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Very few novels make clear and provocative arguments about
American life anymore, but Jonathan Franzen’s important new book, “Freedom,”
makes at least two.

First, he argues that American culture is over-obsessed with
personal freedom.

Second, he portrays an America where people are unhappy and
spiritually stunted.

Many of his characters live truncated lives. There’s a woman who
“had formerly been active with the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in
Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau.” There are
people who devote their moral energies to the cause of sensitive
gentrification. One of the “heroes” experiences great fits of righteous outrage
when drivers ahead of him change lanes without the proper turn signals.

The central male character, Walter, is good but pushover-nice
and pathetically naive. His bad-boy rival, Richard, is a middle-age 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 hopeless. 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.

Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided
that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but
deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation. This message caught on
(it’s flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of
nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. If you judged
by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly
no fulfilled ones.

By now, writers have become trapped in the confines of this
orthodoxy. So even a writer as talented as Franzen has apt descriptions of
neighborhood cattiness and self-medicating housewives, but ignores anything
that might complicate the Quiet Desperation dogma. There’s almost no religion. There’s
very little about the world of work and enterprise.

There’s an absence of ethnic heritage, military service,
technical innovation, scientific research or anything else potentially lofty
and ennobling.

Richard is an artist, but we don’t really see the artist’s
commitment to his craft. Patty is an athlete, but we don’t really see the team
camaraderie that is the best of sport.

The political world is caricatured worst of all. The
environmentalists talk like the snobbish cartoons of Glenn Beck’s imagination.
The Republicans talk like the warmonger cartoons of Michael Moore’s.

The serious parts of life get lopped off and readers have to
stoop to inhabit a low-ceilinged world. Everyone gets to feel superior to the
characters they are reading about (always pleasant in a society famously
anxious about status), but there’s something missing.

Social critics from Thoreau to Allan Bloom to the SDS 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.

© 2010 New York Times News
Service