Revolutionary Road Cornered the Market on Middle-class Angst First: Review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

At the start of the week, I posted about Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. Well, there's a reason for that. The next book in my reading queue was Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which last August was heralded as something of a literary landmark. It was Oprah-fied after being out in hardcover for only about two weeks--evidence, perhaps, of what readers expected from it.

I'll say this: Freedom is a good book. But I hardly feel that Mr. Franzen's novel is the monumental, literary event that reviewers and the media led us to expect.

At its best, Freedom is a considered examination of what happens to the deferment of the middle-class's ambitions, as well as a somewhat Marxist rendering of how the social elites employ their resources to misguide concerned citizens into doing their will--a prime example being Walter Berglund's work for the coal industry under the guise of saving the cerulean warbler.

At its worst, however, Freedom is a weighty repetition of the half-hearted, inert political complaints that my generation has often heard from our parents--those complaints from liberals that the world needs to be better, without doing much about it. There are also frequent pages of dialogue exchange--about various plans and schemes, for one reform or another--that could perhaps be more effectively condensed into exposition.

As these discussions also lead to many arguments, I'd also like to ask Mr. Franzen to turn off the caps lock in future books. Thanks.

In Salon, Laura Miller described Freedom as "[r]emarkable and possibly unprecedented: a merciless satirical look at contemporary life that's also fundamentally generous and human." The novel does find compassion enough in criticizing the crumbling family life of the Walter and Patty Berglund in the present; of the ambitions of Walter (social reform), Patty (her college basketball career), and their friend Richard Katz (a professional musician, who does roofing on the side); and the complicated lives of their children.

But in doing so, Mr. Franzen borrows, perhaps too heavily, from Tolstoy (he makes a point of having Patty Berglund reading War and Peace) in order to give the book an epic scope that this reader, at least, is not certain the book has earned.

And despite Mr. Franzen's largely effective efforts at capturing the mood of a generation, some things feel off; for instance, much time is devoted to explaining Richard Katz, the politics of his music, and the meanings of his sound--and yet there's no reference to punk music, not even a negative comment. Furthermore, Ms. Miller's claim about the novel's originality seems a bit off, especially when we consider that Mr. Franzen's approach to middle-class life is hardly new; in the marital struggle between the Berglunds and their affairs with secondary characters, Franzen recreates many of the ideological and social pressures that Richard Yates explores with Frank and April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road.

Freedom, overall, is a good book--but not the monumental novel that paves the course of 21st-century literature. If anything, in this novel I found a somewhat ballooned return to the central conflicts of mid-20th-century novels like Revolutionary Road.

A Revolution That Wasn't

Over the weekend, I read Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road, and no--I haven't seen the film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. (I would say, though, that I wouldn't have cast either of them in the lead roles of Frank and April Wheeler.) So I'm not going to be talking about how well the film meshes with the book or differing impressions of 1950s America.

But there's something important to get from the characters of Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple living in their house on Revolutionary Road. The novel opens with Frank watching April, who once attended a New York acting school, in an embarrassingly awful rendition of Robert Sherwood's play The Petrified Forest. At the start of the play, April was the only good thing going, but everything eventually wanes and the performance goes to pot. This doesn't go beyond Frank's notice.

And here's where entitlement begins to kick in: We can imagine, with how Yates directly yet sympathetically describes the Wheelers, that these are intelligent young adults in the post-war years who think that they are too clever for the suburban life. And, reading this novel, we get the impression that Yates would genuinely like to help these people. When the Wheelers begin planning an escape to France, a return to their intellectual roots, Frank listens to April outline the plan with some reticence, a hint of the tensions mounting:

But [Frank] knew better than to interrupt [April] now. She must have spent the morning in an agony of thought, pacing up and down the rooms of a dead-silent, dead-clean house and twisting her fingers at her waist until they ached; she must have spent the afternoon in a frenzy of action at the shopping center, lurching her car imperiously through mazes of NO LEFT TURN signs and angry traffic cops, racing in and out of stores to buy the birthday gifts and the roast of beef and the cake and the cocktail apron. Her whole day had been a heroic build-up for this moment of self-abasement; now it was here, and she was damned if she'd stand for any interference.

But the Wheelers refuse to help themselves, and that's the problem. All they do is think and still assume that they can overcome a suburban existence. Without trying to spoil too much of the novel, I'll say this much: The above quotation is a pretty good parallel to the novel--lots of build-up, leading ultimately toward self-abasement. And Frank, of course, listens to all of this, his reticence creating an insurmountable obstacle.

The Wheelers assume that they are entitled to cleverness, to a life in Europe, to all the benefits that a post-war life should bring. But they aren't willing to work toward that end, and so their many plans seldom move beyond talk. Revolutionary Road is a strong example of how, even with resources and access to art and wisdom, nothing comes about without a bit of elbow grease.