Freedom

Patty is Walter’s wife and the mother of Joey and Jessica. Franzen initially characterizes her solely through the perspective of her neighbors, which is significant because Patty’s reality is different than what she shows to the neighborhood. Her neighbors seem to have a good opinion of her as a wife, neighbor, and mother. Patty is good to everyone but hard on herself; she is “famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else” (5) and writes that “[n]obody will ever mistake her for a pillar of resolve and dignity” (509). However, the truth is more complex. Patty is not perfect, and she is far from as happy as people think. She exemplifies one of the darker aspects of freedom. Because Walter’s work and devotion to her allow her to stay home, her freedom is practically boundless. She can do whatever she wants, and yet she is self-aware enough to realize that “[s]he 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” (583).

Patty sees herself as different than other people in a significant but vague way: She tells Walter, “There’s something wrong with me. I love all my other friends, but I feel like there’s always a wall between us. Like they’re all one kind of person and I’m another kind of person. More competitive and selfish” (74). Her focus on competition provides a key insight to her character. Her happiest times in the novel take place—at least in her recollection—during her college years as an athlete. Competition is the driving force in her life. On the basketball court, she is a star and a leader, and perhaps most importantly she has a type of control that feels meaningful to her. However, she also realizes that her dominance on the basketball court relies on the fact that, in her opinion, “Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head” (55). She is also susceptible to flattery, which allows Eliza to gain control of her during their time to college.

Sports allow Patty to distinguish herself from the rest of her family. Her parents are powerful figures in politics and law. Her sister is a devoted artist. She describes one of her reasons for marrying Walter as “the way to win—her obvious best shot at defeating her sisters and her mother—was to marry the nicest guy in Minnesota, live in a bigger and better and more interesting house than anybody else in her family, pop out the babies, and do everything as a parent that Joyce hadn’t” (119). Once Patty finishes college, she has nothing to replace the focus that athletic competition gave her. She replaces it with slowly escalating alcoholism, depression, and an irresistible urge to avoid conflict. Her primary conflict involves her infatuation with Richard, the musician for whom she is willing to sacrifice her marriage.

Ultimately, Patty’s character undergoes a positive arc in the novel. By the end of the story, she recognizes her former inability to convert her freedom into positivity. Her self-image has previously functioned as a cage. When she begins working at the gym and abandons her desires for Richard, the newfound discipline allows her to feel that she has some control over her life at last. Once she feels that she is free of her most self-destructive qualities, she and Walter are able to reconcile.

A foil to Walter and a temptation for Patty, Richard represents another downside of limitless freedom. His freedom arises from his eventual fame, charisma, appearance, and artistic abilities. Yet his freedom manifests in his identity as a selfish, womanizing person addicted to drugs and alcohol who has sex with his best friend’s wife and nearly destroys their marriage.

As a person addicted to drugs and alcohol, Richard presents an intriguing dichotomy. He does not drink because his family has a history of destructive alcoholism. But he throws himself fully into addictions to drugs and sex. Whatever principles and codes he may abide by are easily abandoned when his appetites and self-loathing override them. Richard experiences little growth because he does not believe he can change. He uses a metaphor for hyenas to describe himself to Walter: “Integrity’s a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They’re pure hyena” (230). In other words, he does not blame hyenas for their actions or their unsavory reputations. They simply act like hyenas. Similarly, Richard simply acts like Richard, a view that seemingly absolves him of responsibility for his actions. Franzen describes Richard as having “a strong (if highly intermittent) wish to be a good person, and he was scrupulously polite to people, like Dorothy, whom he considered Good” (133). He desires to be a good person but does not believe that his innate nature will ultimately permit it.

Richard is a principled person whose two strongest stances are his hostility to the mainstream music scene and his loyalty to Walter. He reaches a point where his success and actions place him completely at odds with these principles. He becomes a mainstream musical success, and he wounds Walter by sleeping with Patty and temporarily ending their marriage. Whenever Richard feels that he is losing his freedom, he acts self-destructively. The money he makes from his music disappears quickly as he spends it partying. He destroys the good the Berglunds have done for him by ruining their marriage and losing Walter’s friendship. This leads him back to a perverse sort of freedom where he controls his circumstances, but it only makes him miserable.

Ironically, Richard’s fame removes one of the most cherished aspects of his freedom. When he becomes a household name, he is no longer anonymous. He becomes an object of worship for his fans. Richard is confident enough to know that his music deserves the attention it gets, but he knows that he is not a good enough person to merit the adoration that people now give him. He is trapped because he cannot make his fame and mainstream status vanish. His act of giving Patty’s autobiography to Walter is a way to help his friend see that Richard and Patty betrayed him. Because Richard cannot enjoy his freedom, he tries to grant a different sort of freedom to Walter: freedom from their ongoing competition over Patty.

Joey is Walter and Patty’s son. He is selfish, immature, greedy, and oblivious to much of the world outside himself. His storyline is the most overtly political in terms of global import and foreign policy, and Franzen uses Joey to highlight critiques of capitalism, war profiteering, the extreme Right of the Republican Party, and America’s status as an emblem of desirable freedom.

Joey hates relying on others, which results in some shocking acts of hypocrisy. He wants financial independence, leading to an entrepreneurial streak. On the other hand, he accepts money from Patty every month at college, while hiding this fact from his father. He enjoys Connie’s attention; she grants him the freedom to do whatever he wants, including sleeping with other women. When he impulsively marries her, he asks her to keep it secret, pretending that it is a good thing while secretly going to Argentina to pursue Jenna before settling down to a domestic life. He thinks he is above menial labor like yardwork because he finds any sort of insubordination to another as intolerable. Like Patty and Richard, Joey’s relationship with freedom is complicated and makes the people around him miserable. His attraction to Jenna highlights one of the worst aspects of his character: “Jenna excited him the way large sums of money did, the way the delicious abdication of social responsibility did, the way the embrace of excessive resource consumption did” (388). Joey becomes critical of radical Islam after the attacks of September 11th, but he also views the attacks as an inconvenience that disrupts his school schedule.

Ultimately, Joey’s disaster with LBI and his disastrous trip to Argentina with Jenna humble him to the point where he is forced to ask Walter for help disentangling himself. When he relinquishes his concept of ideal freedom by reaching out to his father, his life improves. He becomes rich with his coffee venture, while also realizing that being able to rely on his loving wife and parents is not a terrible thing.

Jessica is the Berglunds’ oldest child. For much of the novel, her primary characteristic is that she is not Joey, who receives an inordinate amount of attention from Walter and Patty. In a novel in which each character receives a chapter with their own respective viewpoint, Jessica is the exception. At the story’s conclusion, the reader knows less about Jessica’s story than any other character, and she is rarely given the chance to speak about herself on the page. Jessica is characterized solely through her interactions with other characters. She becomes a minor figure in the story because she plays a minor role in her family.

Jessica has two primary appearances in the novel. During Patty’s visit to her college, Jessica’s role is to highlight Patty’s insensitivity towards her. And during her late-story phone call with Richard, she gives him her opinion about her parents. Again, her role is largely used as a narrative device to highlight the deficiencies and hypocrisies of her family members.

However, this gives Jessica a different sort of freedom from the other characters. She may not play a central role, but she is also exempt from much of the central drama. Franzen supplies so little detail about Jessica that it forces a choice on the reader; each reader must decide why Jessica is in the novel at all. She may be a peaceful counterpoint to the other characters, who should perhaps envy her unique freedom in the story. Jessica provides a useful contrast to her family members, in that she is never enmeshed in any critical situation. She never needs to be rescued, and she never suffers the consequences of an unchecked indulgence in her appetites. She simply wishes that she had more affection and attention from her parents—this neglect extends even to the author’s constraints on her on-page appearances.

Lalitha allows Walter to experience the devotion of a woman who has no resentment towards him. She does not want Walter to change; she loves him exactly as he is. This manifests in her utter lack of interest towards Richard, whom she views as immature.

Like Connie and Jessica, Lalitha does not receive her own chapter or a chance for the reader to experience her inner life. However, Franzen gives her multiple expository dialogues about nature, overpopulation, and activism that work as accurate characterizations. The reader experiences Lalitha primarily from the perspective of others. Walter describes her in comparison to Patty: “Lalitha was better than Patty. This was simply a fact” (304). Through Lalitha, Walter experiences a brief time of peace and joy. Their relationship is simple, even though it arises from difficult circumstances. Walter loves her, and she loves him. When Lalitha dies, Walter enters a period of genuine mourning that lasts for years. Her loss makes him withdrawn and cynical.