Jon Baskin on Franzen's Fiction

"What is the philosophy that informs Franzen’s fiction—is there a vision of the good life in his novels? One might think, given the argument in “Farther Away,” that the answer could be found in the meaningfulness of “close loving relationships.” And it is true that Franzen’s novels are about relationships—between husbands and wives, parents and children, the individual and her country. Yet it may come as a surprise to discover how often, for Franzen’s characters, the “hazards” of living relationships prove insurmountable, or nearly so. The story Franzen tells most insistently is that of the man whose idealism about relationships is eroded and finally destroyed by his experience with them. His characters, having ventured out in hopes of companionship and success, return often to bitterness, despair, and (if they are lucky) some insight into the harsh hypocrisies of human conduct. The entire sphinx-like plot of The Twenty-Seventh City is contrived to bring its hero, Martin Probst—who begins as a satisfied family man and ends as a solitary loner, taking a highway out of St. Louis—to the epiphany that he lived in a world “he was only now realizing he didn’t like.” Franzen’s second novel, Strong Motion, presents a character whose solitude is overwhelmed more often by hatred than by love; even in what is supposed to be an optimistic ending, Louis Holland can only momentarily suppress his sense of alienation from an America where “piggishness and stupidity and injustice … were every day extending their hegemony.  Retraction from relationships, and then from society as a whole—for America itself is a character in Franzen’s fiction, with which his protagonists carry on a highly tumultuous relationship—is in fact the most characteristic movement in Franzen’s novels; the New York Review of Books’s Tim Parks has observed that “his stories invariably offer characters engaging in the American world, finding themselves tainted and debased by it, then … withdrawing from it.” Freedom is no exception. Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times has written of the novel’s “majestic sweep,” which “seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.” yet the America portrayed in Freedom is unmistakably a corrupted one, whose contents Franzen catalogues with a cringe. Although the novel charts the Berglund family’s boomerang course from Midwestern suburb to east Coast metropolis and back again, its protagonists discover everywhere the same greed, superficiality and disregard for sound environmental policy. YouTube videos, BlackBerries and iPods lie strewn across the book’s landscape, monuments to American apathy and a once-vibrant culture reduced to “a trillion little bits of distracting noise.” At every turn, the story reinforces its chief protagonist Walter Berglund’s view that “all the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off.”- from Jon Baskin, "Coming to Terms"