I Wish I Could Go Back To College

I’ve referenced Avenue Q several times on this blog. Indeed, it is the most referenced Broadway musical on Geoausch.com and I know no better way to begin my review of Freedom than with another reference.

Franzen’s novel focuses on the complicated relationship between Walter and Patty Berglund, an ultra-progressive couple, chasing the “American Dream,” and forever replaying the events that brought them together and drove them apart. Ultimately, they both seem to cry out, “I Wish I Could Go Back to College,” the time when they met and when the seeds of the great mistake were sown, but “going back to college” for them extends much further than simply searching for a way to salvage their fragile relationship.

With the Berglunds, Franzen frames a world in which “freedoms” must be curbed. A world where man is both the world’s highest being and its lowest common denominator; the earth’s greatest hope and its greatest threat–a world full of lusts, lies and lunacy. It is the world of the secular humanist, where no absolutes exist and the center does not hold.  It is the worldview of Franzen, his contemporaries, and thousands a people scattered along the coasts of this country. In his poem, “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats described a world where, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  The world Franzen creates in Freedom conforms to this description and serves as reminder to the reader why man can never be absolutely free. As the world spirals out of control and their relationship unravels, the couple reflects on the past in an attempt to find some peace–relatively speaking–and not by coincidence, these reflections often take the reader back to college.

I’ve long held that progressives ultimately desire the world to look, feel and function like a college.

• In college, a paternal figure, either the Federal government, parents or the institute itself, often subsidize a student’s education. This “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” approach jives well with the progressives incessant guilt.
• In college, students go to class (their job) and in return their tuition, room & board, meals, and supplies are provided by the Federal government, parents, and/or institute of higher education.
• In the classroom, students and professors utilize the Socratic method to resolve problems.
• In college, an academic adviser plans all the major details of your life for the duration of your education.

In short, college provides structure and order in a world lacking those qualities.

In Walter Berglund, Franzen creates the classic progressive, molded in his own image, a man who no doubt wishes the Federal government functioned a lot more like an institute of higher education and less like a business, a  man who seeks to posit himself as the provost–the senior adviser to those in charge. Through his wife’s long and winding narration, we discover the tale of an emasculated man, consumed with existential angst, searching desperately for a respite. Unable to process his childhood neglect, Walter seems to view humans in general, and Americans specifically, in much the same manner as his own family–cretins incapable of taking care of themselves or one another who require a strong replacement paternal figure to save them all from inevitable destruction.

Walter knows best! For his wife, for his family, for his best friend, for his native Minnesota, for America, for the world–Walter knows best!

Yet Walter finds himself coming of age in America during the Age of Reagan, an era of new conservatism, where those in power, even the Democrats, have long since abandoned the infantile ideology Walter favors. Frustrated and bitter, Walter seeks to exert his power on the one unit he controls–his family. This leads to some strange chemistry in the family and Walter ends up running off his wife and two children. His son ends up moving in with the neighbors next door–a politically apathetic divorcee, her blue-collar-beer-drinking-football-watching-gun-toting (obviously Republican) boyfriend, and their daughter, who just happens to be his son’s girlfriend. After years of  sheltering her feelings for Walter’s best friend, Patty eventually gives into temptation, sleeps with his friend, and writes about it. Walter eventually reads her story and for the first time displays real emotion. Justifiably upset, he kicks her to the street. Unhappy with the way her father handled her mother’s mistake, Walter’s daughter cuts off the lines of communication with him.

These events seem to reinforce in the mind of Walter, the thought that man is too wild to be free. Left unchecked, man’s path of destruction now extends well beyond personal relationships and threatens to destroy the entire world–species by species, habitat by habitat–one overpopulated birth at a time.

As a piece of contemporary fiction, Freedom features all the elements a reader desires–multiple plot lines, well developed characters, and eternal themes. While the narrative switches back and forth between the past and present, Franzen writes in a cohesive manner that sews the story together seamlessly. Technically, I found the dialogue the only element lacking. It seems as if Franzen devoted so much effort into nailing the dialogue of Walter, he neglected the dialogue of the other characters. I do not get the sense the other characters own their words, but rather they are the words Walter would speak if he were in their shoes.

As a cultural critique, Freedom fails epically, at least for a anyone living in “fly over” country. Franzen has penned the ultimate “blue-state”  manifesto, a well-worded, but woefully idiotic evaluation of the United States in the 21st Century. He speaks to the heart of every Ivy League intellectual, Generation X hipster and  every Slate.com staff writer, while casting a condescending eye towards middle America. Franzen, like many “progressives,” attempts to use his intellect as a crutch to beat dissenters, trotting out the same tired straw-man arguments and ad hominem attacks favored by the Left for the past half century. In the end, like a politician, he ends up engaging his base and alienating the middle.