Thoughts on Franzen's "Freedom"

There is a point in Freedom during which Patty, one of the two most central characters, reads Tolstoy's War and Peace in a period of three or four days of solitude in a log cabin. She's struck by the great expanse of time Tolstoy covers, and how long those days felt. It was like she had lived a whole lifetime.

This particular passage stood out to me particularly because I was engaging in a similar relationship with Freedom, which tells the story of the lifespan of an entire family, enveloping nearly three full generations and touching on a fourth, and which I read in about four days. A critic of the novel in The Guardian wrote that he didn't think Franzen was hubristic enough to be actually comparing his own work to that of Tolstoy, but I'm not so sure. Not having read War and Peace, I can't say whether it's fair of him to do so, either.

The very obviously deliberate choice of title places the entire book under the lens of a concept which at first does not seem central to the story, but which then becomes unavoidably pressing on the reader's mind somewhere in the middle of the book after a patch of passages which include a disproportionate use of the words "freedom" and "liberty." And this is a book very much about timeless problems, but which is also very much a book for its time. Questions of freedom are addressed in terms of everything from relationships and career to American imperialism and environmental politics. It even explores the concept of debt and financial obligation as a system of morality (a la David Graeber) via a son, Joey, who views every act of support from his parents as a debt to be repaid. That understanding of their relationship ultimately becomes untenable in a situation in which Joey must simply ask his father for help in a manner which he will certainly not be able to repay. 

Perhaps this was especially apparent because of my predilection against the term "freedom," but what I think Franzen's story ultimately and most powerfully articulates (in terms of the concept of liberty itself) is the essential emptiness of the term. Once we leave a romantic relationship which we had always felt was constraining us, we are free of particular limitations but fall into the restraints of other realities. "We always have a choice," we are told, and it's true to an extent - but we are also limited not only by the circumstances, or by the decisions of others, but also by our own dreams, our goals, our abilities, and by the paths we desperately wish to take but cannot. "Mistakes Were Made" is the title of Patty's therapy-assigned autobiography. The refusal to take the full responsibility or blame for all of the suffering endured by herself and her loved ones is at once reprehensible, understandable, and noble. By narrating the story from each of the character's perspectives we learn that the sometimes seemingly unforgivable actions made by the Berglunds are just the desperate efforts of trapped individuals. Freedom is the story of a family struggling to come to terms with those limitations, and the stories they tell themselves to understand the decisions they've made. With humor and tragedy, Franzen narrates that story without a single unifying "point" or "purpose." It is simply the complicated story of the life of a family. Free from the sentimentality and manipulative emotionality that I remember so strongly in Jonathan Safran Foer's books, Franzen managed to sadden and uplift me with the very real beauty of the struggle of loving one another, and ourselves.