This past week, as the shock waves from the latest senseless shooting reverberated across the country, I was in the middle of reading Jonathan Franzen’s remarkable novel, Freedom, and day after day, as the media went through its usual rapid response analysis and pointless speculating, I was struck by how the novel was eerily relevant to the mood of the nation.
In Freedom, as in his earlier knockout novel, The Corrections, Franzen’s complex plot is rooted in a complex marriage, a marriage which shows no sign of having been made in heaven. The story of Patty and Walter Berglund and their struggle to live with each other and raise their children in a world where the moral compass seems hopelessly compromised by modern economic and political imperatives reveals a lot of what is wrong, and right, about the world today, when the clarity of simpler times is so muddied by the brute force of pop culture and the current penchant for hair-trigger communication that the concepts of honesty and fairness seem almost quaint.
But as Franzen’s acute sensibility and brilliant characterization reveals the long-suffering Berglunds, it becomes apparent that his great theme is, indeed, no less than freedom itself, the price we pay for it, the immeasurable value of it, and the great mystery of how true freedom never comes without the acceptance of some measure of responsibility. There’s a price for everything.
And that’s what Franzen asks us to consider. As Walter Berglund says late in the novel: “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want.”
Reading these words in the wake of the Tucson tragedy, I couldn’t help but feel that Franzen had put his finger on the throbbing pulse of the problem of violence in America. People without hope do desperate things. Anyone can be a target. It’s not the politics, it’s the poverty that infects the human spirit, and locks it in the dark.
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Sleep was clearly nowhere on the horizon, so I tiptoed through the house looking for a magnifying glass so I could read the print in the book – and in the bottom drawer of my desk I found a letter from you, dated April 19, 1982. Apparently I’d moved to Chicago, I’d written to you, and you wrote back. You were raising two little children, and gardening. You’d gone back to school. I live in Silver Spring, in Maryland. My daughter will graduate high school in June. I think the Franzen book is a work of genius – he’s like an American Tolstoy. I hope you are well, and that you happy in your life.