Jonathan Franzen, 21st century cultural icon?

Since the publication of The Corrections in 2001, Jonathan Franzen has been elevated to the status of cultural icon. Nine years later, the arrival of his new book Freedom is the literary event of the season.

As with its predecessor, many critics are responding to Freedom as the “great American novel”. But it’s a label which makes Franzen himself uncomfortable.

“When people start tossing around phrases like ‘great American novel’,” he told me, “You come with a certain expectation of the book, which it may or may not be prepared to make good of. I’m trying to provide first and foremost an entertaining experience, something that will take you up and set you down in a place you didn’t expect to be set and to give you a great ride along the way.

It feels good in that I do appear, almost as if by accident, to have intersected with a cultural moment. Jonathan Franzen

“That’s the main goal and all of the meta-conversation, it feels good in that I do appear, almost as if by accident, to have intersected with a cultural moment.”

However accidental Franzen may claim this intersection to be, he’s happy to admit that he chose a title – Freedom – which evokes an experience many of us understand to be inextricably bound up with American identity.

The novel therefore announces itself, however ironically, as a state-of-the-nation epic. And the theme of freedom is woven through the novel, repeatedly emerging in many different manifestations.

Amongst other things, there’s an exploration of what happens when we have too much freedom, an analysis of how relationships can impinge on freedom, and a sharp swipe at how freedom has been hijacked by the American right to bludgeon their political enemies.

Which brings us back to the label “great American novel”…

But to read the novel in this context actually does it a disservice. For a book burdened with this tag, the characters aren’t remotely archetypal and the novel itself isn’t remotely schematic. And to begin reading it through this prism could even act as a barrier to our enjoyment.

I certainly found that it was only once I’d forgotten about the heavyweight tag and focused instead on the individual characters and their stories that I became immersed in the book and began to find it a compelling read.

And it is a compelling read. There’s so much to engage the reader. I was particularly taken with the characters’ preoccupation with how to be good; they’re constantly measuring themselves against their contemporaries, often unfavourably.

I found that it was only once I’d forgotten about the heavyweight tag and focused instead on the characters that I became immersed in the book. Matthew Cain

I also enjoyed the theme of competition and the way it’s developed during the course of the novel. Practically all the relationships represented – between husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings and friends – crackle with the charge of competition. Again, competition might be something we understand as being bound up with the American experience but on the level of simple character and narrative, I’m struggling to remember a novel which explores this so effectively.

Perhaps more familiar is the theme of repetition through history; here are characters desperate not to repeat the mistakes of their parents but who end up doing so despite themselves, often turning into their mother or father. But this familiarity is never allowed to stray into the realm of cliché. And the same can be said of the novel’s portrayal of a disintegrating marriage – something I haven’t seen executed so successfully since Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road.

Towards the end, there’s even some memorable commentary on the state of the publishing industry. In one memorable passage, the world of literary publishing is described as a “declining and endangered” enterprise. Let’s hope this book can do something to reverse that process.