Room v. Freedom
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ZOMBIE ROUND
Room
v. Freedom
Judged by Michele Filgate
Michele Filgate is currently the Events Coordinator at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, N.H.; she will start as Events Coordinator at McNally Jackson in New York City on April 11. She’s a writer, book critic, and freelance producer for NHPR’s Word of Mouth. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I recently produced a segment on NHPR featuring an interview with Jennifer Egan. I’m friendly with Marcy Dermansky. We had an event at RiverRun with Jonathan Franzen in September. I spoke briefly with Gary Shteyngart at a party in N.Y.C. I met Teddy Wayne at a party in Brooklyn during B.E.A.; he’s going to be on a panel I’m moderating at a literary festival in April. Skippy Dies ties with Elegies for the Brokenhearted as my absolute favorite book of the year—I’ve been tweeting about it a lot, mentioned it on NHPR and some other places, and I interviewed Murray via email for Bookslut. Also, I’ve read and reviewed The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake for The Book Studio.”
When I found out that I had to decide between Freedom by Jonathan Franzen or Room by Emma Donoghue, part of me hoped I would like Room more. I had read countless reviews and tweets and blog posts and articles about Freedom. Even Franzen’s glasses made the news last year when they were stolen during a party. His glasses. I mean, come on. I’d never read any of Frazen’s books, but wasn’t this a little bit ridiculous?
Room sounded promising because the book is told from the point of view of a child. I’m often fond of precocious children in adult books: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and Peace Like A River by Leif Enger being two prime examples. Emma Donoghue’s five-year-old narrator Jack is a very smart boy who depends on daily routines in order to make sense of the world. His whole life has been spent in a tiny shed, where he’s locked up with his Ma. His mother was 19 when she was abducted by “Old Nick,” and she tries to protect her son and do the best she can for him within the constrained environment he’s brought up in. She has to explain to Jack why Old Nick won’t give them a telephone: “We’re like people in a book, and he won’t let anybody else read it.”
Imagination becomes one of the keys to their survival. They fashion a toy snake out of old egg hells and a labyrinth out of toilet rolls. Jack’s mother has him play “Parrot,” where he repeats snippets of conversation from the television to practice his vocabulary.
Tension rises in the narrative as Jack’s mother comes up with a plan for them to trick Old Nick so they can escape. And when that scene finally happens, I was brought back to clammy sweat-soaked sheets after waking up from a recurring nightmare I had as a child, where a strange man would be chasing me down the street and I went to scream but couldn’t. I was rooting for tiny, brave Jack as he pretended to be dead in a rolled up carpet on the back of Old Nick’s truck.
The second half of the novel focuses on Ma’s and Jack’s readjustment to the outside world, a world that Jack used to think existed only on TV. There’s nothing particularly bad about the way this is executed, but there’s nothing particularly stunning either. After a while, Jack’s youthful voice limited the narrative. I would have liked to see alternating chapters from his mother’s perspective. What’s it like for a woman to spend years being hidden from the world, trapped in a room with her child? I realize that the fact that this novel is told from Jack’s perspective is central to its aims, but it ultimately didn’t work for me. Room is worth a read, and a solid example of an adult and child both dealing with a very traumatic, terrifying situation. Yet I didn’t come away from Room with a renewed appreciation for the world I live in, nor did I feel particularly moved by it. Ironically, it is in its very move toward freedom that the book’s limitations were exposed.
Which brings us to the actual Freedom. For most of the time I was reading it, I felt uncomfortable and heavy-hearted. Some of the female characters in particular felt preternaturally drawn to unhappy circumstances, and I was bogged down by these miserable people making decisions that were patently bad for them.
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Freedom follows the lives of Patty and Walter Berglund, a married couple who are incredibly wrong for each other and stuck in a monotonous and needy relationship. All I can say is that if this reflects the reality of most marriages, I dread it already. Reading a book about an unhappy middle-aged couple as a 27-year-old is a bit like standing on the edge of a cliff and succumbing to the irresistible urge to look down at what awaits. Let’s not even go there. Let’s just back away from the cliff and pretend it doesn’t exist. Really, though, Freedom was often remarkably stifling, like sitting in a car with all of the windows rolled up on a sweltering summer day.
At some point, I started to realize it was a testimony to Franzen’s writing that Freedom was stressing me out. Despite how uncomfortable I was, I really cared about Patty and Walter, about their flawed life, their kids, and their good friend Richard.
For most of the book, Patty wants Richard instead of her husband. Richard is Walter’s best friend from college, a perennially adolescent musician who doesn’t know how to be in an adult relationship. In a lot of ways, Patty and Richard deserve each other. That isn’t to say that Walter is perfect, but Patty in particular irritated the hell out of me. She’s constantly feeling self-pity about the inadequacy of her own life. After staying at home and raising two children, she feels like she doesn’t have much to live for; e.g., as she waits for Richard to meet her at a hotel room:
She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.
In Freedom, Franzen covers familiar ground—suburban life and its malcontents—and he writes about big themes relating to the world we currently live in: money, politics, environmentalism, and love. It’s not surprising that the book has received so much attention. In a lot of ways, Freedom fits the mold of the Great American Novel. It’s certainly more ambitious than Emma Donoghue’s Room, and covers more territory.
In Room, Ma and Jack are trapped in an 11-by-11-foot space. They gain their freedom by escaping from the shed, but how free will they ever be, even if Jack and his Ma end up eventually adjusting? In Freedom, Walter and Patty are trapped in each other’s expectations. They hurt themselves in the process, but even though they are emotionally beaten and exhausted and broken, they find comfort in each other eventually. Still, what kind of freedom is that?
So why pick Freedom? Quite simply because it is bigger in scope and more fully realized than Room turned out to be. In reading Room, one feels a connection to its singular characters and gets glimmers of a social world, but in Freedom one senses the inextricability of the social and the interpersonal, that the choices we make take place in a larger and more relevant current.
Advancing:
Freedom
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John: In a rematch, it looks like the gravitas gap rears up and claims Room, double-tapping it to a final demise. Judging from some of the comments in the semifinal match between Freedom and Goon Squad, this may not be a popular choice, but it does set up another potential rematch between those two big books in the finals if Goon Squad can get past Lemon Cake.
According to my own gut and backed up by Andrew Seal’s hype statistics, Room is the most broadly popular book in the tournament (among the general public if not our tourney followers), where a combination of positive media attention and reviews and actual reader response has led to strong sales.
And yet, twice it can’t get past Freedom, which has come in for more negative reviews on Amazon this side of Doctor Dawkins’ Face Rejuvenating Cream with Anthrax Extract.
I agree with Judge Filgate that Freedom travels “familiar ground.” It’s true in terms of theme (the title is Freedom, for the love of Pete), as well as milieu. It’s a white male fuckup novel (or maybe a white person fuckup novel) and it makes use of social issues—environmentalism, class status, war profiteering—that you’d expect on the average broadcast of All Things Considered.
I think it’s interesting that, as of yet, Freedom has not managed to pick up any of the major book prizes (the Pulitzer is still pending). Backed up by some information I found in my own butthole, I wonder if the kind of hype Freedom has received, in combination with its white-bread subject matter, has scared off some committees. It isn’t brave or interesting to validate Freedom as the Great American Novel it’s supposed to be. Perhaps when it comes to committee-think, if they can find a worthy challenger, they’ll give it to that book over Freedom, kind of like how occasionally, Michael Jordan would not win the MVP in his prime, despite being obviously the best player year after year.
My own analogy breaks down a little because I don’t believe that, by any measure, Freedom is obviously the best book of the year (though it’s getting close to the Rooster). It’s just that it looks and acts a lot like the kind of book that will be chosen the best of the year.
Outside of all the baggage it has to carry, when it’s just Freedom against another book, it’s faring quite well, which I think is to the book’s credit. I really thought the hype would doom it at some point here, but it continues to march on.
Judge Filgate also zeroes in on an aspect of Freedom that is common to the WMFUN, the crummy marriage (this is the thing the WM is usually fucking up). She comments about Walter and Patty’s union, “if this reflects the reality of most marriages, I dread it already. Reading a book about an unhappy middle-aged couple as a 27-year-old is a bit like standing on the edge of a cliff and succumbing to the irresistible urge to look down at what awaits. Let’s not even go there. Let’s just back away from the cliff and pretend it doesn’t exist.”
Just like we need our characters to fuck up, or they aren’t all that interesting to read about, so too in fiction, marriage tends to get savaged pretty badly. Filgate identifies Patty and Walter as “mismatched,” which may be true, since the genesis of the relationship is Walter waging a kind of war of attrition on Patty’s affections, even as she is more magnetically drawn to Richard. Perhaps this does not bode well for their ultimate happiness, even if Walter is the nicest person in the world.
Still, if you eliminate Richard, that’s a pretty good description of my pursuit of my—at the time future, but now actual—wife. I like to think that we’re doing pretty well, 10-plus years of marriage in with eight years of exclusive monogamy before that. You’ve got a pretty good streak going yourself, Kevin. Maybe you can offer some solace to Ms. Filgate as well.
I’m actually having a hard time thinking of a novel about a successful marriage. The greatest marriage novel ever (IMHO) is actually two novels, Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell. The marriage is, on paper, a perfect match, and they stay together and devoted throughout their lives, but the novels also imply that this devotion is at the expense of their lives as individuals, that the marriage has smothered other possibilities.
This fact is going to be true of all marriages. Being partnered with someone else precludes the exploration of certain individual paths or pleasures. Some avenues will be closed even as others are opened. Despite being happily married, we’ve both written about fractured marriages in our books (predicated on white male fuckups), but none of that time imagining the way someone could blow a good thing soured me on my actual marriage. It reinforced that it’s a pretty easy thing to screw up and it takes at least a little vigilance to keep from doing so.
Kevin: Happy marriages are as rare in fiction as they are in Hollywood, and in both places they are something of a manipulative device. Marriage, especially one with children, is a high-stakes endeavor that anyone can fuck up at any time (unlike, say, the defusing of a nuclear device). And as you point out, it gets screwed up so often in fiction that when a happy marriage happens in a novel, it’s often used only to indicate to the reader that they are supposed to like a particular character. Likewise when a famous actor goes on a late-night talk show and the host mentions that this person has been married for 30 years, it’s only to make the audience go, “Awwwwwww.”
There are a number of interesting, complex but happy marriages in series fiction. C.J. Box does a wonderful job in his Joe Pickett novels of both using a successful marriage as shorthand for the fact that Pickett is a good guy, and also demonstrating that happy marriages are the product of work and compromise and sacrifice. Of course those books aren’t about a happy marriage. We don’t write novels about happy marriages for the same reason there was never a season of 24 in which Jack Bauer lies around in a Snapple-stained robe and plays MarioKart all day.
It is interesting that something that is such a significant part of so many lives goes largely unexamined in fiction. More interesting, I suppose, than actually examining it.
To your point about the popularity of Room, in our (extremely unscientific) Zombie poll TMN readers preferred Room to Freedom by a considerable margin. Goon Squad finished far ahead of Freedom in that survey, as well (with Lemon Cake and Freedom in a virtual tie). Which means that three times in the tourney so far, Freedom has bested a book that TMN readers preferred by quite a lot. We talked about this phenomenon a few years ago with Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge, a fairly unhyped novel (by contrast) that nevertheless made it all the way to the ToB finals. It was a book that seemed to be liked more when compared side-by-side with other books. And I am still recommending it to people.
We’ll find out tomorrow if Freedom is headed for another rematch in an all-New York (Franzen still has a home there, yeah?) finals against A Visit From the Goon Squad, or if Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake will gun for the Rooster from L.A.
John: It looks like regardless of tomorrow’s outcome, just like last year (and unlike 2009 with City of Refuge), we’re going to have a final between two widely heralded books. I’ll admit to being one of those Rooster fans who would like to see an underdog make it to the finals, but I think whichever book winds up facing down Freedom in the finale can give it a good tussle.
Kevin: Also, I want to give everybody a heads up about the contest we’ll be holding in the comments of Friday’s wrap-up/preview. We’ll be asking our readers to guess which book will win the Rooster, and also what the final tally will be among our 17 judges (e.g. Freedom, 10-7). We’ll have some cool prizes from Field Notes and Powell’s in addition to ToB crowing rights.
I think it’s time to start reading up on the judges.
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