Jonathan Franzen at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Photo credit: David Shankbone

Has Jonathan Franzen really written the novel of the century?

Jonathan Franzen’s last novel “The Corrections” was published almost ten years ago to critical acclaim. A long, family epic of anatomically accurate realism that was so precise as to be painful, “The Corrections” told the story of two generations of the Lambert family. It was published a week before 9/11 and many commentators noticed how that event happened to resonate with the book because it seemed to “ring down the curtain on precisely the era that Franzen’s novel was trying to capture and pass judgment on.” Ross Douthat writing in the New York Times has realized  that Franzen’s new book “Freedom” which, “looks back on the follies and excesses of Bush-era America,” happened to be published on the day that Obama announced the end of combat in Iraq. How spooky. Has Franzen accomplished some Faustian deal, wondered Douthat. When considering the level of praise and adulation that has greeted “Freedom” you might be tempted to believe it.

“Freedom” tells the story of a couple, Patty and Walter Berglund, who met in college. They live in Minnesota — in a neighbourhood that is slowly gentrifying — with a son and a Volvo. But ”Freedom” turns out to be more than just the story of the Berglunds’ inevitable fall from self-condoned grace. “Instead, they are the tip of the iceberg, a filter through which to explore the unresolved tensions, the messiness of emotion, of love and longing, that possesses even the most willfully ordinary of lives,” said David Ulin in the LA Times.

Ulin’s comment was, in itself, just the tip of another iceberg: the iceberg of praise that has confronted “Freedom” on its passage to publication. “The novel of the century,” shouted the Guardian’s headline, rather uncharacteristically, “on a different plane from other contemporary fiction.” Jonathan Jones’s piece went on to say Franzen is “a literary genius of our time.” It is “a masterpiece of American fiction” said the first of two New York Times reviews.

The Huffington Post reviewer got personal: “I staggered to the end, sobbing as I read the last ten pages. My wife finished the book while we waited for our baggage in New York, and then couldn’t speak for most of the cab ride home.

What’s the big deal?

The people.

Not the characters. The people.” The reviewer for Slate agreed: “What propels Freedom from the ranks of good novels into that of great ones has nothing to do with plot or political acumen. It has to do with Franzen’s writing and his ability to evoke character.”  Jesse Kornbluth complained, “Most acclaimed fiction is too “literary” to care more about people than language or structure or the next definition of fiction. Franzen, like Balzac and Dickens, is a journalist at heart.”

There must be flaws somewhere: critical reviewers hunted around for them but were left gesturing. “At a certain point in its second half, it explodes into, well, Franzenism,” said Judith Shulevitz. “Subplots proliferate maniacally. Joey is taken up by the Zionist, Republican father of a Jewish college roommate and winds up working for a defense contractor buying up rusty Soviet-era tanks and reselling them to the U.S. military in Iraq.” But still most have agreed that Franzen’s not inconsiderable talent of ten years ago has been honed: “Whereas ‘The Corrections’ measured the gap between people of Franzen’s parents’ generation and his,” Shulevitz said, “’Freedom’ closes it.”

The book is clearly of our time, and this comes through in the first chapter where we find, according to Shulevitz, “the voice of the Internet, of bloggers, of YouTubers….this is a novel infused with the tone of contemporary political discourse, whose basic unit is the rant that goes viral.” It is appropriate then that a particular voice has sprung up online, having raised a following behind it, to provide dissent from the general approval. The author Jennifer Weiner has made a stand against what she dubbed “Franzenfrenzy”. Speaking to her 15,000 twitter fans she called for suggestions of non-Franzen novels “about love, identity, families.” “There are other books,” she said.

The Daily Beast said it’s “Chick lit versus Dude lit”. ”The battle” is on, agreed the Courier-Journal, explaining, “Writers like Weiner are tired of being dismissed as ‘chick lit’ when their books sell many times more than acclaimed books by ‘literary’ writers.” We don’t think Franzen is going to have much trouble selling his book though.

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