Jonathan Franzen 2010A highly talked about book: readers either love it or hate it. I really like it. As contemporary a family saga as can be, a book to mark the current trying times we live in, and yet another book to remind us of just what we can look forward to if we don't somehow start changing gears. I find the Berglund family as modern and as real as it gets, albeit dysfunctional, with a not-so-perfect marriage, kids, family, friends and neighbors. An engrossing book full of characters stretching the extent of their personal freedoms irrespective of the consequences. And as seemingly trivial and secondary environmentalist Walter Berglund's causes are: saving one single species of bird, the Cerulean warbler, and tackling overpopulation, the realistic consequences of doing nothing are too big to ignore.
'The news about Walter Berglund wasn't picked up locally-- he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now-- but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times. '(opening line)
'For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of socio-cultural pollen, an affable bee... She wondered if her "addiction" to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her "never" reading books anymore.'(5)
'Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.'(55)
'Patty knew in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.'(75)
'At that point, the only thing that could have thrown Walter back into the bad ways he'd felt in college, when he'd been tormented by his sense of losing to the person he loved too much not to care about beating, would have been bizarre pathological sequence of events. Things at home have had to sour very badly. Walter would have had to have terrible conflicts with Joey, and fail to understand him and earn his respect, and generally find himself replicating his relationship with his own dad, and Richard's career would have had to take an unexpected latter-day turn for the better, and Patty would have had to fall violently in love with Richard. What were the chances of all that happening?'(139)
'How she felt: as if a ruthless and well-organized party of resistance fighters had assembled under cover of the darkness of her mind, and so it was imperative not to let the spotlight of her conscience shine anywhere near them, not even for one second. Her love of Walter and her loyalty to him, her wish to be a good person, her understanding of Walter's lifelong competition with Richard, her sober appraisal of Richard's character, and just the all-around shittiness of sleeping with your spouse's best friend: these superior considerations stood really to annihilate the resistance fighters.'(158)
'Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. 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.'(181)
"This was what was keeping me awake at night," Walter said. "This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV-- there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli."(218)
'Everything he's done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft and wanted to undo it.'(242)
"That's exactly right," Jenna's father said. "Freedom is a pain in the ass. And that's precisely why it's so imperative that we seize the opportunity that's been presented to us this fall.'To get the nation of free people to let go of their bad logic and sign on with better logic, by whatever means are necessary.'"(268)
'He didn't know what to do, he didn't know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.'(318)
'He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain.'(325)
'What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.'(335)
"People come to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniac and assault rifles.'(361)
"I don't imagine the theory's changed much since we were in school. The theory is that there isn't any theory. Right? Capitalism can't handle talking about limits, because the whole point of capitalism is the restless growth of capital. If you want to be heard in the capitalist media, and communicate in a capitalist culture, overpopulation can't make any sense. It's literally nonsense. And that's your real problem.'(361)
'And it was a strange thing to feel, but he definitely felt it: when he emerged from the bathroom with the ring on his ring finger, and Jenna rushed past him and then reeled out again, squealing and cursing at the stench, he was a different person. '(432)
"It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!"(483)
'Each year, they arrived to find more of their former homes paved over for parking lots or highways, or logged over for pallet wood, or developed into subdivisions, or stripped bare for oil drilling or coal mining, or fragmented for shopping centers, or plowed under for ethanol production, or miscellaneously denatured for ski runs and bike trails and golf courses. Migrants exhausted by their five-thousand-mile journey competed with earlier arrivals for the remaining scraps of territory;'(485)
'The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn't help being disappointments to each other, because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to both of them.'(509)
'And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.'(559)
First Edition
562 pages
Book borrowed from the library
The excellent and extensive review by Sam Tanenhaus from the New York Times is here.
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