On Jonathan Franzen and the Everymen

My longstanding experience as a reader has taught me that good writing is when you can talk about nothing and still make that nothing interesting and fascinating.

Great talent is required to tell a small, unimportant, unnoticeable story, and Jonathan Franzen is a great talent. The world of literature is filled with great, unforgettable characters, heroes and epic climaxes. When your narrative encompasses lives, centuries and peoples, when you're telling something that needs to be told, that story becomes epic, and it ends up narrating itself. But what happens when you tell an everyman's story?

The theme of the Everyman is especially loud in postmodern literature and histerical realism, where the central character is the perfect antihero nobody would want to hear about. Novelists such as Roth or Wallace or Pynchon or DeLillo try to make sense of the human alienation in the postmodern era by picking and (almost literally) taking apart one of its protagonists: not the hero, not the president, not the terrorist, but rather the office clerk, the serially manufactured product of a corporation.

Franzen's Freedom does that, though without exploiting or exposing postmodernism more than it's necessary. So, Freedom is about a family, taken apart. In 700 pages. And it's never boring. And you never feel like you're wasting your time. So I asked myself: why do I like this so much? 

I think the answer lies not only in Franzen's ability to write in a witty, elegant, humorous and idiosyncratic way, but also in the fact that his Everymen are so scared, contradictory and complacent about their failures that they don't just seem real--they are real. They evolve throughout the years and - this is what struck me the most - in their smallness, they are that story that becomes epic. It's a journey for them and for us readers, and we struggle and change along with them.

Franzen's novel brings us back to that place where we are all real, individual human beings, and not just part of a system; this way, it tells us we're all worth happening.

“This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.” 

“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.”