A Change in Nature

Page 485 of the hardcover is almost exclusively dedicated to describing bird migration. It takes place immediately after Walter’s cathartic rant against all of the evil in society and precedes his vacation with Lalitha. This shocking change in pace and tone is all the more palpable because it’s one of the first moments in this book (that uses the exploitation of nature as a major element) where we get a simple, pretty description of nature outside of any need for plot advancement or character’s perception.

There are a lot of interesting things going on in this seemingly innocuous moment. I’d like to touch on them all, but instead I will just focus on the basic form of this passage. The first thing I thought when I saw this wall of uninterrupted text was that I need to prepare myself for another one of those Wallace-esque moments, that Franzen is going to try and prove once and for all that there is a direct scientific relationship between convoluted syntax and wit. Instead I got a simple, yet pretty account of various birds’ migratory patterns. The prettiness was soon replaced by the sad details of how these birds have become externalities to ‘growth’ in the U.S., but even this political moment was removed from any sort of hip cynicism or snarky metafiction.

Our goal in class has been to locate the new literary form in the wake of post-modernism, and we have specifically discussed the notion of a new sincerity–with Franzen as its banner bearer–filling this role. Though I am not yet convinced of Franzen’s prophetic power, I can still point to this passage as potentially useful example of new sincerity. Franzen is clearly interested here in describing something he loves a lot (birds) and the sad system that is yearly committing genocides without even being aware. There’s no point where he turns to beloved tropes of post-modernism to lambast this clearly imperfect system, rather he just sits the reader down for this page and talks about something he clearly cares a lot about.

There’s a Beginning, and There’s an End.

Reading the last few pages of Freedom left me both resolved and annoyed. I mean, really? They’re just going to move back to New York, turn the house into a bird sanctuary? It all seemed extremely… contrived. Actually, it reminded me of the first section of the novel. The way Franzen’s writing just slips through your mind, and it is all very.. ordinary (the dialog, I mean)? I don’t know if that is quite the word I’m searching for.. But Patty’s thoughts, the way she speaks to her neighbors, is extremely similar in both sections, however not similar throughout. On page 561 (hardback), the tone of Patty’s explainations seems as if it could’ve been pulled out of the first section:

Patty explained that she had a good job in education that she wanted to return to, and that her mother and her siblings and her daughter and Walter’s best friend all lived in or near New York, and that, although the house on the lake had meant a lot to her and Walter over the years, nothing could last forever.

Similarly, it seems Walter is back to him old self. He is no longer “speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius.” And, he has decided (being greener than green peace as described on the first page of the novel), to turn their family lake home into a sanctuary for birds. Slightly ironic, isn’t it? Turning the lake home into a place that could be described as a “sanctuary,” but will mostly end up covered in shit.

I guess Franzen didn’t give me what I was expecting. Similar to White Noise in some ways, in fact. The last section of the novel left me feeling disappointed and wanting more.. like, wait? That’s it? I suppose there are a lot of things going on on a deeper level, and I’ll have to reread a few sections in order to investigate…

Franzen is really playing with what a romantic relationship is. Patty’s relationship with both Richard and Walter, Joey’s relationship with Connie, Richards relationship with other women, no one has a “regular” relationship with their partner. So then two questions arises from this observation, is this the new norm in the 21st century and why is everyone’s relationship such a mess?

I don’t think that messy relationships were ever not the norm, i believe that this generation is more open about their relationship then other generations before. Issues with infidelaty and sex additions didn’t just arise now, although the advancements in communication and in entertainment has definitely added to this issue.

In Freeedom, everyone has family issues and that seems to be the root of everyone’s issues. Who know if Patty would have been a completely different person if her parents had acted aggressively after she was raped. If Connie’s mom didn’t drop her off at Patty’s house before she got her life together, would Connie have started her relationship with Joey. A person is the sum of all their experiences and maybe without a few of the one these characters experienced, maybe they would have turned out differently.

Joey Berglund and the cult of the personality

One big thing that I still have questions about (and there are decidedly more than one) is the magnetism and almost mythical quality that surrounds Joey throughout the novel. We only have to look to his relationships with Connie and Patty to understand the strange power he has over at least them. Perhaps it’s because they’re both depressed in similar ways and thus drawn to a certain quality in Joey, but I’m not sure what that is, aside from self-assuredness and intelligence. Even Joey’s friend Jonathan can’t seem to shake off wanting to be friends with Joey, even after Joey repeatedly proves himself to be nothing short of an ass (in his treatment of Connie and his unabashed pursuit of Jenna.) It seems as if the text is sort of weirdly dedicated to Joey as well, and finds a way to forgive him, no matter what. It seems like it wants to suggest that in dedicating himself to Connie as a good husband, donating his war profits to Walter’s Free Space initiative, and humbling himself to talk to his dad, instead of his mother, Joey is thus absolved from his past behavior. I think I take issue with this for a few reasons, though, least of which being that Joey’s past behavior goes beyond what I think seems like normal teenager-is-an-asshole sort of stuff and instead is focused on a weird ego-maniacal game that he is playing with himself, at the cost of really, anyone who happens to get in the way. So for the text to say that this is so easily fixed by a phone call to his father, and a rededication of himself to his marriage I think seems careless. It also seems fairly deliberate to me, because the passage in the second volume of Patty’s autobiography explicitly says that “Joey has Jessica pretty well beaten, in other words” (534) and while this could be a way of reminding us that Patty will always have a soft spot for Joey in her heart, I get the sense that Franzen wants us to know that Jessica, whose biggest act of unkindness is maybe in her inability to accept Lalitha, or her need to separate herself from her family, is on her way to bitterness, and has already lost to her brother, whereas Joey, who was painted fairly negatively for much of the text, seems to have pretty much everything well in other.

Why resolve ‘Freedom’?

“She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute.  And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they’d ever said or done, every pain they’d inflicted, every joy they’d shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.” (559, hardcover)

As our time w/ Freedom comes to an end, I find myself questioning Franzen’s decision to provide resolution within his novel.  Many of the other authors we have read do not allow for this kind of Dickensian close, where the reader is aware of what has happened to each character, what is happening at the very moment of the novel’s end, and even moreso, what might happen in the future.

What work does Franzen think he is doing by neatly wrapping up each loose end?  I’m not sure that I have necessarily come to like any of the characters, rather I have only come to recognize they are complicated.  So I’m not quite sure if I want them/their interpersonal relationships to end up ‘happy,’ ‘unhappy,’ or in any concrete, easy state of being.

This particular excerpt from the book, the moment when Walter and Patty reunite, is one of the more poetic sections.  I’m fairly certain that one reason Franzen decided to make such a sweet (perhaps unbearably so) ending is to further humanize Patty, the ‘autobiographer,’ or perhaps to teach the reader a lesson in forgiveness, as I was none too eager to ‘forgive’ Patty’s character.  I didn’t want to let her be happy.  She “warms” upon being back with Walter, and there are further temperature-related descriptions of their relationship, as though they are two poles which shift and change depending on their contact with one another.  One example is: “It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty’s greatest warming influence was on Walter.” (561)

I also noticed two references in the above section, which seemed obvious though I might be reading into it too much.  The first was the concept of the void, “in which the sum of everything they’d ever said or done…would weigh less than the smallest feather.”  Is Franzen talking about Heidegger’s void?  A place where action becomes negated by connection b/t two people (or things) seems to fit the philosophical definition.  And thus, Franzen’s ‘ending’ takes on a more universal tone, because he is making a commentary on the ends of lives and ways in which we make meaning from them.  Moreover, Walter is staring into the “nothingness” where his loved ones who have died reside, and his connection to Patty even transcends the natural world, and become a “connection between life and what came after life.”  I can’t help but be reminded of the end of “White Noise,” and the place where the living speak to the dead.

In the end, I think these references help me understand Franzen’s desire for conclusion, even though I haven’t worked out their full significance.  The author does leave room in Patty and Walter’s story for an element of the unknown, because they move away and nobody knows where they’ve gone, including the reader.  But I can’t help feeling like some/most of the characters have sacrificed something: their freedom?  themselves?  and for what?  to create connections with other people?  I wonder, is that enough?

Heritage in Freedom

One of the things that really struck me as interesting is Franzen’s strange adherence to genetics and family lines. Walter’s family is especially interesting- he is predestined to be as angry and unhappy as all the previous men in his family because Einar couldn’t stand his place in his family in Sweden- some sort of inherited Oedipal complex that has been passed down with feelings of inadequacy and being unable to live up to expectations. Similarly, Richard Katz is supposed to thrive on depression and terrible situations because of his Jewish heritage. Patty attempts to flee her mother’s life, become as unNYC and unlike her family as possible, and this somehow makes her into her mother- her need for attention, her ignoring of others needs. Why does Franzen span this strange generation gap? In the case of Walter and Katz he makes a strong statement about the myth of American immigrants coming for opportunity–the myth of immigration vs some unflattering emigration stories. Yet, it seems unnecessary to do this with so many of the characters. Even Jessica starts to become her mother, and Walter grows away from her because of it. Franzen definitely has some strange issues when it comes to family life, but this reenacting through generations seems to be founded in some sort of literary metaphor beyond “we all become our parents”. Do we experience a lack of freedom due to our heritage, doomed to reinvent the same people over and over again? Is there a metaphor for an original set of Americans–that we will always be the first ones over, because we will always be our ancestors? I’d really like any input on this, I’m really unsure of what Franzen is trying to do here.

American Beauty and Freedom

Throughout this entire book, I couldn’t help but make comparisons to American Beauty, the film directed by Sam Mendes. Freedom has been called the Great American Novel of our times because it is so real and disturbingly readable. When it was first discussed in class, I wasn’t sure how much of it I would actually enjoy because the topic seemed so mundane and boring…a family trying to overcome everyday life struggles blah blah etc. But when you actually dive into the book further, nothing is actually normal, yet many of us could relate to this book. Whether it was the identity struggles or the constant judgment from the outside neighbors looking in, at one point or another, I think most of us felt that we were connecting because it was so familiar.

What struck me most in similarities between this book and the movie were how they were able to portray so many themes that seem simple on the outside, until you get an inside look and get into the minds of the characters internally. From classism and judgment from the Upper Middle class, to the ideas of romance and love (both familial and sexual) both of the book and the movie are able to truly explore a family’s views of these things so intimately, that the reader/viewer cannot help but feel as if they are in the moment with these twisted characters. The more fucked up things seem to get, the more we feel connected to the characters. Instead of being repelled by their flaws and uncertainties and searches we are more interested in these characters. Just like in American Beauty, Freedom wants us to take a closer look inside the lives of suburbia. We need to be thinking about people internally, rather than just judging them from what little we actually know. When we found out Patty was having an affair, we wanted to gain more knowledge about this, versus when we just thought she was a simple, boring housewife who had an odd relationship with her son. We need to be looking closer at everything because this book shows us how nothing is really as it seems, even in a simple town with a simple family.

Here is the link to the trailer for American Beauty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q3ltyPJJMQ