
Instead I read the following:
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Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation. This message caught on (it’s flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. If you judged by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly no fulfilled ones.
By now, writers have become trapped in the confines of this orthodoxy. So even a writer as talented as Franzen has apt descriptions of neighborhood cattiness and self-medicating housewives, but ignores anything that might complicate the Quiet Desperation dogma. There’s almost no religion. There’s very little about the world of work and enterprise. There’s an absence of ethnic heritage, military service, technical innovation, scientific research or anything else potentially lofty and ennobling.
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It is actually kind of refreshing to see the NY Times print something that isn’t sneering at us middle-class clingers. So, perhaps for the first time in years, I’ll give them a little credit for printing this review.
” First, he argues that American culture is overobsessed with personal freedom.”
As was Jefferson, and all the other patriots who died rather than remain living in slavery.
It was kind of refreshing, to coin a phrase, to see someone point out that the Franzen book is a mediocre piece of work, people with characters whose mediocrity gives the books a truly American flavor, the chickens coming home to roost for the Baby Boomers and their kids.
Larry