Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.
Berglunds, meet the Berglunds, they're a Minnesotan family. In the town of St. Paul, they're about to be in this story. So there's Walter and Patty and their teenage kids Jessica and Joey. Walter is a lawyer, Patty is a former teenage star basketball player, now a "homemaker". We meet them just as some destabilising changes are afoot, mainly prompted by Joey's involvement with Connie, the girl down the road. The friction this creates causes Joey to eventually move out of the family home and into Connie's home, where he comes into the orbit of Connie's Mum's new boyfriend Blake, a man of robustly Republican political leanings, another thing that doesn't sit well with the Berglunds, who are classic middle-class liberals. Eventually, with Joey seemingly moved out for good and both kids coming up to college age anyway, Walter and Patty decide to up sticks and move to Washington.
And so ends the first section of the book. The next section takes the form of an autobiographical memoir written by Patty Berglund, apparently at the prompting of her therapist as some sort of act of catharsis or exorcism. It details her early life, her brief years of sporting stardom, the knee injury that ended them, and her meeting with Walter and his charismatic friend Richard Katz. It also includes some details about her that are not commonly known, even by Walter, such as her being raped at a party when she was seventeen, or the on-and-off affair she's been conducting with Richard Katz at various times during her marriage to Walter.
Speaking of Walter, he has jacked in the old lawyering game for a job doing something closer to his heart - nature conservancy and eco-activism. Not something you'd think there'd be a ton of money in, but Walter has found a super-rich benefactor whose methods are a bit, erm, unconventional, but who is prepared to throw a large wedge at some of Walter's pet projects. He has also provided Walter with an assistant, the young and super-efficient Lalitha, who also appears to be in love with Walter, much to Patty's chagrin.
Walter and Lalitha are tasked with facilitating the purchase of a large area of mountain country in West Virginia in order for it to be turned into a bird sanctuary by the unorthodox method of mining it down to the bedrock, trousering the profits and then re-landscaping it, planting a few trees, and designating it a haven for the cerulean warbler, whereupon those guys will presumably move in and warble away to their hearts' content. Needless to say among those who aren't sure about the whole idea are the current occupants of the land and the local and national media, who are further riled by Walter's rather blunt approach to public relations.
Joey, meanwhile, is at college, still in a relationship with Connie despite adopting a fairly lax attitude to fidelity, and, while disdaining much contact with Walter, regularly accepting cash gifts from Patty, much to Walter's annoyance. Richard has become a minor rock star off the back of an album of songs inspired by his fling with Patty. Richard also has some involvement as a figurehead for some of Walter and Lalitha's eco-work and notices their obvious attraction to each other. Eventually, pissed off at Patty's avoidance of his attempts to rekindle their relationship, he leaves some of Patty's confessional writings where Walter can find and read them, which results in Walter throwing Patty out.
Patty moves in with Richard for a while but quickly realises it isn't going to work out. Freed of any obligation to Patty, Walter and Lalitha quickly start going at it like knives, also finding some time to expand their eco-activism into population control, in particular trying to persuade people to voluntarily stop having kids. On her way to do some setup work for an upcoming charity concert Lalitha's car is involved in an accident on a mountain road and she is killed.
Six years pass, with no contact between Walter and Patty. Patty, after moving out of Richard's place, has got a teaching job in New York, while Walter lives a reclusive and irascible life in his family's old lakeside cabin, formerly gloriously isolated but now just down the road from a new housing development whose inhabitants' cats wreak havoc upon the local bird life and whom Walter soon comes into conflict with. Patty unexpectedly runs into Richard in New York and he suggests that she get over herself and make contact with Walter, and so she takes herself off to Minnesota and parks herself on his doorstep in the cold until her lets her in. Eventually Walter relents and a reconciliation is effected, helped by another section of confessional memoir from Patty which Walter reads while she is thawing out.
You might recall I read The Corrections back in the fairly early days of this blog - that was Franzen's big breakthrough novel and he took nine years to follow it up, probably being a bit busy raking in the royalties and having pointless feuds with (and subsequently making up with) Oprah. For what it's worth, despite Freedom being a bit less garlanded with awards (and with the caveat that I read The Corrections 17 years ago) I enjoyed it more. Some of Franzen's discomfort about the whopping success of The Corrections was connected to the whole balancing act between wanting a large readership (which novelists, with very few exceptions, do) and the purity of your Art. If you don't want to get into a pointless discussion about the distinction between Important Literature and Just Books then you might just observe that both The Corrections and Freedom tick the boxes of being highly readable multi-generational family sagas with characters you care about while also being smart, occasionally funny and engaging with some topical issues of the day while (mostly) avoiding shoehorning stuff in in an obvious and clunky way.
The topicality in Freedom is around ecological issues like deforestation and population growth, which oddly echoes some of the main topics in The Overstory (though it's worth pointing out that Freedom was published eight years earlier), but with perhaps slightly less of a manic evangelical gleam in the eye. Besides, Freedom has other fish to fry as well, like the main family saga - love, aging, betrayal, the mutual delights and disappointments that parents and children inflict upon each other. There is the usual tricky balance to be struck when large sections of the narrative are supposedly written by one of the characters - Patty's memoir(s) in this case - i.e. they've got to be readable but not displaying a totally implausible level of literary merit. I think Patty's voice comes across pretty convincingly in these bits, as befits the most rounded and interesting character in the book.
Anyway, it's certainly not perfect but I enjoyed it very much, and it's pretty easy to scoot through despite being only a couple of pages short of 600 in length. By an odd coincidence I read The Corrections (which was itself 600+ pages) immediately before a very short book (Bonjour Tristesse) and here I'm reading Freedom immediately after an even shorter book (Candide). Life, oh life, etc.
