Freedom

The emotional core of Freedom, for me, was the love triangle between married couple Walter and Patty Berglund, and Walter’s rock star best friend, Richard. The three met in college, and for Patty, it was the classic choice: lust for the wild and dangerous musician, or the comfort of the responsible nice guy.

The book has an interesting structure, starting with a section told from the perspective of the Berglund’s suburban neighbours. It’s got a gossipy feel, like they see the cracks in the marriage, but can only speculate on the couple’s true nature from a distance.

Then, we get a chapter that’s taken from Patty’s therapeutic journal. She writes about her life story in the third person, but inserts running commentary as “the autobiographer,” often with self-deprecating or rueful reflections. I thought it was a really compelling way to dive into a character.

The autobiographer has no doubt that if Patty had been more conscious of herself and paying any halfway decent kind of attention to the world around her, she wouldn’t have been nearly as good at college basketball. Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.

The middle of the book dragged a bit for me, as it shifts focus to Richard and Walter, and the Berglund’s son, Joey. The latter’s chapters especially grated on me: sure, it may be true that young men go through life in a state of almost-constant sexual arousal, but I felt like it was meant to titillate rather than illuminate the character. And ultimately, I thought he took away focus from the core triangular relationship.

Along the way, the book explores Walter’s professional life, and his approach to environmentalism. In his role as a corporate lawyer, he brokers a land deal which would allow an energy company to mine coal by blasting it from mountaintops. As objectionable as that sounds, he justifies it because his actual goal is ostensibly to transform the land into a conservation area for birds, after the mining is complete. Further, he intends to use the PR funds at his disposal to launch a campaign against population growth, which he believes to be the root cause of the climate crisis. Ultimately, I think he’s pretty misguided about his mission¹, but what’s not so clear is whether the book condones and celebrates Walter’s deeds, or whether we are meant to feel sorry for him for trying so hard on a clearly ineffectual venture.

The novel ends with a hopeful reconciliation for the Berglunds. I thought it happened too quickly: Patty just shows up at Walter’s hosue after a long separation, and then by the next page, they’re together again. Franzen is so good at writing the earlier scenes of conflict, and the fact that they resolve their differences without having any conversation about it is disappointing. On the other hand, I did feel glad that our characters had a happy ending, which sums up my experience with the book on the whole: it was entertaining and hard to put down, despite my disappointment with the lack of substance in some key areas.

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