Please Set Me Free

Coming to the close of Jonathon Franzen's new and heavily lauded novel, I found myself reading B.R. Myer's review of Freedom in The Atlantic Monthly. It is the most incise and accurate description of the book I've read. There has been so much press surrounding Freedom and nearly all of it unabashedly, resoundingly--I hesitate only briefly to say weepingly--positive that one almost feels compelled to rush to the nearest bookstore, snatch the book off the shelf, and batten down inside the closest available bathroom to read this monument cover to cover.

But, alas...spare yourself.

It ain't worth it.

"But if Freedom is middlebrow," Myers writes, "it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more 'social,' broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus. This may be the reason we get such boring characters. Instead of portraying an interesting individual or two, and trusting in realism to embed their story naturally in contemporary life, the Social Writer thinks of all the relevant issues he has to stuff in, then conceives of a family 'typical' enough to hold everything together. The more aspects of our society he can fit in between the books' covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be."

This is, I think, the finest summation not only of Freedom but of a whole swath of modern American fiction.

Interestingly, my experience with Franzen's novel was eerily the same as my experience with the other writer Myers name-drops, DeLillo. Underworld's prose dragged me swiftly along, shifting between periods when DeLillo really revs up and periods where the book is roughly on par, in terms of excitement, with watching cement dry (this, mind you, is the book that ranked number 2 in a recent poll of the greatest novels of the last thirty years). When I eventually tossed the book down, after 400 pages (the half-way point) it wasn't even primarily because it had become boring but because after all those pages absolutely nothing had happened (but then, maybe that is the definition of boring).

Freedom doesn't even have that much going for it. Nowhere do you really feel like Franzen is revving up. Mostly you wonder if someone will ever point him toward the runway. Strangely, though, he is not unreadable. In fact, quite the opposite. Franzen's writing is misleadingly swift, accessible, and compulsive; misleadingly, because it never leads anywhere.

It also, sadly, is full of hackneyed grammar and overburdened cliches, which, in their attempts to appear clever, have only that much further to fall.

Consider: "...stirred the cauldrons like a Viking oarsman," "...another overconsuming white American male who felt entitled to more and more and more: saw the romantic imperialism of his falling for someone fresh and Asian, having exhausted domestic supplies," "...the emptiness of her nest...now that the kids had flown."

American literary critics have yet to give justified explanation for why writers of commercially successful fiction can be condemned for such stilted, silly cliches but writers of mainstream garbage are given a free pass.

Indeed, it is not just a free pass that is often given, but high praise, awards, and money.

As it stands right now, Franzen's novel is the 2010 Oprah Book Club Pick (the irony here is sharp enough to draw blood). It is the number one and number two bestseller on Amazon.com (a miracle of marketing made possible by a separate, Oprah BC edition). Franzen will no doubt be up for a National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize (Pulitzer being more likely, as he won the NBA for his last novel). The movie rights have already been purchased. And Franzen made the cover of Time under the heading "Great American Novelist," with Freedom being compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace.

I rarely trash books...at least not publicly. And to be honest, I'm not that interested in trashing Freedom. It's not a horrible book. But it IS boring. And pointless. And, in the end, disappointing.

What disappoints most is that this is the literature the American literatti take seriously. This is what is held out to the world (and to our own society, to our children who struggle every day between choosing to read or choosing to watch movies) as the best we can do. If this is as good as our writers get, then we might as well stop trying. Because this isn't compelling literature.

There are a wealth of great writers in America. Unfortunately, Franzen isn't one of them.

If you want some better selections, take a look at the list to your left. These are the best books I read last year. All of them are worth your time.