Freedom

The other night Elisabeth and I had a conversation we've had a few time before, centring on how it seems that new parents seem to be under the impression that raising children is something no ones ever done before.  While I think I'm a bit more forgiving than Elisabeth on the subject, I do think that it's interesting that a lot of attention seems to be given to the idea that this is the first generation of kids growing up with unprecedented access to technology and information; less attention is paid to the fact that this is also the first generation of parents raising kids with this kind of access too.

If you compound this with the dichotomous fact - I feel fairly certain I can use the word 'fact' here - that our generation will be the first to have a lower standard of living than our parents (And that more than likely the following generations are going to have, if not increasingly lower standards, radically different realities.), it seems that all this weird arrogance that new parents have may be related to a darker zeitgeist that has yet to be acknowledged.

This sort of ties into my thoughts about finishing Jonathan Franzen's newest novel, Freedom.  In all honesty, I don't mind if he only publishes one novel a decade if those novels are able to weave together such insightful and venomous deconstructions of the spirit of the age (I refuse to use 'zeitgeist' again out of fear of appearing too pretentious) into family dramas which explore the damage that history does to a person.

I'm embarrassed that I let the book sit on my shelf as long as I did before finally giving it a shot.  I'm also not too sure what the sales are like (I suppose we'll have to wait for the paperback to come out to find out) but am fairly sure that they would be tripled had the setting taken place somewhere exotic like India.  People would be able to talk about the culture, how barbaric things are, how his descriptions make you wish you were there, and how foreign yet relatable the characters were.  Instead he writes about the American mid-west with the kind of you-are-there exactitude of Rohinton Mystery that I think would make a lot of readers uncomfortable at how close to home (and below the belt) Franzen comes.  I'm going to totally rip off CBC radio and say "If you're only going to read two books this year, this should be one of them."