Family fallout

Philip Hensher salutes ‘Freedom’, Jonathan Franzen’s latest great American novel

Family is the engine that drives the novel. Relationships which are both fixed and constantly negotiated are what the novel, as a form, is about. We don’t choose our siblings, our parents, our children, but from day to day we choose, with the full volition of our existence, how those relationships will shape us. The interplay between our free will and the world which is wished upon us is the core, irreducible territory of the great novels. Perhaps now that family ties are growing more dependent on volition and goodwill (or bad) rather than on duty and obligation, family is becoming more of a fruitful territory for the novelist’s investigations, rather than less so. Certainly in this stupendous, magnificent, unforgettable novel, family has never seemed a more urgent and gripping subject.

The Berglund family are caught at the moment when a once edgy neighbourhood has moved indisputably into respectability and even smugness. In Minneapolis, their neighbours are generally, like them, professional, socially concerned and well-behaved. In the 1990s, this street is a kind of Democrat Valhalla. The four of them — Walter, his wife Patty, their children Joey and Jessica — are so typical that they come in for a ribbing from some very similar families. Only the more irregular ménage, such as Carol’s next door, reminds everyone that this was not always a middle-class neighbourhood. Their Volvo-driven concerns have every appearance of urgency. ‘Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries?’ English readers may be reminded of the Stringalongs, or of Posy Simmonds’s deathless Webers.

But the Berglunds are not quite as idyllic and admirable as they seem. Joey, at a startlingly young age, seduces the working-class Connie, whose mother, Carol, has taken up with the dreadful Blake.