This novel, set largely in Minnesota, New York City, Washington D.C. and West Virginia in the 1980s to 2008 is populated by insecure, amoral, largely young characters with shifting loyalties and mental illnesses. They are from very dysfunctional families; no one could be considered normal. The dialogue of the characters is filled with extreme, constantly shifting expressions of love and hate.
Divided into eight unnumbered chapters, the narrative is broken up by time shifts. One hundred and sixty pages of what is said to be an autobiography, but is not written in the first person singular tense, reads more like a multi-character novel within the novel, covering several years of Patti Berglund’s life from college to married motherhood.
Walter Berglund’s long sermons about loss of biodiversity, climate warming, deforestation, population growth, food security, toxic wastes, feral outdoor bird-killing cats, etc, are all loosely tied to what was in 2010 politically fashionable even as he works as a government lobbyist after moving from Minnesota to D.C. There are many pages devoted to his efforts to preserve the endangered cerulean warbler and similar endangered species, but he also lobbies to obtain permits for coal companies to make fourteen thousand acres of Appalachian mountaintops in West Virginia into barren moonscape, destroying an entire thriving ecosystem. He justifies these contradictory actions with rants about the dangers of relying on nuclear power and wind farms. Some of his arguments are counterintuitive but quite compelling; others are quite specious. I suspect that they reflect the known somewhat radical views of the environmentalist author. Later efforts with Walter’s new lover to be address overpopulation (after his wife’s longstanding affair with his best friend, a young member of her son’s rock band, is discovered) run afoul of American right wing concepts of personal freedoms and rights.
Franzen is a master at mocking the absurd contradictions of American cultural and societal trends, driven by political correctness. The plot is quite intricate, but it is not very difficult to keep the characters straight, even with all of their contradictions. The emotional ups and downs ascribed to some characters do seem a bit excessive. The late reunion of Walter and Patti Berglund after a long separation is a bit of a surprise, but the fate of some other characters is left to the reader’s imagination.
The author seems obsessed with casual sex with seemingly no regard for any longterm consequences, and uses the most disgusting, vivid, foulest, scatological language in describing such trysts that I have ever read. None of the characters are faithful to their spouses. The gutter language is not confined to the conversations of the characters a reader could expect it from, but is an integral component of the author’s narrative. This unnecessary pervasive feature of the whole book compelled me to downgrade my assessment of it by three stars out of ten.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10.
Thanks, Andra.
Cam
The Passionate Reader 