This is the second book I’ve read by Franzen, (the Corrections being the other) and I have come away from this book with a similar feeling that I did previously: all of these characters are beautifully written, but without a great deal of redeeming qualities. Franzen relishes putting his characters into compromising situations and then asking the question, “What if they did the wrong thing here, what would happen? Would it destroy them? Would it destroy someone else? Would anyone care? Is it right to care?” This leaves the reader without any protagonists to speak of. Every character is compromised in one way or another. (Here’s where I could lamely make the remark, “Well maybe that’s the point. We are all compromised in one way or another. Maybe that’s the point…” then puff on something heavily THC-laden, and lose any credibility.)

As for the name and main theme of the book, “Freedom,” I think Franzen does a thorough job of dissecting how people mis-conceptualize freedom both personally and corporately. He considers how some people fetishize the idea of freedom as the ability to do as they wish without worry of consequences. In his book, as it does in real life, this course leads people down dark paths. Franzen adeptly paints characters whose acts of freedom end up being the things that enslave them. These are fairly strong Biblical themes. The Israelites, “doing what was right in their own eyes,” leads them to destruction and slavery. The apostle Paul talks about the concept of grace and emphasizes how the assurance of forgiveness does not give people the freedom to transgress against others, but the freedom to let something other than short-term self interest reign in their lives. Self-forgetting freedom seemingly never occurs to any of Franzen’s characters. They continually see freedom as a thing to grasp just beyond their next bad decision, and they inevitably end up constrained more rather than less.

Franzen deserves credit for his ability to convey the complexity of human mistakes and relationships. However, as I told friends when discussing this book, “the goal of reading a Franzen book is not to find examples of how to live, but to better inform yourself about the people you want to avoid becoming.”

Passages that stood out to me:

“Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.”

p. 181

“’what don’t you like about them?’ he said

’Oh, well, where to begin?’ Patty said. ‘How about the flipflop thing? I have some issues with their flipflops. It’s like the world is their bedroom. And they can’t even hear their own flap-flap-flapping, because they’ve all got their gadgets, they’ve all got their earbuds in. Every time I start hating my neighbors around here, I run into some G.U. kid on the sidewalk and suddenly forgive the neighbors, because at least they’re adults. Than uptight me, who would prefer not to look at people’s bare feet on the subway. Because, really, who could object to seeing such beautiful toes? Such perfect toenails? Only a person who’s too unluckily middle-aged to inflict the spectacle of her own toes on the world.’”

p. 372

This section comes after the character Joey accidentally swallows his wedding ring:

“He’d been digesting things every minute of his life without paying the slightest attention to it. How odd it was to think that his stomach lining and his mysterious small intestine were as much a part of him as his brain or tongue… as he lay and strained to feel the subtle ticks ans sighs and repositionings in his abdomen, he had a premonition of his body as a long-lost relative waiting at the end of a long road ahead of him . A shady relative whom he was glimpsing for the first time only now. At some point, hopefully still far in the future, he would have to rely on his body, and at some point after that, hopefully still farther in the future, his body was going to let him down, and he would die. He imagined his soul, his familiar personal self, as a stainless gold ring slowly making its way down through ever-stranger and fouler-smelling country, toward the [poop]-smelling death. He was alone with his body; and since weirdly, he   his body, this meant he was entirely alone.”

p. 390

In a passage about the crazy driving habits of one character there is this parenthetical:

“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

p. 445