Book Club: Tuesday evening at Enoteca I Trulli in Gramercy. The wine begins to flow as our few members take their seat at the big wooden table, decorated with fresh focaccia bread and a bottle of Rose. After graduating from college, my friends and I found ourselves yearning for a bit of an academic experience. We all enjoy a great novel so why not read the same one and be able to discuss and debate literature over appetizers? Sounds like a great post grad plan to me. And so began our book club...
Our fourth book was Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and if you've read this book, I highly recommend the above link to an NPR interview with Franzen. The book, as well as the novel, as been hailed by many critics as "a masterpiece of modern post 9/11 literature". Written after the terrible attacks, it took Franzen 9 years to finish this novel and it is laced with the anger and grief of the after math. However, the anger is only one side and the character's personality pools are deep and dark, filled with their complete self. As my friends and I chatted about each of the main personalities, Walter, Patty, Richard, Joey, we found ourselves so invested in each on, almost as if we could argue their point of view in any situation. Franzen's character building is his literary gift.
When I began this book, my first read on my ipad (I just couldn't pay $30 for a hard cover edition when my ibooks offered a luring $12 price tag. I STILL prefer a real book to a screen.). Anyways, I was a little hesitant. I wasn't sure what to expect and the first fifty pages or so, I just allowed myself to be carried along, not thinking too much into the story. However, as it dove into the details of their everyday life and the emotion of love swooped in and tormented, captured, strangled, freed, and fulfilled the characters, you are left with a pessimistic view of love. Sadly, my friends all agreed that true love is never found among the pages. More of a compatible love, a picture of marriage as a working relationship, a "companionship" as one of my more skeptical friends described it. As we self-reflected on one of the most powerful human emotions, I was sad to hear that I out of every one at the table was the only one who strongly believes in true, everlasting love. Call me a hopeless romantic, I want my fairytale. And I've seen it happen before.
Franzen eloquently commented in his interview that this novel is a "microscopic narration of petty seeming emotional difficulties" yet it strikes a line between the reader and the weighty portraiture of fictional humans as we tend to recognize these traits in ourselves. Whether or not we will come to terms and admit this is another story. Another interesting facet of the novel are the strong political views of mostly Walter. With "FreeSpace" and the Warblers and the Mountain Top Trust Fund, Walter seems to be a man of passion and fierce devotion to nature and especially birds (the portrayal of domestic cats near the end is sadly true - and makes me despise the creatures, except of course for my clawless Bode - RIP). Even Joey gets caught in the tangles of political and economical forces, although money is his golden goose. The men in this book couldn't be more different, with Richards constantly tormented by his fame and recognition, and Walter struggling to love a depressive and unfaithful wife, and Joey chasing after money signs and carrying Connie along in the background. However they all carry a bit of anger and a sense of want, whether or not they can identify this want, is debatable. And then there is Patty. She narrates most of the book and her story is rather blackened by her upbringing and sadly, she is lost among the woods of middle class America. Patty, Patty, Patty, I have to shake my head in frustration. The woman just couldn't get a hold of things. Until.....
Just read the book.
In the end, I finished and was left feeling empty. A few of my friends were left with the same traces of emptiness. After diving so deep into the characters, their personalities and intricacies, and then to be left, thrown back into reality without these thick and evolving characters. We finished off the Rose, flushed and satisfied with ourselves for a true literary talk, and quickly moved on to our present social culture - Twitter, True Blood, Fire Island, & Fracking. Ah, 2011.
