Freedom

I must admit that, however enthusiastically I might have been told about The Corrections, (the book signed by Jonathan Franzen and translated by Polirom Publishing in 2004), I never got into it. I gave it up after about 150 pages.

But I experienced something completely different with Freedom, Franzen's 2010 novel, recently translated also by Polirom Publishing. The author, who had a major success with The Corrections, needed nine years to publish his following book. I wondered how he wrote it, whether he is a disciplined author, who sits down at his desk every day, and his extremely humane answered, and many others, I found in his dialogue with Philippe Boulet-Gercourt for Le Nouvel Observateur. Franzen speaks there of fame, middle class depression, Bush years, Twitter, Facebook and literature. Asked which are the strengths of a novelist, he says: “I need three things: first of all, sophisticated characters to love. I spend three to six years trying to find them between two books. Then I need to know that I innovate formally: it must be something I have never done before, maybe something that was never done before by anyone else. Then, I need to find in my head the tone of the book. Once these conditions are met, I start writing. I can write thousands of words every day.”

Having said these, let us return to the novel Freedom, a book of 650 pages to be read in one breath. There's to it something of the commitment one develops for smart American series, which you can't let go until you find out what happens next to the characters you are so fond of, how they evolve, and what direction their lives take.

The American world, with its foibles and clichés is looked into microscopically and described accurately and ironically. The Berglunds, with its two spouses, Patty and Walter, and the two children is much more than that. Because, truly spectacular in Franzen, is the way in which he builds the relations between the protagonists, the mechanics of the feelings that bring in to strengthen their position in the family. Each negotiates his own personal freedom and that of their dear one. They love and torture each other in the name of happiness. Patty remains the strongest and most subtle character from one end of the book to the other. She is initially regarded with detachment, portrayed from the perspective of the rest of the characters and later comes out in the lime light to therapeutically tell her story.

Nice, competitive, ridiculous, bovaric – all these match Patty Berglund perfectly. And what saves her is her disarming humanity.

Frazen's novel has, among others, one great merit: it is extremely topical, deeply humane and in no sense moralist. Humour and irony always come to rescue – both for the reader and the book's characters.