Opinion What’s wrong with the American novel?

The central male character,Walter,is good but pushover-nice and pathetically naive. His bad-boy rival,Richard,is a middle-aged guy who makes wryly titled rock albums and builds luxury decks to make ends meet. He is supposed to represent the cool,dangerous side of life,but he’s strictly Dionysus-lite.

One of the first things we learn about Patty,the woman who can’t decide between them,is that she is unable to make a moral judgment. She invests her vestigial longings into the cause of trying to build a perfect home and family,and when domesticity can’t bear the load she imposes,she falls into a chaos of indistinct impulses.

In a smart,though overly biting,review in The Atlantic,B.R. Myers protests against Franzen’s willingness to “create a world in which nothing important can happen.” Myers protests against the casual and adolescent language Franzen sometimes uses to create his world: “There is no import in things that ‘suck,’ no drama in someone’s being ‘into’ someone else.” The result,Myers charges,“is a 576-page monument to insignificance.”

But surely this is Franzen’s point. At a few major moments,he compares his characters to the ones in War and Peace. Franzen is obviously trying to make us see the tremendous difference in scope between the two sets of characters.

Tolstoy’s characters are spiritually ambitious — ferociously seeking some universal truth that can withstand the tough scrutiny of their own intelligence. Franzen’s modern characters are distracted and semi-helpless. It’s easy to admire Pierre and Prince Andrei. It’s impossible to look upon Walter and Richard with admiration,though it is possible to feel empathy for them.

Freedom is not Great Souls Seeking Important Truth. It’s a portrait of an America where the important,honest,fundamental things are being destroyed or built over — and people are left to fumble about,not even aware of what they have lost.

Freedom sucks you in with its shrewd observations and the ambitious breadth. It’ll launch a thousand book club discussions around the same questions: Is this book true? Is America really the way he portrays it? My own answer,for what it’s worth,is that Freedom tells us more about America’s literary culture than about America itself.

Social critics from Thoreau to Allan Bloom to the S.D.S. authors of The Port Huron Statement also made critiques about the flatness of bourgeois life,but at least they tried to induce their readers to long for serious things. Freedom is a brilliantly written book that is nonetheless trapped in an intellectual cul de sac — overly gimlet-eyed about American life and lacking an alternative vision of higher ground.

The New York Times