2010 Person of the Year in Fiction: Jonathan Franzen

You saw this coming.

Freedom, Jonathan Franzen’s fourth novel, didn’t exactly fly under the radar. Even before it hit bookstores last September, its author had appeared on the cover of Time magazine, with the unassuming headline GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST. Not to be outdone, the Times Sunday Book Review called Freedom “a masterpiece of American fiction”—in the first line.

After so much critical thunder, backlash was inevitable. Exactly seven seconds later—as surely as Drang follows Sturm—Franzen was at the center of a fierce argument about sexism in the publishing industry. The charges brought back the bad old days of 2002, when Franzen was vilified as the arrogant jerk who dissed the Oprah Book Club. Inexorably, like a potent weather system or the Law and Order franchise, the maelstrom crossed the Atlantic: In one particularly bizarre instance, Franzen’s eyeglasses were stolen by a crazed fan in London, who reportedly left a ransom note promising their safe return. Is it necessary to point out that this doesn’t typically happen to writers of literary fiction? I live in Boston—a city lousy with writers, many wearing distinctive eyeglasses. Ask anyone crossing Harvard Square if his spectacles (or for that matter, his novels) have ever been pilfered. If he’s honest, he’ll admit he couldn’t give them away.

Schadenfreude is taking pleasure in the pain of others. Franzenfreude is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.—Author Jennifer Weiner, via Twitter

Writers are a contentious bunch. Moodiness and crankiness are hallmarks of the phenotype, inextricably connected, probably, to the reasons we begin writing in the first place. Factor in a general panic at the state of the publishing industry, the loneliness and anomie of a life spent sitting alone in a room; and it’s no surprise that the Freedom frenzy has made writers touchy, that so many of Franzen’s colleagues die a little at his very long moment in the sun. The novelist Jennifer Weiner has even coined a term for it, Franzenfreude – a bastardization of Schadenfreude, at which Franzen, a famous Germanophile who has translated Franz Wedekind’s play Spring Awakening, must surely cringe.

Weiner’s hashtag is, if anything, painfully astute. For weeks—months—writers dogpiled on Franzen via Facebook and Twitter. The posts were angry and, in most cases, patently unfair. Though he may well benefit from it, sexism within literary culture is no way Franzen’s fault.

The Franzenfreude argument—that white male writers get the lion’s share of critical attention at the expense of others—is a point worth making. It’s a rare female writer who hasn’t felt the sting. And yet my own frustration at this state of affairs is dwarfed by my delight that anyone, in 2010, has landed—and remained—on the popular radar for writing a novel. And not just any novel, but an uncommonly good one: a fiercely intelligent book that is unapologetically literary, that provokes and questions even as it entertains. Morally and physically, Freedom is no lightweight. (At 576 pages, Freedom is as zaftig as The Corrections, another breadbox of a book.) It demands far more of the reader’s time, and an altogether different quality of attention, than most bestselling fiction.

It may seem odd, even comical, for a female novelist to rush to the defense of a colleague who clearly needs no protection, but I feel compelled to point out that Franzen is no sexist; that at the heart of this story is a female character as fully alive as any in a Barbara Kingsolver novel. Patty Berglund is arguably Franzen’s greatest creation: Madame Bovary circa this afternoon, a wry anti-heroine for the Title Nine generation. We see her morph from college athlete to soccer mom, a woman who manages to radiate unhappiness while living the life we’re all supposed to want; a disgruntled wife who loves her mild, good husband in precisely the way women love such men, all while nursing a passion for Walter’s old friend Richard Katz, who even as an aging hipster has remained brutishly sexy. For 150 wildly funny pages, Franzen treats us to what is certainly Freedom’s greatest pleasure: Patty’s diary, kept at the urging of her therapist, in which she tells the truth about herself and the world as she sees it. Hilarious, sharply observed and palpably angry, Patty’s diary is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of a novel that gets so very much right.

Much, but not everything. Freedom isn’t perfect. It’s too long. It drags in the middle. Franzen’s prose is a little loose for my tastes: his overstuffed sentences, his fondness for jargon, his addiction to the semicolon. But whatever its weaknesses, Freedom is that rare thing, a serious and artful novel that Americans argue about; a book we resent, defend, disparage, love. And let’s be clear: In this case, Americans isn’t code for tenure-track Americans or Charlie Rose Americans or subscribers to The New Yorker. My 80-year-old mother read Freedom. So did my hairstylist, and his mother, and the pilot on a recent flight to Chicago (not, I should add, while he was flying the plane.)

As Lev Grossman wrote in Time_: “_Freedom isn’t about a subculture; it’s about the culture. It’s not a microcosm, it’s a cosm.” And this, in the end, may be the novel’s greatest accomplishment. Franzen is no more an elitist than he is a sexist. He has crafted an eminently accessible, utterly populist work of fiction in which the reading public recognizes itself. His characters have jobs, in-laws, irritating neighbors. They wrestle with life’s large questions against a dispiritingly junky modern world that clicks and hums on the page—a world noisy with talk radio, social networking, reality television, the dreck and distractions of modern life; a landscape discernibly, unnervingly our own.

Jennifer Haigh is the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning and PEN/L.L. Winship Award-winning author of The Condition, Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble. Her fourth novel, Faith, will be published by HarperCollins in May.