DIS

.The ‘Freedom’ Agenda
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 20, 2010
Josh Haner/The New York Times
David Brooks

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 overobsessed 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 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 naïve. 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.

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 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.