The Curse of Freedom

          I would like to address what I believe to be one of the most shocking (and perhaps one of the most thematically honest) quotes in Franzen’s Freedom.  It occurs during Katz’s meeting with Walter, Lalitha, and Jessica , when they are discussing ideas for an anti-overpopulation movement.  Walter says:

“People came to this country for either money or freedom.  If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedom all the 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 maniacs with assault rifles.  You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life  whatever way you want to.” (383)

This is quite a statement.  It is not the kind that would have necessarily been believable from Walter before now.  However, for all of its bitterness, it is reflective of many of the novel’s characters – Patty is miserable with her amount of free time; Joey, once liberated from his family, makes a long series of poor life choices until he returns and admits to his father that he needs help; Katz, though unbound by familial or romantic ties, lives an aimless and less than satisfactory life.  According to Walter, and exhibited by the aforementioned people, freedom is a curse, and people have a tendency, when they have freedom, to misuse it.

            While I know that this class is not intended to have a specific theme or idea that runs through it, I have come to hesitate to refer to the novels we have read simply as “21^st century American literature.”  That title, to me, seems too arbitrary to cover the threads that bind these books together.  I’ve thought about the moniker, “post-9/11 literature,” yet, while all of our novels have, in many ways, been shaped by the idea of the unthinkable, this too seems to put too much weight on an event that is not included in every single novel.  (“Adults-behaving-like-children literature” was also an option I discarded early on.)  While I have not yet formulated a category in which to put all of these disparate yet similar novels, Freedom seems to be at the center of some web of ideas that connects each of them, seems to bring to just below the surface some declaration about what it means to be an American in a century where the unthinkable happened and continues to happen each day.  Yes, Franzen and other authors’ novels are populated with people who use their freedom to “fuck up” their lives, or to simply do nothing with them, but that has yet to explain away the fact that most of them continue to survive, or that what they meant to others continues to endure.  Where does “freedom” fall on the balance between realism and idealism?  Where does it fall on the spectrum between repulsion and redemption?  What does freedom truly mean in Franzen’s 21^st century America?