I'm reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom at the moment and hugely enjoying it (Amazon are selling the hardback for £8.00 at the moment so grab yourself a copy). As with The Corrections, he takes 100 pages or so to set up the characters and the dynamics and then Boom, you're off and turning the pages way past bedtime. It makes you wonder anew at the way some marks on a page can conjure up, in our minds, very real-seeming human beings. But of course, this only happens when those marks are made by a writer as skilful as Franzen.
So is Franzen a Great American Novelist, as his admirers say, to be set on the same lofty pedestal as Fitzgerald, Bellow or Updike? Is he even, as at least one critic has claimed, worthy of comparison to Tolstoy, or Big Leo as he is known round these parts? It's a comparison that Franzen - as ambitious as they come - playfully invites in Freedom, by giving one of his characters War and Peace to read. But I'd say no, to both questions.
He doesn't have Tolstoy's range. Big Leo can describe a vast battle scene in one chapter and make you feel as if you have just fallen off your horse, and then, in the next scene, place you next to someone at dinner and make you feel their breath on your face. Franzen's world feels a little small, the air a little thin by comparison. Tolstoy has unbeatable emotional range too; from lovely little jokes to awe-inspiring emotional grandeur of the kind that hardly anyone else has been able to capture in a novel. His writing is endlessly surprising, impolite, unpredictable and messy - you're never quite sure whether the next page will bring boredom or epiphany. But that's why he's the writer whose novels most closely resemble life at its best and worst. Franzen's novel is far more tightly-wound; a brilliantly designed work that takes the reader on a thrilling and moving ride. But you never feel like you're going to fall off your horse.
As for Franzen's great American antecedents, where he falls short by comparison with them is in his command of the language. Of course, it's the worst thing in the world when a novelist who isn't Nabokov or Bellow or Updike aspires to be considered writerly and tries to imitate them, and it's to Franzen's huge credit that he doesn't, despite having more literary ability than most of his peers. He keeps the language simple, direct and informal throughout. But Bellow could swing from Chicago vernacular to high literary style in a paragraph, and Updike could find poetry in the opening of suitcase. Franzen doesn't really do beautiful sentences. He can even lapse into dullness or cliche; in Freedom, two characters "exchange uneasy glances", something that only happens in novels.
What he can do - as mentioned - is create real, complex, breathing human beings, and smash them together in the most compelling collisions, and keep you reading without once wanting to check what's happening on Facebook. And that is no small gift. But I'd put him near the top of the second division rather than up in the first.
According to the reviews at Amazon, you're required to really, really love this book or really, really hate it (the book equivalent of ginger, marzipan, or cilantro). There is no in-between. I'm afraid to pay money for the book at this point, but I'm really curious about it now, so I guess I should check it out from the library. Maybe. Anyway, thanks for yet another perspective.
Posted by: Dawn | January 06, 2011 at 04:18 AM