Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen $38.99

Walter and Patty Berglund seem the personification of the American dream.  Early founders in the ‘gentrification’ of their neighbourhood they are community stalwarts, successfully raising their two children Jessica and Joey, in a lovely home they have worked hard to create.  Beneath the surface however, things are beginning to come unstuck.

Walter, a good father, firm disciplinarian, fervent idealist and campaigning environmentalist finds himself frequently frustrated and thwarted in both his home and professional lives.

His ex star-athlete wife Patty is becoming increasingly unhappy and difficult to live with.  Patty – who has poured all her passion into parenting since injury ended her promising basketball career – is somewhat overly invested in her beloved son Joey.  Although Joey is the rebel and the rule- breaker of the family, (much to Walter’s bitter disappointment), Patty loves him inordinately and unconditionally.

Perhaps in a rebellious rebuttal of such smothering love, Joey launches into an affair with a neighbouring girl, Connie Monaghan, whose mother and step-dad Patty both looks down and profoundly dislikes.  To add further insult Joey then moves in with the Monaghans and appears to shift all his allegiances and loyalties to them.  The Monaghans represent to Patty all that she loathes politically and morally, and Joey’s rejection of her in their favour induces a terrible rage.

So begins a long and erosive era in the Berglund marriage.  As recounted by Patty in her autobiography: “Mistakes were made”; Composed at her Therapist’s Suggestion’, Patty goes into a spiral of anger and resentment and rather too much drinking.  She blames Walter for Joey’s defection and feels somehow cheated by life into her housewife status.

Then there’s Richard Katz; talented musician and Walter’s best friend; basically the antithesis of Walter in every way. Amoral, selfish, lascivious, sexually rampant and unrepentant, he both loves and scorns Walter for possessing all the worthy characteristics he himself does not.  This uncharacteristic loyalty manifests in his longstanding restraint where Patty is concerned, as she and Richard have had a strong attraction that pre-dates her marriage.

Freedom is a novel of astonishing scope, using the Berglunds as a sort of template of modern American life.  It lays bare the hypocrisies and contradictions involved in being human and free – the unforeseen and often devastating consequences of our freedom to choose – whether environmentally, politically or on an interpersonal and intra-familial level.