One of the year's most acclaimed and high-profile novels was also its most overrated, yet in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom we have the perfect illustration of the triumph of hype over literary merit, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY
HYPE HAS a great deal to answer for. It embellishes, it manipulates, most of all, it distorts. Hype creates a subplot; it elevates a sideshow to a main event. If Jonathan Franzen had not taken nine years to write Freedom,it would most likely have been received as the novel it actually is – a sloppy, overwritten, mildly amusing extended sitcom that is being inaccurately, even grotesquely, hailed as a masterpiece.
Instead, because of various delays; the loss of the author's reading glasses; possibly his use of multi-coloured paper clips; his diva's determination to be seen as a literary master instead of a highly successful bestselling writer; all those authorial changes that may or may not have been lost by his publishers; and the fact that his photograph appeared on the cover of Timemagazine, Freedom,the work of a media darling, has been hailed as a literary second coming – which it is not.
If Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic had had a Franzen-like hype machine pushing it, all this misguided "Great American Novel" talk may have instead been about Union Atlantic– a better novel than Freedom, although not a great one either. Ironically, Franzen did blurb it.
The plaudits have been excessive and unfair; not only to Franzen, who will, eventually, be regarded as seriously overrated, instead of as the rather ordinary, fantastically indulged and indulgent satirist he is. It is also unfair to both literary and commercial US writers and, above all, to readers. It is outrageous to hail him as the new John Updike. Perhaps it is time that someone pointed out that Freedomis stylistically far closer to The Bonfire of the Vanities(1988), than it is, or ever will be, to War and Peace.
Okay, so War and Peacemay seem a cheap shot. Interestingly, Franzen makes several references to War and Peace in Freedom, a novel that is twice the length it should be, if less than half the size of War and Peace. He even has a sequence in which an old family estate has become a parody of a Tolstoylian dacha. Still, Franzen, as is more than patently obvious, is no Tolstoy.
Commercially, Franzen is well placed; the success of The Corrections,a good but far from great third novel, made him famous, won him the 2001 National Book Award and put him where he is – in the position of presenting a meandering yarn such as Freedom in the full confidence that anticipation and demand would carry the novel above and beyond responsible textual criticism, never mind severe pre-publication editing.
But what is it? A bulky, gleefully knowing narrative in which most of the characters sound the same; they shriek, they shout, they do angst, they all want to sound like exasperated stand-up comics hurling abuse at the guy next door. Aside from Walter, the dull if worthy quasi-hero who by default gets the girl, Patty, who really wanted the sexier but nasty Richard, none of the characters are remotely likable – or even interesting. Meanwhile the plot is stretched so thin, it risks the danger of snapping with a loud “pop”.
Richard Russo is as good as Franzen, as are John Irving and Rick Moody – none of whom would expect, or merit, comparison with Updike, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo or Richard Ford. Nor does Franzen.
He is not even quite as perceptive, as stylish or as original a satirist as Bret Easton Ellis, a fellow seasoned media performer. How does David Leavitt, a good writer who has experienced the highs and lows of publicity, feel about the way in which Franzen’s fiction is applauded before publication?
To see Freedombeing praised as "the Great American novel" only a year since Richard Bausch's magnificent war novel Peacereminded us all, yet again, of the towering achievement of US fiction, is like being stabbed in the heart. Not only in this year, when Philip Roth, a tried-and-tested Great American Writer, has, in Nemesis, written a great novel (and he has, by now, written several), but in any year.
Who could dare place The Correctionsor Freedomon the same shelf as Updike's Rabbit tetralogy? Why is it that in any other country in the world, writers can publish good, to very good, to fine, to at times brilliant novels, without reviewers frantically feeling obliged to afix "the Great whatever" to each new contender?
Several members of the British literary establishment selected Freedomas among their books of the year. No doubt they enjoyed it: it is an easy read; intellectually undemanding and amusing; culminating in a well-drawn war of wits between old Walter and the owner of a bird-killing cat – but there are far funnier US novels and far superior ones. American writers use comedy, social satire, character and convincing dialogue well, many far more skilfully than Franzen.
But lurking beneath the apparent British acceptance of Freedomis the suspicion that the British may think, or prefer to think, that this is as good as US fiction gets. It is not, far from it. Freedomis surface gloss, it hits at a traditionally easy target – the smug, liberal, constitutionally fragile, materialistic, self-righteous US middle class.
It offers the goofball, infantile America that the British love to smile at – and don't forget there is that very English lavatorial sequence of the unfaithful new young husband who swallows his wedding ring and then has to wait for his digestive system to return it. Yuck, but that's Freedom.
But hey, the British, initially, also laughed loudly at The Bonfire of the Vanities– another overrated, doorstop-sized novel. And while the British were laughing, there preened the deluded Tom Wolfe, convinced he had written a work to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Balzac and Dickens. How mistaken could a writer be? Franzen also considers himself to be on a serious literary mission, and truly capitalised on the Oprah episode when appearing to reject her endorsements.
Yet because a protective bubble is encasing this novel; it is obscuring better US fiction, work that has serious, proven artistry; consider Paul Harding's Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, a beautiful novel, a profound and philosophical work of art which explores life, death and the concept of time. Anyone who has read it speaks about it in a tone of sheer wonder.
It is rather like the admiration readers share for Marilynne Robinson, who won the Pulitzer for Gileadin 2004 and followed that with Home(2008), but had already secured her audience years earlier with Housekeeping in 1980. When Ford's breakthrough novel, The Sportswriter(1986), was published in London, many British reviewers were pleased that "they got it" – that is, they grasped the elegiac point of it.
Ford is deservedly internationally revered; Independence Day(1995) and The Lay of the Land(2006) are contenders for the "Great American Novel" epithet, while Harding and Robinson are major artists, not minority writers.
Also this year, singer Willy Vlautin's Lean On Peteshowed how strong American realism remains. Anyone who read it loved it, but hype dominates publishing. Lean on Peteis half the length of Freedombut twice the novel.
With Point Omega, Don DeLillo again asserted his visionary concern for his country, his time, our post-terrorist hell in which nature is now taking revenge, but DeLillo is not a publicist’s dream – he’s too quiet, too intense.
As for Roth, now 77, he does not believe in publicity. Even as a Roth fan, particularly of his love for country expressed through later novels such as American Pastoral(1997), I was astounded by the passion and simmering rage tracking the terrific plot that is Nemesis– Roth's urgent, deliberate prose, never mind the story, leaves Freedom for dead. In Nemesis,a polio epidemic is presented as a vengeful plague; children die, parents grieve, there is no salvation. Equally, there is no comparison between Freedomand the infinitely superior Nemesisin terms of quality, but Roth doesn't give interviews and to my knowledge, hasn't appeared on Oprah. That Freedomovershadowed Nemesissays a great deal about the power of hype.
It can't be simply the fact that Freedomis set in the more recent present. A very talented new US writer, Sicilian-American Salvatore Scibona was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2008 with The End, an ambitious novel that is set mainly on August 15th, 1953. It is a daring, elegantly brutal narrative, extraordinary on several counts. It was published in Britain this year only to disappear, and yet it is a fine novel. Hype dictates fiction the way that harsh reviews end theatre runs.
Only now, thanks to Debra Granik's superb movie version of Daniel Woodrell's astonishing novel Winter's Bone (2006), have readers begun acknowledging the source novel.
Should we be wringing our hands for Roth and DeLillo? Could anyone seriously claim that Freedomis better or even within a mile of Underworld? Hardly.
So why attack Freedom? It falters on examination. It creaks and, most damning of all, it lacks the enduring strength of US fiction, a convincing narrative voice. Superior US novels were published this year, such as Nemesis; while better international fiction was published – Orhan Pamuk's equally lengthy The Museum of Innocenceis more compelling.
As for Irish fiction, one need look no further than Paul Murray's Skippy Diesfor a hysterically funny and heartbreaking state of the middle classes satire that leaves Freedomlooking very ordinary, far smaller and less meaningful than the hype suggests.
