So like seemingly every other writer in Toronto, I’ve been reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and last night around 1:30 a.m., I finished it. Was it the masterpiece it was hailed as in this review by the New York Times? Naw, I don’t think so. Its excellence follows an upward curve; it starts rough, then gets steadily more captivating until the concluding pages are approaching brilliant. But there was too much backstory for me—too much going back in the narrative and recounting past events, “He had done this,” “She had done that,” rather than recounting events as they happened—”He did this, she did that.” Recounting backstory is always less captivating than chronicling story, if only because, by recounting the past from the point of view of a future narrator, we have a clue to the end; that is, that the narrator remains alive to tell us the events we’re following. Nevertheless I thought it a fascinating depiction of a North American family, one with some problems I found particularly disturbing—and which may disturb other Bunchland readers, as well.
