Michael Lewis launched his successful career as an author with his book Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, which is both a youthful memoir and a journalistic look at the inner workings of Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street firm that grew fat trading bonds and then crashed and burned. The book takes place, roughly, between the years 1984 and 1987, and so I wasn’t surprised that the book reminded me of the movie Wall Street – just replace Gordon Gecko with Salomon’s head John Gutfreund. At the beginning of the book, Lewis has just been hired, quite unexpectedly, by Salomon, and he takes us through his trajectory at the company, from the cut-throat training process to his days as a bond trader in London. From this vantage point, Lewis was able to watch the company, emboldened by spectacular success in the 1980s, become a symbol of corporate gluttony. Along the way, Lewis profiles many of the company’s outsized personalities. He also delves into the intricacies of the bond market in such a way that the arcane becomes pretty readable. The book is also filled with anecdotes about the conspicuous consumption of those times and the raucous, inelegant trading floor, filled with foul-mouthed traders who threw phones and insults and reveled in their gluttony. Lewis’ revelation was that the company (and its competitors) made profits at the expense of its customers, and, while the period that Lewis chronicles is interesting in its own right, its impact is somewhat diminished by the many corporate scandals and Wall Street improprieties that have occurred since the book was first published. Against this backdrop, Liar’s Poker is no longer an exceptional story that defined an era, it is merely another moment in the cycle of Wall Street corruption and ensuing retribution that continues today.
Review: Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
Working the Wound: Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye
For the last three weeks, I’ve kept my distance from Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye , reading it in batches, then putting it out of my reach until I could bring myself to pick it up again. I ran scared from this book, not because I didn’t think it would be worth reading, but because when I read it, I unraveled. When my father died in a swimming accident during my sophomore year at college, I gave myself a solid mourning period to sit shiva, be alone in my thoughts, and compose a list of wants and needs that would clue friends into what I was going through. And then time was up: I had to go back to my regularly scheduled, pleasantly affable life. Now over seven years later, I felt sorrow freshly nipping at my ankles each time I gingerly cracked open O’Rourke’s book. But as much as I wanted to avoid it, her book haunted me, nagged at me. It was a constant reminder of what I wasn’t doing: stopping and acknowledging a sadness that has never really gone away, and is something that will never be managed or contained.
O’Rourke’s book doesn’t tell me what to do with my grief, or provide overly generalized statements on what it means to mourn—and in that sense it might be one of the least judgmental memoirs I have ever read. Instead of judging, O’Rourke presents the intimate details of the loss of her mother, and by diving all the way down to the bottom of her sorrow, O’Rourke steeps the reader in her experience. Because every line she writes is so truthful, so unblinkingly direct, every sentence knocks the reader right back into her own aching memories. It was impossible to keep my own experiences on the sideline, or to annotate O’Rourke’s prose with scribblings of recognition. Every time I tried to become a detached reader, my thoughts kept coming out like the flat, well-intentioned but useless condolences that the mourner often receives.
But O’Rourke isn’t out to solicit my sympathy or even praise, and she has no interest in being an authority on grief. “I know that I am one of the lucky ones. I am an adult; my mother had a good life,” she says, “Knowing I was one of the lucky ones didn’t make it much easier.” Instead of providing you with a guide to grief, O’Rourke volunteers the story of her mother’s death from colorectal cancer almost in real time. Taking in her thoughts, you get the sense that you are sitting opposite from her on a whispering bench: she quietly murmurs the most intimate thoughts to herself, and you hear them crisply at a very long distance. It is a secret meant to be shared among members of a club that no one ever wants to join.
As she chronicles the three years from her mother’s diagnosis to death, and the mourning period that followed, O’Rourke alternately laces her sorrow with wit, sarcasm, and rage—and never hides it away from the reader. The narrative is almost keening with every emotion one could feel as someone they love slips away: anger, frustration, wishful thinking, deep regret, and even deeper denial. Even though her mother is sick, she throws herself into an affair with a man across the country, laying out a deliberate distance between herself and reality.
As I was doing all this, the watcher in me—the part that now and then stepped back and observed my life—thought my actions betrayed how fundamentally irrational human experience is. No one I loved had ever died. Perhaps I believed that if I changed everything, the inevitable would not come, whereas staying put meant acknowledging the awful trajectory we were on.
O’Rourke beautifully elaborates on the strange unreality she experienced throughout her mother’s illness, constantly wondering if everyday moments were meant to become more poignant, more dramatically evocative. A longtime critic and poet, O’Rourke has a flair for employing lyric, but she finds that imposing such beauty and emotional highs strips her experiences of their true value. She wants to leave herself open to the pain, as though the universality of death might make it less personally devastating: “I told myself that my pain was the pain of a lucky person whose life was about to be touched by the ineluctably real for the first time. I was thirty-two; I shouldn’t be so destroyed by what was happening. And yet this kind of mental calculus had no impact on my limbic system.”
Knowing that the only certainty of life is death doesn’t make it any easier to her to bear the loss, and there’s no narrative structure that can contain all of O’Rourke’s thoughts. So it spins outward, becoming achronological and unruly. She can’t invent an alternative ending “as if had I pushed harder at one of these moments, had I been more aware, all would have changed…it is what I am still doing, rummaging through the bric-a-brac of my mind for possible alternatives, the family silver that was put aside in the attic but still gleams unseen in the autumn sun.” Maybe she gets led astray by her poetic impulses, but the grieving heart can’t help but become a little florid. And I get where she’s coming from: when you grieve, you’re constantly imagining ways in which you could’ve dodged the current state of things. If there was something that could’ve been said, you would’ve said it. If you could’ve known the tide was too strong, you would have stayed on shore. The magical thinking sustains us not just because it’s more pleasant, but because it’s less possible, less real than what you’re experiencing now.
But even in the moments of highest fantasy and fanciest prose, the real details of who we’ve lost remain. And though the memoir of her passing gets rhapsodic from time to time, the real presence of the late Barbara O’Rourke anchors us. Rather than incorporating her mother as a ghost, Meghan O’Rourke revives her, bringing in beautifully specific qualities and memories to cherish. Her mother notices tiny details in Monet’s painting The Magpie; she pulls her young daughter out of an overly long bath with a tall tale and a fluffy towel; she guides her children with a measured pragmatism, telling them to “hasten slowly” toward their destinies; she possess a beautiful, frightening frailty as she tries on new clothes in the last months of her illness. Barbara is everywhere, but never solely for the purpose of illustrating grief: she was vibrant and funny and smart and undeniably alive, and her corporeal absence only serves to remind us that there will be no new memories created with her.
But mourning her is not so circumscribed, O’Rourke realizes, and though her mother’s body may be gone, her influence is much harder to keep track of. Months after her death, as she and her siblings get ready to throw her mother’s ashes to the wind, they start to worry about the Big Lebowski effect—the ashes blowing back in their faces, getting woven into their hair and mouths, hard to brush off. But her father gets it—mourning is messy. “You do this, and it just feels real—it’s part of real life, too. There’s wind, it’s messy. And you realize you can’t avoid the Big Lebowski effect.” The grief blows back over her, gets tangled up in her daily life, becomes inseparable from her daily life. You never really get over this kind of loss, because it never really goes away. And nothing’s messier than that.
But it’s her willingness to get messy—to get real, with the experience of grief—that makes O’Rourke shine. She does take time to consult other authorities on grief—C.S. Lewis, Sigmund Freud, even Emily Dickinson, “a women who knew what it meant to carry a burden”—and though their writings give her new directions for her grief to follow, they cannot carry the same immediacy or relevance when placed alongside her own. She may respect these authors, but it’s her voice I came for, because she’s speaking to me as a fellow member of the club. And as she moves out of the immediacy of her mother’s death and into the present day, the narrative structure gently crumbles about her. This seems right: show me a structure to the end of grief, and I’ll show you a road with no destination in sight. Mourning becomes part of your everyday life—wishing someone was there; someone could laugh with you, notice the things you’re noticing. Their presence becomes an aspiration, a thread of hope and desire and longing that makes it impossible to move forward at the same speed.
A few weeks after my father died, my mother started finding the pennies. She found them in odd places—in shoes in her closet, on the sidewalk by her car, in pockets of pants that hadn’t been worn in a very long time. She said they always appeared when she was thinking about my dad, especially in moments of real doubt and anxiety. “I would wish he was there,” she’d say, “and then there were pennies everywhere.” It took a long time for me to see a stray penny without thinking “Oh, there he is.” Maybe I’m meant to keep seeing it this way, to stop and notice the pennies, and to let his absence stick around. But there's no possible way to sum up his death, his loss, his memory and my still being here to feel it. These things are just too messy to fit into a tidy synopsis.
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Buzz’s Illustrated Book Notes: Transit Tehran
Infrequent Millions contributor Buzz Poole has written for numerous publications and is the author of Madonna of the Toast. He is also the proprietor of a blog by the same name.The scene: an all-night, drug-fueled party. We could be in New York, London, Berlin or Buenos Aires, until the host turns down the music, telling revelers "Be quiet, or we won't be able to hear it - it should be coming now!" People laugh knowingly and accuse the host of being disrespectful, but then at 5 a.m. comes the Azan, the first call to prayer:A high-pitched male voice, singing in Arabic, soars through the air. The crowd begins to cheer, whistle and clap. Then the music is turned back up and the party continues.Such is life on the Persian hip-hop scene - one of the many examples of how the global influences of the 21st century have fused with tradition in Iran.Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations provides myriad ways to trace the contradictions and dichotomies that define contemporary Iran, especially in Tehran. Fiction, nonfiction, photography, film stills, paintings and illustrations speak to every aspect of the capital's 14 million residents, while also exploring the burden that artists bear as "cultural agents to the West," in the words of contributor Shirin Neshat. These potent and incisive creative acts and cultural investigations are complicated by the current government's imposing role in controlling the flow of information in and out of the country. But it is not only the Islamic Republic that has used authoritarian tactics to maintain power over its people. Transit Tehran presents Islam as just one of many aspects of the country today, reaching back to Persian history, kings, shahs, the influence of foreign governments and oil.Many of the stories and studies in this book hinge on the dilemma of change without change, which according to Neshat dates back to the nineteenth century. "[T]he tragedy of Iran seems to repeat itself, with no escape," he writes, in an appreciation of the exiled illustrator Aredeshir Mohassess. Living in New York since 1976, Mohassess is considered "the most significant living Iranian artist to date... almost entirely forgotten by both the Iranian and the Western public." The strength of Mohassess's work, as Neshat sees it, is that it "facilitates an understanding of the modern political history of Iran, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries: a history that proves to be overwhelmingly dark and authoritarian." Of the black ink samplings of Mohassess's illustrations in Transit Tehran, chains figure heavily, rendering forced servitude, almost always at the hands of government figures. But just as this work alludes to a bloody history of exploitation, the resilient and revolutionary spirit of the people is celebrated with macabre humor. The illustration "The king is always above the people," for example, comprises a group of modest men, with their king strung up above them.Khosrow Hassanzadeh's series of paintings "Guys in the Hood," inspired by his desire "to remind people that although the Revolution happened, in many ways, beneath the surface, nothing changed," features such modest men. His subjects are his neighbors, who enjoy long-standing pastimes like waterpipes, wrestling and chai. Proud, assured faces define these portraits, which derive from martyrs' portraits and the fact that the "government still says the Iranian people are living martyrs; sixty million people ready to die for their ideology."Women are the focus of several of the pieces in Transit Tehran. Newsha Tavakolian's "Girl Power" photographs convey "one of the many contradictions of life here. The new generation [of women] is completely different from that of their mothers who just ran households." This difference ranges from attending university and running businesses to martyrdom, but even the empowerment generated by these changes does not eradicate the patriarchic reality of the culture at large. "Dragnet Tehran" introduces Iranian policewomen, in existence as trainees since 1966 but only just making their "first official public appearance during the 2006 demonstration on International Women's Day." "Going Home," perhaps the most personal offering in the book, eulogizes the pre-Revolution days when women would wear bathing suits in the Caspian Sea. Javad Montazeri's images of women enjoying a day at the beach and swimming in the hejab were shot for his daughter, who will also have to cover herself when she turns nine years old: "The change that has taken place didn't evolve naturally. It was imposed on us... They altered surface appearances, but people's minds were unaffected."The Western media tends to cover only certain aspects of Iran, creating a perception that these alone define the country. For those of us on the outside looking in, every page of Transit Tehran peels away a layer of misunderstanding and sheds light on the dynamics of Iran and its people.Update: It's been brought to our attention that the Transit Tehran's co-editor, Maziar Bahari, has been imprisoned in Tehran since June 12. PEN issued a letter last week, signed by a who's who of contemporary writers, demanding his release[Images courtesy Garnet Publishing]
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The Spanish Prisoner Redux: On Finn Brunton’s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
A colorful assortment of international tradespeople, drug-pushers, swindlers, and fraudsters, spammers have become a familiar feature of our digital landscape.
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Unsettled and Unsolved: Tana French’s Broken Harbor
The detectives we meet in Tana French's novels, those who guzzle watered down coffee after an all-night stake-out, who toss suspects into one of their intentionally-uncomfortable interview rooms, who like to say Jaysus as they snap on their latex gloves, are smart but haunted creatures. They can solve crimes, but they can't solve themselves. E.M. Forster called "The king died and then the queen died of grief" a plot. In a Tana French novel, it's more like: "The king died and then the queen became a really good detective until a particular case dredged up her grief/resentment/secrets and mucked up her whole life."
Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of "and then" you want to read in the summertime.
In some ways, Broken Harbor is the most straightforward book in French's oeuvre. At its outset, Detective Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy -- whom some of you might remember as a minor character in Faithful Place -- is assigned a gruesome, tragic case: a husband and his two young children have been found dead in their home in Brianstown, a half-deserted development on the coast of Ireland. The wife is in intensive care, recovering from serious knife wounds. Kennedy needs to nail this case after a previous professional screw-up, and his partner is a working-class rookie named Richie. They both have something to prove, their motivations are clear, and the plot, for the most part, adheres to a juicy police procedural/mystery story. Who killed these victims, and why? Will the wife wake up? Does she know anything? Why are there those holes punched into the walls of their otherwise immaculate house? Is the suspect they've nabbed guilty? It's questions like these that keep a girl up late reading.
That the murders happened where Kennedy used to vacation with his family adds a ripple of tension, a pull of emotional mystery, into the narrative design. What was once a seaside camp called Broken Harbor is now a renamed "luxury" development, gone to seed in the wake of Ireland's financial crisis. Like French's other work, there's a back story in this novel that complicates the present conflict. As the pages accumulate, so does the reader's understanding of Kennedy's past. Not one, but two, tragedies emerge: the murders, and what happened to Kennedy and his family when he was a kid. Slowly, the plot takes on another dimension, for there is not only the case to solve, but also a person to understand. Other questions materialize: Is Detective Kennedy able to see this case clearly? Is he too eager to close it? Will his mentally-ill sister ruin him? The novel becomes about a man's binary ways of understanding the world, of believing the world can be understood, measured, quarantined, and then parceled into evidence. How this plot wraps around the book's initial, more straightforward one is what the novel is really about. To return to E.M. Forster, it's the novel's "of grief."
French does many things very, very well in Broken Harbor. The writing, for one. Just as any shot of liquor could get me drunk, any well-plotted mystery novel could probably keep me turning its pages. It's the beauty of Tana French's prose, however -- lines like, "Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek," and, "darker than the inside of bone" -- that makes me enjoy turning those pages. A Tana French mystery is like a fancy cocktail: sure, the alcohol alone could do the trick, but it's how the liquor interacts with the homemade ginger beer, or the muddled local strawberries, that make me feel closer to God.
In Broken Harbor, French's writing is masterful, dare I say Godly: smooth, sharply observed, with at least one beautiful and accurate description on every page. It's what renders Brianstown, with its half-built houses and deserted streets, an eerie ghost town, one that would easily breed not only unease but violence. It's also what gets us closer to Kennedy and his particular way of seeing the world. Our hero is the declarative sort; he has particular ideas about how things work, and how to do his job, and he enjoys imparting this wisdom: "I watch myself hardest around the families. Nothing can trip you up like compassion," he narrates. And: "In every way there is, murder is chaos. Our job is simple, when you get down to it: we stand against that, for order." French's first-person narrative is intimate and also calculating: Kennedy's self-assured negotiation with the world dissolves as the story progresses, and that's dramatic.
For the most part, the relationship between Kennedy and Richie is another successful aspect of the novel. Theirs is a love story without the sex, a work-place tale that echoes father-son narratives the world over, a story about intimacy and trust between men. For the first half of the book, Richie is a stand-in for the reader -- Kennedy shows him how to solve a case, Scorcher-style -- which is a clever device on French's part. Once the book moves away from its straightforward crime-solving, the story of how Kennedy and Richie's connection grows, strains, and frays is what most interested me.
There are times when the novel falters. Occasionally, the emotional shifts in Kennedy seemed contrived. It sometimes felt as though French pushed her hero into believing theories that I wasn't sure he'd believe, perhaps all in the name of giving him a strong and dramatic arc. In the latter half of the novel, Kennedy makes decisions that felt a little thick to me: he was too attached to certain arguments regarding the case, and I didn't buy his inflexibility. In the first two-thirds of the novel, his relationship with Richie is depicted with grace, but the end of the book gave me an uncomfortable deus ex machina feeling. A near-end twist did surprise me, but it felt bullied into the story, as a way to wrap up the mystery. Maybe there was too much plot, and it got in the way of everything else. I was also immediately bored with a few of the minor characters, including a 20-something computer specialist who seemed snatched from any number of Law & Order episodes. Note: a penchant for loud techno music doth not a character make.
Despite its flaws, the end of Broken Harbor left me deeply unsettled. French ends her novel with a mystery beyond the mystery: Why do terrible things happen? It's a question I've been pondering ever since. Just yesterday, for instance, as I walked home from the grocery store, a wind picked up and blew across my street like a portent of terror. I thought of Broken Harbor, of all that can happen beyond our control, and I shivered.
Now, that's what I call summer reading.
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It’s All in Your Head: The Problems With Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine
Charlie Wilson’s Secret Proxy War
Charlie Wilson's War, the movie, is set to open nationwide on Friday. A recent screening in Manhattan was about two-thirds full, and the response when the lights came up was tepid applause. It's not a bad movie, basically Tom Hanks wearing suspenders, grab-assing with Julia Roberts, and drinking a lot of scotch. It also features trademark Aaron Sorkin screenwriting: dense, snappy dialogue a la "West Wing" and A Few Good Men (Sorkin also has a new Broadway offering, The Farnsworth Invention), and direction by Mike Nichols (Primary Colors). Philip Seymour Hoffman rounds out the cast, and he does his usual fine turn as Gust Avrokotos, a CIA agent with a chip on his shoulder. It is a film based on actual events, events chronicled in George Crile's book, subtitled "The Extraordinary Story of how the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times." Charlie Wilson's War, the book, takes a lot longer than the movie to absorb, but it is worth the time. It's an amazing story that just about does justice to that rambling subtitle. In addition to being a sensational tale of political maneuvering, high-power high jinks, and clandestine operations, Crile's reporting provokes deep thoughts about how the Cold War was ended and how legislative government really functions in America. Crile hints that Wilson, the Democratic Congressman from Texas, hard drinker, notorious philanderer, "Good Time Charlie," as he was called, may have had a hand in saving the world from the Soviets. As a member of the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, Wilson wrangled millions of Federal dollars for the CIA to support the Islamic tribal guerrilla factions within Afghanistan that battled the Red Army, which occupied Kabul in late 1979, throughout the 1980s. Guns, mortars, mines, rocket launchers: things that jihadists need to kill Commies."Afghanistan was the largest and most successful covert operation ever mounted by the CIA," writes Crile. The partnership between Wilson, the congressman, and Avrakotos, head of the CIA's South Asian Operations Bureau, made it happen. The degree to which the Red Army's defeat in Afghanistan, culminating in complete withdrawal in 1989, influenced the subsequent raising of the iron curtain, collapse of the U.S.S.R., and end of the Cold War, is a matter for debate. Wilson recognized that there was one place in the world, Afghanistan, where the U.S. had an opportunity to have a hand in the killing of Soviet soldiers. After seeing the refugee camps in Pakistan, and meeting with numerous mujahideen, Wilson came to view them as freedom fighters, and he championed their cause.But inspiring as Charlie Wilson's story is, let's face it: it's frightening to think that an obscure congressman could have such awesome power to dictate American foreign policy. Did Wilson and Avrakotos break laws in the course of directing the most successful covert operation ever mounted by the CIA? Crile writes the following:At a time when [Nicaraguan] Contras could not get a dime from Congress, Charlie Wilson had managed to turn the CIA's cautious bleeding campaign in Afghanistan into a half-billion-dollars-a-year operation that dwarfed any prior agency effort. For all practical purposes Wilson had hijacked U.S. foreign policy and was busy transforming it into the first direct winner-take-all contest with the Soviet Union... He was now engaged in the kind of sensitive diplomacy that is technically illegal for anyone other than the White House to conduct: Cutting arms deals with the defense minister of Egypt; commissioning Israel to design weapons for the CIA; negotiating all manner of extraordinarily controversial matters with the all important U.S. ally general Zia [ul-Haq, president of Pakistan].Whether or not his actions were legal, it would seem that Wilson was motivated by patriotic ideals, to aid victims of tyrannical aggression and hurt the U.S.'s great Red enemy. But part of what makes this such a jaw dropping story is that Wilson was able to accomplish what he did - and get away with it.Honest though his motives were, Wilson's actions had unforeseen consequences, a fact that was brought home to him on September 11, 2001. All of the hijackers who hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon had spent time training in Afghanistan. I shuddered when I read this sentence:For anyone trying to make sense of this new enemy, it would seem relevant that for over a decade in the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. government sponsored the largest and most successful jihad in modern history; that the CIA secretly armed and trained several hundred thousand fundamentalist warriors to fight against our common Soviet enemy; and that many of those who now targeted America were veterans of that earlier CIA sponsored jihad.Especially when considered in light of the intelligence failures that predicated the 9/11 attacks, the CIA emerges from the Charlie Wilson saga with their usual black eye, despite the Afghan war with Soviets being supposedly the Agency's finest moment. It is a perverse glory that comes with winning a "proxy" war. It would seem a rather ignoble pursuit.
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Tough Love: A Review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom
Jonathan Franzen seems to have always known what kind of writer he wanted to be when he grew up. His underrated first book, The Twenty-Seventh City, published before he was thirty, managed to synthesize the warring impulses of postwar fiction - toward black comedy and intimate lyricism, toward domestic realism and busy narrative, toward the personal and the political - in a language of aphoristic wit, journalistic specificity, and lapidary precision. The Twenty-Seventh City was a little bit of everything, without seeming like the average of anything.
Notwithstanding his subsequent (and public) hemming and hawing about the social vs. the domestic, the difficult vs. the hospitable, art vs. entertainment, Franzen's ambitions have proven remarkably stable since then. Every seven or eight years, he brings out another dense and dazzling slab of pages - another panorama of American life viewed through the prism of the individual conscience. With 2001's The Corrections, he would seem to have perfected his method. It won the National Book Award, pissed off Oprah, and sold a million billion copies. Our recent poll of authors and editors singled it out as the best novel of the last decade.
What could it possibly mean, then, to say that Freedom, his long-awaited follow-up, finds Franzen maturing? Surely not that he is more confident at 50 than at 40. (It's hard to think of a novel more confident than The Corrections.) Nor that Freedom is more or less expansive, or that it represents, in the canned phraseology of newspaper reviews, any kind of "stunning departure" in substance or in sensibility. Rather, the novelty of this novel - the richest reward it offers us for our patience - is the deepening of the author's moral imagination. One thinks of flavors ripening over a slow boil, of instruments changing as they age. To put it another way, in Freedom, Franzen's blues are bluer. The ironies are stronger, the pain more mysterious, and the characters more given to change.
Like its predecessors, Freedom can be read as a species of family novel. Unlike them, it is, at heart, a love story...though Franzen cannily muddles the terms of the genre. The lovers in question are Patty and Walter Berglund, parents of two and members in good standing of the urban gentry of St. Paul, Minnesota. But it is not at all clear initially that Patty loves Walter - or, at any rate, how Patty loves Walter, or how well Walter knows Patty. It is, moreover, not at all clear that we should care. A bravura overture, "Good Neighbors," introduces us to the Berglunds through the eyes of their fellow gentrifiers, offering a mordant catalogue of the foibles of "the Whole Foods generation." The satire is delicious, but also offputting. We come to agree with community sentiment, expressed in the free indirect third-person Franzen favors: "There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds."
Immediately afterward, however, Freedom takes a sharp turn: it plunges us into Patty's point-of-view. Seeing through her eyes Walter - and their son, Joey, and Walter's best friend, the charismatic rock musician Richard Katz - we are shaken from our comfortable judgments. And then, in long, subsequent sections that follow, we move into Richard's head, and Walter's, and Joey's, and back to Patty's, each time having to adjust our understanding of this core quartet, the married couple and the manchildren who come between them. Franzen has played this inside-outside game before; The Corrections shuffled us serially among the Lamberts. Here, though, the sharper disjunctions between the various perspectives make the stereoscopic effect at once deeper and more unsettling. Between the outward and inward lives of these characters is a chasm we begin to wonder if we will ever bridge. Which is, of course, exactly the chasm Walter and Patty will have to bridge.
First, though, we hopscotch through time. We explore the Berglunds' formative years (their meeting at college, Patty's rape, Walter's alcoholic father); the flickering, destabilizing presence of Richard in their lives; their move to post-September 11 Washington, D.C.; Joey's and Walter's entanglements with the conservative powers of that city; and the slow dissolution of the Berglund marriage under the familiar Franzen formula of depression, anger, and explosive sex.
If this sounds heavy, it should be pointed out that Franzen is one of our funniest writers. His sense of humor, too, constitutes an inside-outside game. When Patty, years later, "envies and pities the younger Patty standing there in the Fen City Co-op and innocently believing that she'd reached the bottom," we are both the wiser, older self (how bad can things really be, in the Fen City Co-Op?) and the "innocent" younger one. Franzen has a wonderful way of boiling down this kind of perspectival comedy even further, into a little bouillon cube of diction: "Joey was staggered by the quantity of hardcover books and by the obviously top quality of the multicultural swag that Jonathan's father had collected during distinguished foreign residencies." "Multicultural swag" is funny - we catch the superficiality of Joey's hosts, and a flicker of glib self-awareness in Joey. A lesser novelist might have stopped there. But the agrammatical "obviously top quality," tucked away nearby, is funnier. For all his efforts at savoir-faire, Joey is also ingenuous, in ways he can't quite see.
For Franzen, as for the Buddhists, understanding, whatever pieties it may traduce, is the supreme act of compassion. And to understand people in all of their contradictions is, perforce, to be ironic. To speak of the "likeability" of Freedom's characters is thus to miss the moral project completely. Joey is a product of his generation; as another character observes, there is "something Reaganite" about him. But because the novel cares enough about him to inhabit his consciousness fully, we care about him, too. We are laughing at once with him and at him. And with and at ourselves.
Such anthropological laughter is a constant in Freedom. The novel picks up and probes everything it comes into contact with, managing in the process to take apart a goodly portion of what currently constitutes American life. It's not that Franzen "knows a thousand different things," as James Wood has suggested the contemporary American novelist seeks to - he's no Tom Wolfe, thank heavens. But he is curious about everything: Volvo maintenance, phone sex, alt-country, iPods, college life, Leo Strauss, NCAA women's basketball...
Franzen's curiosity - his wish to welcome the world into his book - at times becomes overly antic, in a way that sits less easily against Freedom's midlife sobriety than it did in The Corrections' atmosphere of oxygenated adolescence. Joey's excursion in South America as a would-be war profiteer is like a less compelling version of Chip Lambert's sojourn in Estonia. And the coal-company conspiracy that envelops environmentally-minded Walter in the middle of the book is far less effective, as political commentary, than the tensions within Walter's own family. One thing Franzen does not seem to know particularly well is Washington, D.C., and there is an opacity to Walter here that we don't feel with Walter elsewhere, or with Joey, Richard, or Patty. (It is surely worth mentioning that Franzen writes more persuasively and attentively about the inner life of women than any male American novelist since Henry James.) But Franzen has the wisdom not to strand Walter inside the Beltway.
Against the urban densities where the Berglunds have chosen to make their lives, Freedom keeps returning to a family cabin in the Minnesota woods where they seek respite. And it is a mark of Franzen's growth as a novelist that he keeps letting them find it - letting them breathe. Here, for example, is Walter, late in the novel, but early in his life:
Seventeen years in cramped quarters with his family had given him a thirst for solitude whose unquenchability he was discovering only now. To hear nothing but wind, birdsong, insects, fish jumping, branches squeaking, birch leaves scraping as they tumbled against each other: he kept stopping to savor this unsilent silence as he scraped paint from the house's outer walls.
And here is Patty, twenty years later and 300 pages earlier, just before her life falls apart in earnest:
She took War and Peace out to the grassy knoll, with the vague ancient motive of impressing Richard with her literacy, but she was mired in a military section and kept reading the same page over and over. A melodious bird that Walter had despaired of teaching her the proper name of, a veery or a vireo, grew accustomed to her presence and began to sing in a tree directly above her. Its song was like an idee fixe that it couldn't get out of its little head.
In the delicate mirroring of these passages, Franzen insists on nothing. Instead, he lets meaning, the elusive thing, emerge through momentum, like widening circles from a pond-tossed rock. The songbird's repetition echoes Patty's, and its idee fixe is really hers: the "vague ancient" impulse to sleep with Richard. Moreover, the grassy openness of the place Patty calls "Nameless Lake" speaks of a freedom neither Patty nor Walter can find in the "cramped" confines of the nuclear family, or of the society of which it is a microcosm. Freedom, in its intertwining personal and political aspects, is Freedom's explicit concern. It should be noted, though, that the bird the novel keeps coming back to (and that graces its cover), is a blue one, allied not so much with freedom as with happiness. Franzen's real quarry here is the vexed relationship between the two. In the space of the Minnesota woods, the Berglunds are - like Richard on the road or Joey off at college - free, but alone.
Ultimately, in these and other moments that call to each other across time and across the space of the novel, Franzen also allows the patient reader to see what Walter and Patty cannot: that they are made for each other. I cede the floor to James Baldwin:
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
It is the surprising grace - in every sense - with which Franzen evokes Patty and Walter's love that marks Freedom as the work of a master. Readers looking for the pleasures of The Corrections will find all of them here, in force. But they are also likely to come away from this novel moved in harder-to-fathom ways - and grateful for it. Which is to express the hope that, amid the general childishness of the cultural scene he skewers so lovingly, Jonathan Franzen and his audience may be growing up together.
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