That’s David Brooks’ judicious view of the most celebrated novel of the year. It’s too easy to display people today as being empty or insignificant or having nothing left to lose, and it’s natural for literary men and women to be critical of times without obvious exemplars of heroic greatness and romantic love. I’m all for being anti-bourgeois in the sense of denying that being bourgeois–or beings with interests–comes anywhere near exhausting who we are. But I’m not for being anti-bourgeois in the sense of saying that American lives have become bourgeois and nothing more and so are really the lives of “last men.” Souls still have longings, destinies remains personal, and people still display their dignity or unique and irreplaceable status. (I’ll have more to say about FREEEDOM once I actually finish it–it’s worth reading, mind you.)
I, of course, have plenty of sympathy for the Stoic criticism of who we are, as given by “Colonel John Pelham, Jeb Stuart’s legendary artillerist” in Walker Percy’s fictional portrayal of “The Last Donahue Show” in LOST IN THE COSMOS. Here are Pelham’s reflections on what he heard about sexual promiscuity on that expert show: “That’s not the way people should talk or act. Where we’d come from, we’d call them white trash. That’s no way to talk if you’re a man or a woman. A gentleman knows how to treat women. He knows because he knows himself, who he is, what his obligations are. And he discharges them.”
I also have some sympathy for the reflections on the Donahue Show by Percy’s version of John Calvin: “What I have heard is licentious talk about deeds which are an abomination before God.”
So it’s true enough that–insofar as Americans find no guidance in their Stoic and Christian countercultures–they really do have big trouble knowing who they are and what they’re suppose to do. But if Will is right, FREEDOM misses what remains of Stoic and Christian America, and so what some American know about the purpose-driven dimensions of human freedom. And in any case talking and even acting like white trash doesn’t mean we’re not actually much more. Nobody really believes that young Americans are okay with the “hook up” culture and all that, although many may–in white trash fashion-brag that they are.
All this is meant to be a prelude to my account of my wonderful visit to Georgetown, which begin with ME giving a seminar on LOST OF THE COSMOS and ended with a discussion on whether there’s a purpose-driven dimension to our Constitution’s view of who we are–or whether the famous mystery clause is right that our freedom is all about lonesome self-definition in the mysterious absence of natural or divine guidance.
September 23rd, 2010 | 2:48 am
You say “George Will” did you mean “David Brooks”?
Meg
September 23rd, 2010 | 10:27 pm
Freedom is a good story for our age as all the reviewers want to say. It’s a little silly. It may be true, but as Brooks notes there is no reference to reverence for the divine in the novel. For all the snarkiness that Freedom has for environmentalism, it doesn’t entertain a thought outside of contemporary modes of environmental thought.
Jonathan Franzen may want to think he is better than Oprah sentimentalism, but he ends up with an Anne Tyler type ending with characters recognizing excess but relying on what they always already had even if they rejected it–viz. the family. BTW, I like Anne Tyler.
Walter’s family sucked and Patty’s sucked too, but making their own family made them recognize their own limits. Why couldn’t they strive for something better? Franzen likes the low ceiling as the reviewer in the New Republic had it.
Regardless, Brooks has the question that many “book clubs” will be asking–WTF, does Brooks live in the 1950s and the heyday of Reader’s Digest? Does Brooks still think the suburbs are Revolutionary Road with their “book clubs”?–the question is namely, does Freedom accurately represent America today? Of course it doesn’t–not even on an analogical level.
As a gen Xer, I recognized the knowing cynicism of Freedom in the first 30 page interlude. It sucked me in–people are talking about me, nay the Berglunds. It is brilliant. I must admit that I made it through the first half of the novel in one sitting. I was riveted, but then I wondered.
I’ve read most of Franzen and like it, and as most reviewers have noted his distinction between the contract novel and the artsy fartsy novel is quite brilliant. freedom–whether meaning the emptiness of the unencumbered self or George Bush’s second inaugural–certainly resonate. However, he sticks to the easy M. Scott Peck psychobabble–or was it Dr. Phil. This is like Anne Tyler too. In fact I’d rather have a dinner at the homesick restaurant than dinner with the uptight Berglund’s any day.
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home are much deeper if one is looking for an examination of freedom and its limits.
However, is this what people really say, and if so who gives a shit? I hate to think I am so alienated from what is real in the world, let alone from what is real in American democratic society today, that I take Jonathan Franzen’s imagination of what Michael Stipe thinks is good or what “the philosopher” (his version of a conspiracy involving Leo Strauss) says.
That said. It was a good book. Like I said, I was drawn in to the narrative, but this narrative mimesis is surely a funhouse mirror. It is one that does not expose the truth through exaggeration, bit one that exaggerates the truth in the name of hipsterdom.
September 24th, 2010 | 11:50 pm
If not seen, here’s this review from City Journal:
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/bc0917bb.html
September 26th, 2010 | 1:30 pm
If there is one revolution that has gone completely un-remarked upon in this noisy age, it is the sacking of independent thought and moral standards by that simulacrum of culture known as the “popular culture”. We’ll have to wait a few years to get a proper accounting but perhaps we can be premature and refer to it as Cable Channel Marxism. The Consumer Commune possesses 75 channels and so still has choice.
Funny enough, the prevailing wisdom smells a rat but the cashiers keep insisting that this rat is clothed beautifully.
September 26th, 2010 | 10:05 pm
I’ll wait a while to say more about Franzen’s Freedom; I’m still letting it sink in, and I don’t know how to talk about it without talking about the end. So you all finish reading it then we can talk about it, including the end. For now: transcendence does in a way show up throug its absence, and so there are faint glimpses of the Big Questions. No doubt many kinds of Americans are left out, but no doubt there is much truth here re. a certain godless elite. The right and the left are at least skewered more or less equally, though what’s missing then are a more thoughtful liberalism and conservatism. There are very keen observations on generational differences that I recognized but wouldn’t have been able to make sense of myself. The plot is too much driven by sexual suspense, but there is no doubt truth in depicting a society in which sex has replaced God as the Ultimate Concern.
So, more later, after you read through to the end.
September 28th, 2010 | 8:37 am
Isn’t Brooks’ point similar to Tom Wolfe’s argument in his article “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”? Actually, Wolfe’s argument is better and his project is better is even better than his argument. Unlike most, he writes about more types of persons than just suburbans.
September 30th, 2010 | 9:45 am
The Deist is right. Listen to her.
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