In a candid interview, Jonathan Franzen talks to Megan O’Grady about the personal roots of his epic new novel, Freedom. “I like the fact that novels in other languages are called some version of romance,” says Jonathan Franzen, sitting at the antique wood dining table of his book-filled Upper East Side apartment. “Roman in German, roman in French, romanzo in Italian. Because they should be romances for the reader, but they have to before that be romances for the writer. And I initially thought this book was my romance with Patty.”
Romance might seem like an odd—even dangerous—word for a male author to use with regard to his female protagonist. But writing full-blooded women of complexity and fallibility has never been a problem for the 51-year-old author, whose deliberate manner, salt-and-pepper hair, and classic tortoiseshell glasses belie a certain essential boyishness. Think of Enid, the tragically deluded, Christmas-obsessed matriarch of The Corrections, his meteorically successful, National Book Award–winning last novel, or Denise, whose teenage indiscretion touches off the book’s core revelation. And now there’s Patty Berglund, the heroine of Franzen’s Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and his richest creation to date—a woman as lovable as she is badly behaved.
Set predominantly in the latter half of the 2000s, Freedom taps the anxieties and anger of the Bush years—the sense of American overreach and moral compromise, a misguided war, environmental calamity: an empire in decline. As with The Corrections, which emerged the week before September 11 and effectively bookended the decade reflected in its pages, Freedom holds an acutely angled mirror to our uncertain, post-patriarchal, postfeminist, self-obsessed times through the story of—what else?—a Midwestern family that loses its idealism.
At its center is Patty, a college basketball star turned stay-at-home mom. A folksy repository of friendly advice and Silver Palate recipes with a barely submerged competitive streak, she, along with her weak-chinned, high-minded husband, Walter, is among the first of the Victorian-renovating, Volvo-driving gentrifiers in their St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood. “Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller.” Patty’s domestic idyll is shattered when her brilliant and all-too-beloved son, Joey, leaves home at sixteen, moving in with the right-wing family next door. That’s when the college-era object of her desire, Richard, a swaggering, self-destructive indie rocker who also happens to be Walter’s best friend, decides to pay a visit.
“I had Patty’s voice in my head years before I had anything else,” says Franzen, who explains that with each of his four novels, the female protagonist was the first to take shape. Like The Corrections, Freedom follows intersecting characters at different points in time, but Patty’s chapters, including one that illuminates what it was like to be cast as the dumb jock in a politically ambitious family, feel most crucial. After her first sexual experience—a date rape at a high school party—Patty grasps the full extent of her parents’ indifference, in what is one of the book’s sharpest, most unsettling passages. “But she was seventeen now, and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.” The narrative picks up again in 2004 in Washington, where Walter, with a comely young assistant in tow, has become involved with a dubious conservation effort involving Dick Cheney, a coal-mining company, and the fastest-declining songbird in North America. Meanwhile, Patty, for whom building the perfect nest was a way to win against her “creative” siblings, finds herself in midlife plummet. She’s professionless, estranged from her children, and very, very angry.
In the period following The Corrections, the downside of unchecked liberty was very much on Franzen’s mind. After six years of false starts trying to break ground on a new novel, years in which he faced the death of his mother and adapted to a new life of literary celebrity, he saw his country subsumed by anger. “What’s this rage about?” he asks rhetorically. “You can do anything you want. We’re unprecedentedly rich and free; why is everyone so miserable? And of course, I was an example of it myself. I was suddenly rich and free. Why am I so miserable?”
Patty’s thwarted need for victory became a way into the novel, the majority of which was eventually written in one seven-month sprint. “I was once married to a person who was very competitive, who was very competitive with me,” says Franzen. (His longtime girlfriend, the short-story writer Kathryn Chetkovich, famously laid bare her own feelings about his success and its effect on their relationship in a piercingly candid 2003 Granta essay titled “Envy.”) “And I really wanted to write about competition because it’s this fixture of the free market that nobody really wants to talk about. It’s considered unattractive to be competitive, and yet our entire political economy is based on a mechanism of competition. It’s bad enough to be a man and be competitive; it’s even harder to be a woman and be competitive.”
Freedom confirms Franzen as an author of astonishing prescience—it’s uncanny, and yet somehow unsurprising, that he publishes a big book with an ecological bent just as millions of gallons of oil defile the Gulf of Mexico. But for all his laudable devotion to the social novel, it’s another, far riskier kind of imperative—emotional honesty above all—that keeps us reading. Franzen is attracted to the same sort of urgency and fearlessness in other writers, leading him to champion the work of authors like Paula Fox and Christina Stead, and it’s this quality that makes reading Freedom, in an era in which too much fiction is sold on a clever premise and nifty voice, feel like the literary equivalent of a cerulean warbler in a West Virginia coal mine. Feather-ruffling, corrosively funny, and entertainingly discursive, Freedom—a lot like Franzen himself—tends toward flights of virtuosity and an often startling sweetness. It’s a darker novel than The Corrections, but it’s a more humane one, too.
“Freedom is my most autobiographical book,” he says. “There is not a thing in it that actually happened to me, and yet it’s the book that draws most directly on my experience of being, and the path my life has taken. To take the lid off the innermost can of worms, which is what I feel I did in this book, I went to all the stuff I was most ashamed of, most uncomfortable writing about, stuff that was least resolved in me.” In evoking the tenderness—and increasing toxicity—of Patty and Walter’s marital world, he drew upon the fourteen years he was married, as well as the long, often adversarial marriage of his parents, moving them up a generation. But it’s Joey, the authority-resistant, smother-mothered son, who was the most difficult to write—and the closest, he admits, to the author himself. Here was a character that allowed him to examine, within the veiled intimacy of fiction, his conflicts with his own mother, whom he describes in his 2006 essay collection, The Discomfort Zone, as an “ever-invading sea.”
“It was only in the last month my mother was alive that I began to be able to love her, and I didn’t really love her a lot until after she was gone,” he confesses. “I’ll always have in my mind the ways in which my mother was impossible, so there was built into Patty all that was impossible. But there was also the possibility of loving someone who was in the position that my mother was in, and that gave me the necessary mixture of love and scrutiny—but it also made it different enough from my own life that I could pour my life in.”