Freedom and Reality: Birds, Books, Central Park, and the Quantum Bullet

I just finished listening to the novel Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (2010, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The book was read superbly by David Ledoux, who was named an AudioFile Best Voice in Fiction for his performance of this novel. 

One of the reasons I decided to give Franzen a second chance (I'd tried to read his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, FSG 1988, and lost interest) is that I saw him recently in an HBO documentary called "Birders: The Central Park Effect." I rather liked him in that movie, which features a woman named Starr Saphir, who's been leading birdwalks in Central Park for over 30 years. In fact, I went on two walks with her when I lived in New York, and fell in love with birds. 

From a PBS "Nature" website for the documentary
"Pale Male," about a Central Park Red-Tailed Hawk,
who has been seen alive and well since Hurricane Sandy...

Here's what a Slate contributor says about Franzen and the Central Park Effect. The Slate article mentions a New Yorker essay about birding by Franzen that I remember vaguely reading. Franzen's New Yorker article, "My Bird Problem: Love, Grief, and a Change in the Weather" (August 8, 2005), it turns out, is like a "treatment" for his novel Freedom. (The New Yorker also published two excerpts from the novel: "Good Neighbors," 6/8/09; and "Agreeable," 5/31/10).

• In Freedom, a husband and wife break up, though they seem to love each other very much. In "My Bird Problem," Franzen talks about his break-up with his wife, whom he seems to have loved very much. 
• The mid-40s husband in Freedom has an affair with a 27-year-old woman; Franzen, who was in his mid-40s when "My Bird Problem" ran, admits to having an affair with a 27-year-old woman. 
• In the New Yorker article, Franzen admits to wanting children, but seems to meet women who aren't ready to, or don't want to, have children. The husband in Freedom, Walter, starts a population-control organization with his 27-year-old lover, Lalitha, who doesn't want children (though Walter and his estranged wife, Patty, already have two). 
• Walter -- whose background is Swedish Lutheran, like Franzen's -- is obsessed with bird conservation, to the point where he does a deal with a Texas oil billionaire to start a preserve in West Virginia for the cerulean blue warbler, the billionaire's pet endangered species. Franzen admits in "My Bird Problem" that some of his finest birding experiences occurred on a huge private ranch in Texas. 
• In the New Yorker article, Franzen takes an extended camping trip throughout the United States with his wife, in an attempt to salvage their marriage. Walter takes the same trip with Lalitha before she is tragically killed in a car accident.

Cerulean Blue Warbler
(Photo by Phil Swanson)

I had a lot of trouble figuring out whether I liked Freedom or was put off by it. I was definitely fascinated by the novel, which is 19 unabridged CDs long (576 pages in the hardcover edition). Part of the reason I'm fascinated is because Freedom is a classic 19th century realist novel in the style of George Eliot (Middlemarch) or Stendahl (The Red and the Black), with Henry James's minute attention to character detail (Portrait of a Lady). One example: Walter and Patty's son, Joey, 21, estranged from his parents, secretly gets married and accidentally swallows his wedding ring six months later, just before he boards a plane to Argentina with a woman he intends to sleep with. Franzen describes Joey's thorough search through his own feces for the wedding ring in minute, excruciating detail.

Alexander von Humboldt

The realist novel emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and concurrent with the great 19th century expansion of the sciences (think Darwin, Edison, Bell, Pasteur, the Curies, and von Humboldt, to barely scratch the surface). It makes sense in that context.

Freedom appears in the midst of the greatest ecological crisis faced by man (dinosaurs and other creatures faced as great an ecological crisis in their day), combined with a myopic focus by world leaders on extracting the last cent of the last drop of disappearing resources to keep the global economy from collapsing in advance of total ecological collapse -- and deals well with that reality. Dealing with it by employing classic 19th century-style reportage and "unreliable" narration (large segments of the novel appear in the form of a third-person "autobiography" written by Patty) is a bit like relying exclusively on the daily paper edition New York Times for one's news. The spectrum is so narrow, and there are so many sources of news these days.

Can we really still write novels this way? And, should we?

The benefit of well-written realist novels like Freedom is that one can go back to them 25, 50, or 100 years later and get a vivid sense of exactly what life was like for a certain segment of humanity during the period covered by the novel. Some of the details about the characters' backgrounds or the time-frame covered in a particular passage of Freedom were so accurate and relevant to my own experience (part of my background is Danish Lutheran, by way of the Midwest), that it was like a mirror being held up to my memory of a time,  a place, or a person.

I'm curious about the narrative choices Jonathan Franzen makes because The Shell is being written during the same time period as Freedom. I have chosen to borrow from various genres in order to engage a wider audience in the questions of our time, but I employ a narrative style that is multivalent and archetypal. Classical Newtonian physics, upon which the certainty of science was built, has given way to quantum physics, which deals a lot more with uncertainty. In our time, objective facts matter less than the mythos that informs those facts. Like the great authors of fantasy (Tolkein, Lewis, L'Engle, and LeGuin), the "magical realist" authors of the mid-20th century (see Writing Influences: Latin America) stumbled upon a way to tell stories that freed narrative from the constrictions of Realpolitik, using imagination to augment "history" and open a portal to a richer, more multidimensional experience of life. Wilson Harris of Guyana (whose Palace of the Peacock freed the novel from all its realist shackles), has said, "My writing is quantum writing. Do you know of the quantum bullet? The quantum bullet, when it's fired, leaves not one hole but two."