This review is from: Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (Kindle Edition)
I will avoid the plot review, because so many others seem compelled to summarize, and the repetition becomes tiresome. I enjoyed this novel, and I think you will too. I gave it four stars because it is not perfect, but it is better than most current fiction. Franzen may be a "serious" writer, but he is also highly readable, with an interesting story that can be enjoyed for itself alone, absent any considerations of literary aspirations.
This is a big, rambling tale of modern Americans in their modern lives, people who reminded me of real people, a plot which kept me turning the pages of this compulsively readable, mostly entertaining novel. The tone is slightly condescending, as the quote above my review would suggest, mostly cynical, and ultimately hopeful by the end of the story, when his battered, bruised and bruising characters emerge from the wreckage of their lives, and bravely carry on.
In many ways this novel is similar to his previous work, The Corrections. I remember enjoying that novel a few years back, although I could not understand why the critics raved about it. Franzen proves yet again that he is a very good writer, building a complicated but workable plot, creating characters who are real, complex and often disappointing, showing us his American self-portrait in 2010. He reaches for a big theme, as the title implies, but he doesn't quite achieve his goal of demontrating the illusory nature of our freedom (or alternatively that all this freedom is killing us). Like Sophocles, Franzen seems to take a dim view of freedom. I probably should not compare Franzen to Sophocles, or other great writers, past or present. He has a genuine voice, a straightforward style, but he does not possess lyrical abilities, nor great thematic breadth. His writing style is similar to Paul Murray's, serving up a cast of mostly unremarkable people who screw up their lives by means of their character defects, giving you a funny and sad slice of everyday life, saying something profound in the process.
Amazon reviewers were much less enamored with The Corrections than the professional reviewers: they gave only three stars on average, with almost as many one star reviews as five star. Franzen's self portraits are closer to the world of the publishing industry than the world of amazon readers. His characters are based in the Midwest, at least in the beginning of the novel, but they are not the American everyman or woman. They are highly educated, well read, socially evolved and spiritually lost in the manner of the wealthy white specimen liberalis americanus. This writing feels too focused upon their world to allow for universal appeal. Nevertheless, Freedom is a very well and carefully written novel. Only time itself will reveal if this is the work of the moment, or a work for all time.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen 2. Review
Excellent writing when dealing with the painfully intimate and intricate details of adolescence, marriage, childrearing, infidelity and romantic yearnings. In fact, it approaches the true-to-life fictional style used so successfully by Tom Wolfe in the "Bonfire of the Vanities," and "A Man in Full."
Yet, this saga ominously hits a brick wall when it becomes enmeshed with any number of environomental, social and political issues (incluing mining and overpopulation) that seem to go on for far too long and which consume an excessive amount of time and space. Very "preachy", didactic and repetitive if you will.
As a result, we are confronted with a lengthy novel that is only partially rewarding. It is constucted on cycles of excitement and tedium which make for an erratic reading experience. You really have to invest a good deal of time and effort searching for the literary nuggets that make the effort worthwhile in the end.
Yet, this saga ominously hits a brick wall when it becomes enmeshed with any number of environomental, social and political issues (incluing mining and overpopulation) that seem to go on for far too long and which consume an excessive amount of time and space. Very "preachy", didactic and repetitive if you will.
As a result, we are confronted with a lengthy novel that is only partially rewarding. It is constucted on cycles of excitement and tedium which make for an erratic reading experience. You really have to invest a good deal of time and effort searching for the literary nuggets that make the effort worthwhile in the end.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen 1. Review
Barack Obama went to Martha's Vineyard and there obtained, a week before its release, a copy of Jonathan Franzen's novel. That same week, my family was heading to the Bahamas, and because we'd be isolated on a island three miles long and half a mile wide, with spotty internet access and even more problematic electricity, I was able to convince the publisher to give me an embargoed copy of the book.
I doubt that the President has made his way through all 562 pages of "Freedom." My wife and I have made it to the end. It required no effort of will, just a little negotiation ("I'll take the kid to the beach if you'll use the time to read"). That is how, on our final morning overlooking the pink sands where Corona makes its wish-you-were-there beer commercials, I staggered to the end, sobbing as I read the last ten pages. My wife finished the book while we waited for our baggage in New York, and then couldn't speak for most of the cab ride home.
What's the big deal?
The people.
Not the characters. The people. Men and women we come to know and care about, not because they're so admirable but because they're so real.
Like Patty Berglund, a former college basketball star, now a stay-at-home mom. In her slowly gentrifying neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, she was, Franzen writes, "already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street." That is: "a morning of baby-encumbered errands, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound and latex paint, and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel." The questions that plagued her: "Where to recycle batteries? ... How elaborate did a kitchen water filter need to be? ...Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning?"
Like Walter Berglund, her husband. Son of a man who owned a small motel in Hibbing --- yes, that Hibbing, where Bob Zimmerman grew up and dreamed himself into Bob Dylan --- he was the very nice guy you never really knew in college because he was studying so hard and working his way through school. He'd met Patty there and knew she was The One, and waited for her to know it. And when she said yes, and shared that her dream was motherhood, he shelved every exalted ambition to get a job in Corporate Communications at 3M. When we meet him, he's the executive director of Minnesota's Nature Conservancy, having trouble with his teen-aged son, about to move to Washington for a new job --- he'll sell his St. Paul house "near the bottom of the post-9/11 slump."
One more character drives this novel, Walter's college roommate and unlikely best friend. Richard Katz is the leader of nihilistic rock bands, and he's made for the part: talk, dark and arrogant, deadly attractive to women and eager to exploit that attraction. You don't want the truth served up with nasty spin? Keep away from Richard.
Patty keeps away. Not because she dislikes Richard --- she craves him. But she's made her choice: a man who will do anything to create a home with her. Hot sex? It passes. It has to. Except that....
This is Fiction 101: Building Characters, and if you're surprised how hard it grabs you, it's because today's most acclaimed fiction is too "literary" to care more about people than language or structure or the next definition of fiction. Franzen, like Balzac and Dickens, is a journalist at heart --- what he's created in "Freedom" is this generation's "Bonfire of the Vanities."
The mark of this kind of novel is not only that it feels true but that it becomes true. There's a sequence here about American profiteering during the early days of the Iraq War that's excruciating in its account of American officials who didn't give a damn. Now, as the war "ends, recent articles remind us of billions lost and unaccounted for. These crimes, for the government, are consigned to a memory hole. But there's no lack of accountability here. Not on Franzen's watch.
Look anywhere in this novel, and you'll see how it defines our time. Like that bird on the cover. It's not decorative. It's going to have its own preserve in West Virginia, courtesy of a billionaire who will, in exchange for a few protected acres, get to blow up mountains and harvest coal. And just as we're reading this, here is Jane Mayer's revelatory New Yorker profile of David and Charles Koch, the billionaires whose companies pollute and despoil while David gives hundreds of millions to Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Let's consider the title. Franzen's characters are not like the Koch brothers or the coal magnate or the Iraq fraudsters. They are their victims, living in an America where we make our biggest choices as shoppers. It's a dreary, ugly culture. Even Walter --- staid Walter --- comes to make a surprising indictment: "As long as you've got your six-foot-wide-plasma TV and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch 'Survivor: Indonesia' till there's no more Indonesia!"
The personal quarrels? Just as lacerating. I can't imagine having a fight with my wife as ugly as the ones in these pages. But they're not set-pieces. They're the intimate moments of people whose conflicts, though maybe not ours, are recognizable to us. And when those fights end, sometimes there is clarity, even beauty:
"She cried then, torrentially, and he lay down with her. Fighting had become their portal to sex, almost the only way it ever happened anymore. While the rain lashed and the sky flashed, he tried to fill her with self-worth and desire, tried to convey how much he needed her to be the person he could bury his cares in. It never quite worked, and yet, when they were done, there came a stretch of minutes in which they lay in the quiet majesty of long marriage, forgot themselves in shared sadness and forgiveness for everything they'd inflicted on each other, and rested."
"The quiet majesty of long marriage" --- that phrase stopped me cold and led me back to the ultimate subject of this book, which is, I think, the challenge of building a functional romantic partnership when you're carrying the legacy of your flawed family and your country's dishonest and exploitative culture. Again, I suspect this challenge isn't unique to Patty and Walter Berglund. It's mine, for sure. And, just maybe, yours.
And that is why the end is so devastating. It's richly symbolic --- and, for once, the symbol works. It sets our fond hopes against our hard realities. It reminds us of the limits of our personal power. It redefines what "freedom" is for people like us, in a time like this. And it suggests, after our big dreams have been crushed, that we may still make smaller dreams come true.
I wish I could be more specific, but that would spoil your experience of "Freedom." Let me just say that the end is everything you want from a great book --- it's not rushed or tacked on or phony or commercial or cynical. It's at once heartbreaking and inspiring, and it makes you both elated and very, very sad. But, most of all, it immortalizes Patty and Walter and confirms what you are, by then, already feeling --- these imaginary people are in your heart, the way your closest friends are.
I doubt that the President has made his way through all 562 pages of "Freedom." My wife and I have made it to the end. It required no effort of will, just a little negotiation ("I'll take the kid to the beach if you'll use the time to read"). That is how, on our final morning overlooking the pink sands where Corona makes its wish-you-were-there beer commercials, I staggered to the end, sobbing as I read the last ten pages. My wife finished the book while we waited for our baggage in New York, and then couldn't speak for most of the cab ride home.
What's the big deal?
The people.
Not the characters. The people. Men and women we come to know and care about, not because they're so admirable but because they're so real.
Like Patty Berglund, a former college basketball star, now a stay-at-home mom. In her slowly gentrifying neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, she was, Franzen writes, "already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street." That is: "a morning of baby-encumbered errands, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound and latex paint, and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel." The questions that plagued her: "Where to recycle batteries? ... How elaborate did a kitchen water filter need to be? ...Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning?"
Like Walter Berglund, her husband. Son of a man who owned a small motel in Hibbing --- yes, that Hibbing, where Bob Zimmerman grew up and dreamed himself into Bob Dylan --- he was the very nice guy you never really knew in college because he was studying so hard and working his way through school. He'd met Patty there and knew she was The One, and waited for her to know it. And when she said yes, and shared that her dream was motherhood, he shelved every exalted ambition to get a job in Corporate Communications at 3M. When we meet him, he's the executive director of Minnesota's Nature Conservancy, having trouble with his teen-aged son, about to move to Washington for a new job --- he'll sell his St. Paul house "near the bottom of the post-9/11 slump."
One more character drives this novel, Walter's college roommate and unlikely best friend. Richard Katz is the leader of nihilistic rock bands, and he's made for the part: talk, dark and arrogant, deadly attractive to women and eager to exploit that attraction. You don't want the truth served up with nasty spin? Keep away from Richard.
Patty keeps away. Not because she dislikes Richard --- she craves him. But she's made her choice: a man who will do anything to create a home with her. Hot sex? It passes. It has to. Except that....
This is Fiction 101: Building Characters, and if you're surprised how hard it grabs you, it's because today's most acclaimed fiction is too "literary" to care more about people than language or structure or the next definition of fiction. Franzen, like Balzac and Dickens, is a journalist at heart --- what he's created in "Freedom" is this generation's "Bonfire of the Vanities."
The mark of this kind of novel is not only that it feels true but that it becomes true. There's a sequence here about American profiteering during the early days of the Iraq War that's excruciating in its account of American officials who didn't give a damn. Now, as the war "ends, recent articles remind us of billions lost and unaccounted for. These crimes, for the government, are consigned to a memory hole. But there's no lack of accountability here. Not on Franzen's watch.
Look anywhere in this novel, and you'll see how it defines our time. Like that bird on the cover. It's not decorative. It's going to have its own preserve in West Virginia, courtesy of a billionaire who will, in exchange for a few protected acres, get to blow up mountains and harvest coal. And just as we're reading this, here is Jane Mayer's revelatory New Yorker profile of David and Charles Koch, the billionaires whose companies pollute and despoil while David gives hundreds of millions to Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Let's consider the title. Franzen's characters are not like the Koch brothers or the coal magnate or the Iraq fraudsters. They are their victims, living in an America where we make our biggest choices as shoppers. It's a dreary, ugly culture. Even Walter --- staid Walter --- comes to make a surprising indictment: "As long as you've got your six-foot-wide-plasma TV and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch 'Survivor: Indonesia' till there's no more Indonesia!"
The personal quarrels? Just as lacerating. I can't imagine having a fight with my wife as ugly as the ones in these pages. But they're not set-pieces. They're the intimate moments of people whose conflicts, though maybe not ours, are recognizable to us. And when those fights end, sometimes there is clarity, even beauty:
"She cried then, torrentially, and he lay down with her. Fighting had become their portal to sex, almost the only way it ever happened anymore. While the rain lashed and the sky flashed, he tried to fill her with self-worth and desire, tried to convey how much he needed her to be the person he could bury his cares in. It never quite worked, and yet, when they were done, there came a stretch of minutes in which they lay in the quiet majesty of long marriage, forgot themselves in shared sadness and forgiveness for everything they'd inflicted on each other, and rested."
"The quiet majesty of long marriage" --- that phrase stopped me cold and led me back to the ultimate subject of this book, which is, I think, the challenge of building a functional romantic partnership when you're carrying the legacy of your flawed family and your country's dishonest and exploitative culture. Again, I suspect this challenge isn't unique to Patty and Walter Berglund. It's mine, for sure. And, just maybe, yours.
And that is why the end is so devastating. It's richly symbolic --- and, for once, the symbol works. It sets our fond hopes against our hard realities. It reminds us of the limits of our personal power. It redefines what "freedom" is for people like us, in a time like this. And it suggests, after our big dreams have been crushed, that we may still make smaller dreams come true.
I wish I could be more specific, but that would spoil your experience of "Freedom." Let me just say that the end is everything you want from a great book --- it's not rushed or tacked on or phony or commercial or cynical. It's at once heartbreaking and inspiring, and it makes you both elated and very, very sad. But, most of all, it immortalizes Patty and Walter and confirms what you are, by then, already feeling --- these imaginary people are in your heart, the way your closest friends are.
Jonathan Franzen's Biography
Jonathan Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, in 1959, and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1981, he studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In addition to winning a Whiting Writers' Award in 1988 and the American Academy's Berlin Prize in 2000, he has been named one of "Twenty Writers for the 21st Century" by The New Yorker and one of the "Best Young American Novelists" by Granta.
He is the author of three previous novels: The Corrections, which won the National Book Award and spent 29 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list; The Twenty-Seventh City; and Strong Motion. He is also the author of two works of nonfiction, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone. Jonathan divides his time between New York City and Santa Cruz, California.
Learn more about the book and start reading an excerpt from Freedom.
Looking for other readers to talk to about the book? Join the online discussion now.
Do you have a question for Jonathan Franzen? Is there something you can't stop thinking about? Do you need him to settle a debate from your book club discussions? Send in your questions while you read!
He is the author of three previous novels: The Corrections, which won the National Book Award and spent 29 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list; The Twenty-Seventh City; and Strong Motion. He is also the author of two works of nonfiction, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone. Jonathan divides his time between New York City and Santa Cruz, California.
Learn more about the book and start reading an excerpt from Freedom.
Looking for other readers to talk to about the book? Join the online discussion now.
Do you have a question for Jonathan Franzen? Is there something you can't stop thinking about? Do you need him to settle a debate from your book club discussions? Send in your questions while you read!
Reading Questions for Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
1. As a young woman, Patty is phenomenally strong on the basketball court yet vulnerable in relationships, especially with her workaholic parents, her friend Eliza and the conflicted duo of Richard and Walter. What did her rapist, Ethan Post, teach her about vulnerability? After the rape, what did her father and the coaches attempt to teach her about strength?
2. How would you characterize Patty's writing? How does her storytelling style compare to the narrator's voice in the rest of the novel?
3. What feeds Richard and Walter's lifelong cycle of competition and collaboration? If you were Patty, would you have made the road trip with Richard? What does Freedom say about the repercussions of college, not only for Walter and Patty but also for their children?
4. Discuss the nature of attraction, both in the novel and in your own experience. What does it take to be desirable in Freedom? In the novel, how do couples sustain intense attraction for each other over many phases of their lives?
5. Does history repeat itself throughout Walter's ancestry, with his Swedish grandfather, Einar, who built roads, loathed communism and slow drivers, and was cruel to his wife; his father, Gene, a war hero with fantasies of success in the motel business; and his mother, Dorothy, whose cosmopolitan family was Walter's salvation? What do all the characters in the novel want from their parents? How do their relationships with their parents affect their relationships with lovers?
6. After her father's death, Patty asks her mother why she ignored Patty's success in sports, even though Joyce was a driven woman who might have relished her daughter's achievements. She doesn't get a satisfactory answer; Joyce vaguely says that she wasn't into sports. Why do you think Patty did not garner as much attention as her sisters did? How did your opinion of Veronica and Abigail shift throughout the novel? Does Patty treat Jessica the same way her parents treated her?
7. What accounts for the differences between Joey and Jessica? Is it simply a matter of genes and temperament, or does gender matter in their situation?
8. What does Joey want and get from Jenna and Connie? What do they want and get from him?
9. Did Carol and Blake evolve as parents? What sort of life do you predict for their twin daughters?
10. How is Lalitha different from the other characters in the novel? How does her motivation for working with the Cerulean Mountain Trust compare to Walter's? Does Walter relate to the cerulean warbler on some level?
11. How would you answer the essential question raised by Walter's deal with the Texas rancher Vin Haven: What is the best way to achieve environmental conservation?
12. Near the end of the novel, Walter's relationship with Bobby the cat is described as a sort of troubled marriage. Was their "divorce" inevitable? When Patty is eventually able to serve as neighborhood peacemaker, even negotiating a truce with Linda Hoffbauer, what does this say about her role in Walter's life? Does she dilute his sense of purpose and principle, or does she keep him grounded in reality?
13. Freedom contains almost cinematic descriptions of the characters' dwelling places, from the house in St. Paul to Abigail's eclectic Manhattan apartment. How do the homes in Freedom reflect the personalities of their occupants? Where do Walter and Patty feel most at home? Which of your homes has been most significant in your life?
14. What unique truths emerge in Freedom? In what ways does this novel enhance themes (such as love and commitment, family angst, the intensity of adolescence and the individual against the giant—corporate, governmental and otherwise) featured in Jonathan Franzen's previous works, including his nonfiction?
15. There are references to freedom throughout the novel, including the freedom of Iraqis to become capitalists, Joey's parents' attempt to give him an unencumbered life, an inscription on a building at Jessica's college that reads "USE WELL THY FREEDOM" and alcoholic Mitch, who is "a free man." How do the characters spend their freedom? Is it a liberating or destructive force for them? Which characters are the least free?
16. Consider the novel's epigraph, taken from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The lines are spoken by Paulina in the final act, after she learns the fate of her dead husband. She receives the news while surrounded by happy endings for the other characters. The most obvious parallel is to Walter, but who else might be reflected in these lines?
17. If Walter had written a memoir, what might he have said about his victories and his suffering?
18. Which tragicomic passages in Freedom made you laugh? Which characters elicited continual sadness and sympathy in you? How does the author balance poignant moments with absurdity?
Join the online discussion with Oprah's Book Club producer Jill and a world of readers!
Do you have a question for Jonathan Franzen? Is there something you can't stop thinking about? Do you need him to settle a debate from your book club discussions? Send in your questions while you read!
2. How would you characterize Patty's writing? How does her storytelling style compare to the narrator's voice in the rest of the novel?
3. What feeds Richard and Walter's lifelong cycle of competition and collaboration? If you were Patty, would you have made the road trip with Richard? What does Freedom say about the repercussions of college, not only for Walter and Patty but also for their children?
4. Discuss the nature of attraction, both in the novel and in your own experience. What does it take to be desirable in Freedom? In the novel, how do couples sustain intense attraction for each other over many phases of their lives?
5. Does history repeat itself throughout Walter's ancestry, with his Swedish grandfather, Einar, who built roads, loathed communism and slow drivers, and was cruel to his wife; his father, Gene, a war hero with fantasies of success in the motel business; and his mother, Dorothy, whose cosmopolitan family was Walter's salvation? What do all the characters in the novel want from their parents? How do their relationships with their parents affect their relationships with lovers?
6. After her father's death, Patty asks her mother why she ignored Patty's success in sports, even though Joyce was a driven woman who might have relished her daughter's achievements. She doesn't get a satisfactory answer; Joyce vaguely says that she wasn't into sports. Why do you think Patty did not garner as much attention as her sisters did? How did your opinion of Veronica and Abigail shift throughout the novel? Does Patty treat Jessica the same way her parents treated her?
7. What accounts for the differences between Joey and Jessica? Is it simply a matter of genes and temperament, or does gender matter in their situation?
8. What does Joey want and get from Jenna and Connie? What do they want and get from him?
9. Did Carol and Blake evolve as parents? What sort of life do you predict for their twin daughters?
10. How is Lalitha different from the other characters in the novel? How does her motivation for working with the Cerulean Mountain Trust compare to Walter's? Does Walter relate to the cerulean warbler on some level?
11. How would you answer the essential question raised by Walter's deal with the Texas rancher Vin Haven: What is the best way to achieve environmental conservation?
12. Near the end of the novel, Walter's relationship with Bobby the cat is described as a sort of troubled marriage. Was their "divorce" inevitable? When Patty is eventually able to serve as neighborhood peacemaker, even negotiating a truce with Linda Hoffbauer, what does this say about her role in Walter's life? Does she dilute his sense of purpose and principle, or does she keep him grounded in reality?
13. Freedom contains almost cinematic descriptions of the characters' dwelling places, from the house in St. Paul to Abigail's eclectic Manhattan apartment. How do the homes in Freedom reflect the personalities of their occupants? Where do Walter and Patty feel most at home? Which of your homes has been most significant in your life?
14. What unique truths emerge in Freedom? In what ways does this novel enhance themes (such as love and commitment, family angst, the intensity of adolescence and the individual against the giant—corporate, governmental and otherwise) featured in Jonathan Franzen's previous works, including his nonfiction?
15. There are references to freedom throughout the novel, including the freedom of Iraqis to become capitalists, Joey's parents' attempt to give him an unencumbered life, an inscription on a building at Jessica's college that reads "USE WELL THY FREEDOM" and alcoholic Mitch, who is "a free man." How do the characters spend their freedom? Is it a liberating or destructive force for them? Which characters are the least free?
16. Consider the novel's epigraph, taken from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The lines are spoken by Paulina in the final act, after she learns the fate of her dead husband. She receives the news while surrounded by happy endings for the other characters. The most obvious parallel is to Walter, but who else might be reflected in these lines?
17. If Walter had written a memoir, what might he have said about his victories and his suffering?
18. Which tragicomic passages in Freedom made you laugh? Which characters elicited continual sadness and sympathy in you? How does the author balance poignant moments with absurdity?
Join the online discussion with Oprah's Book Club producer Jill and a world of readers!
Do you have a question for Jonathan Franzen? Is there something you can't stop thinking about? Do you need him to settle a debate from your book club discussions? Send in your questions while you read!
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen Review
In his latest novel, Jonathan Franzen returns to fiction with a comic and tragic epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the responsibility of privilege. Charting the characters' mistakes and joys as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever-changing and confusing world, Freedom is an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul, Minnesota—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Baby Boomers. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world.
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why is Walter working away from home so much? What has happened to their teenage son? Why has Patty, the bright star of Barrier Street, become "a very different kind of neighbor," coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes? And what exactly is eccentric rocker Richard Katz—Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture?
As the story explores the nature of love, it also tackles our tenuous relationship with nature. When Walter fights to preserve a habitat for an endangered bird, the troubled history between Patty, Richard and himself threatens to topple the deal, along with everything he believes about truth and illusion.
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul, Minnesota—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Baby Boomers. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world.
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why is Walter working away from home so much? What has happened to their teenage son? Why has Patty, the bright star of Barrier Street, become "a very different kind of neighbor," coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes? And what exactly is eccentric rocker Richard Katz—Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture?
As the story explores the nature of love, it also tackles our tenuous relationship with nature. When Walter fights to preserve a habitat for an endangered bird, the troubled history between Patty, Richard and himself threatens to topple the deal, along with everything he believes about truth and illusion.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen EXCERPT PART1
The news about Walter Berglund wasn't picked up locally—he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now—but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times. According to a long and very unflattering story in the Times, Walter had made quite a mess of his professional life out there in the nation's capital. His old neighbors had some difficulty reconciling the quotes about him in the Times ("arrogant," "high-handed," "ethically compromised") with the generous, smiling, red-faced 3M employee they remembered pedaling his commuter bicycle up Summit Avenue in February snow; it seemed strange that Walter, who was greener than Greenpeace and whose own roots were rural, should be in trouble now for conniving with the coal industry and mistreating country people. Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.
Walter and Patty were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier. They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it. Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt. Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweatclothes and said, "Hey, you guys, you know what?" Patty frightened nobody, but she'd been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfedupon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.
In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else's children's sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.
Walter and Patty were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier. They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it. Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt. Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweatclothes and said, "Hey, you guys, you know what?" Patty frightened nobody, but she'd been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfedupon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.
In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else's children's sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen EXCERPT PART2
There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries? How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood? Was it true that the glaze of old Fiestaware contained dangerous amounts of lead? How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be? Did your 240 sometimes not go into overdrive when you pushed the overdrive button? Was it better to offer panhandlers food, or nothing? Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy, brilliant kids while working full-time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning? Had anybody in the history of St. Paul ever had a positive experience with a roofer? What about a good Volvo mechanic? Did your 240 have that problem with the sticky parking-brake cable? And that enigmatically labeled dashboard switch that made such a satisfying Swedish click but seemed not to be connected to anything: what was that?
For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee. She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said she expected to be "beheaded" someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she'd replaced. Her children were "probably" dying of trichinosis from pork she'd undercooked. She wondered if her "addiction" to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her "never" reading books anymore. She confided that she'd been "forbidden" to fertilize Walter's flowers after what had happened "last time." There were people with whom her style of self-deprecation didn't sit well—who detected a kind of condescension in it, as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers. But most people found her humility sincere or at least amusing, and it was in any case hard to resist a woman whom your own children liked so much and who remembered not only their birthdays but yours, too, and came to your back door with a plate of cookies or a card or some lilies of the valley in a little thrift-store vase that she told you not to bother returning.
It was known that Patty had grown up back East, in a suburb of New York City, and had received one of the first women's full scholarships to play basketball at Minnesota, where, in her sophomore year, according to a plaque on the wall of Walter's home office, she'd made second-team all-American. One strange thing about Patty, given her strong family orientation, was that she had no discernible connection to her roots. Whole seasons passed without her setting foot outside St. Paul, and it wasn't clear that anybody from the East, not even her parents, had ever come out to visit. If you inquired point-blank about the parents, she would answer that the two of them did a lot of good things for a lot of people, her dad had a law practice in White Plains, her mom was a politician, yeah, a New York State assemblywoman. Then she would nod emphatically and say, "Yeah, so, that's what they do," as if the topic had been exhausted.
For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee. She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said she expected to be "beheaded" someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she'd replaced. Her children were "probably" dying of trichinosis from pork she'd undercooked. She wondered if her "addiction" to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her "never" reading books anymore. She confided that she'd been "forbidden" to fertilize Walter's flowers after what had happened "last time." There were people with whom her style of self-deprecation didn't sit well—who detected a kind of condescension in it, as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers. But most people found her humility sincere or at least amusing, and it was in any case hard to resist a woman whom your own children liked so much and who remembered not only their birthdays but yours, too, and came to your back door with a plate of cookies or a card or some lilies of the valley in a little thrift-store vase that she told you not to bother returning.
It was known that Patty had grown up back East, in a suburb of New York City, and had received one of the first women's full scholarships to play basketball at Minnesota, where, in her sophomore year, according to a plaque on the wall of Walter's home office, she'd made second-team all-American. One strange thing about Patty, given her strong family orientation, was that she had no discernible connection to her roots. Whole seasons passed without her setting foot outside St. Paul, and it wasn't clear that anybody from the East, not even her parents, had ever come out to visit. If you inquired point-blank about the parents, she would answer that the two of them did a lot of good things for a lot of people, her dad had a law practice in White Plains, her mom was a politician, yeah, a New York State assemblywoman. Then she would nod emphatically and say, "Yeah, so, that's what they do," as if the topic had been exhausted.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen EXCERPT PART3
A game could be made of trying to get Patty to agree that somebody's behavior was "bad." When she was told that Seth and Merrie Paulsen were throwing a big Halloween party for their twins and had deliberately invited every child on the block except Connie Monaghan, Patty would only say that this was very "weird." The next time she saw the Paulsens in the street, they explained that they had tried all summer to get Connie Monaghan's mother, Carol, to stop flicking cigarette butts from her bedroom window down into their twins' little wading pool. "That is really weird," Patty agreed, shaking her head, "but, you know, it's not Connie's fault." The Paulsens, however, refused to be satisfied with "weird." They wanted sociopathic, they wanted passive-aggressive, they wanted bad. They needed Patty to select one of these epithets and join them in applying it to Carol Monaghan, but Patty was incapable of going past "weird," and the Paulsens in turn refused to add Connie to their invite list. Patty was angry enough about this injustice to take her own kids, plus Connie and a school friend, out to a pumpkin farm and a hayride on the afternoon of the party, but the worst she would say aloud about the Paulsens was that their meanness to a seven-year-old girl was very weird.
Carol Monaghan was the only other mother on Barrier Street who'd been around as long as Patty. She'd come to Ramsey Hill on what you might call a patronage-exchange program, having been a secretary to somebody high-level in Hennepin County who moved her out of his district after he'd made her pregnant. Keeping the mother of your illegitimate child on your own office payroll: by the late seventies, there were no longer so many Twin Cities jurisdictions where this was considered consonant with good government. Carol became one of those distracted, break-taking clerks at the city license bureau while somebody equivalently well-connected in St. Paul was hired in reverse across the river. The rental house on Barrier Street, next door to the Berglunds, had presumably been included in the deal; otherwise it was hard to see why Carol would have consented to live in what was then still basically a slum. Once a week, in summer, an empty-eyed kid in a Parks Department jumpsuit came by at dusk in an unmarked 4x4 and ran a mower around her lawn, and in winter the same kid materialized to snow-blow her sidewalk.
By the late eighties, Carol was the only non-gentrifier left on the block. She smoked Parliaments, bleached her hair, made lurid talons of her nails, fed her daughter heavily processed foods, and came home very late on Thursday nights ("That's Mom's night out," she explained, as if every mom had one), quietly letting herself into the Berglunds' house with the key they'd given her and collecting the sleeping Connie from the sofa where Patty had tucked her under blankets. Patty had been implacably generous in offering to look after Connie while Carol was out working or shopping or doing her Thursday-night business, and Carol had become de pen dent on her for a ton of free babysitting. It couldn't have escaped Patty's attention that Carol repaid this generosity by ignoring Patty's own daughter, Jessica, and doting inappropriately on her son, Joey ("How about another smooch from the lady-killer?"), and standing very close to Walter at neighborhood functions, in her filmy blouses and her cocktail-waitress heels, praising Walter's home-improvement prowess and shrieking with laughter at every thing he said; but for many years the worst that Patty would say of Carol was that single moms had a hard life and if Carol was sometimes weird to her it was probably just to save her pride.
Carol Monaghan was the only other mother on Barrier Street who'd been around as long as Patty. She'd come to Ramsey Hill on what you might call a patronage-exchange program, having been a secretary to somebody high-level in Hennepin County who moved her out of his district after he'd made her pregnant. Keeping the mother of your illegitimate child on your own office payroll: by the late seventies, there were no longer so many Twin Cities jurisdictions where this was considered consonant with good government. Carol became one of those distracted, break-taking clerks at the city license bureau while somebody equivalently well-connected in St. Paul was hired in reverse across the river. The rental house on Barrier Street, next door to the Berglunds, had presumably been included in the deal; otherwise it was hard to see why Carol would have consented to live in what was then still basically a slum. Once a week, in summer, an empty-eyed kid in a Parks Department jumpsuit came by at dusk in an unmarked 4x4 and ran a mower around her lawn, and in winter the same kid materialized to snow-blow her sidewalk.
By the late eighties, Carol was the only non-gentrifier left on the block. She smoked Parliaments, bleached her hair, made lurid talons of her nails, fed her daughter heavily processed foods, and came home very late on Thursday nights ("That's Mom's night out," she explained, as if every mom had one), quietly letting herself into the Berglunds' house with the key they'd given her and collecting the sleeping Connie from the sofa where Patty had tucked her under blankets. Patty had been implacably generous in offering to look after Connie while Carol was out working or shopping or doing her Thursday-night business, and Carol had become de pen dent on her for a ton of free babysitting. It couldn't have escaped Patty's attention that Carol repaid this generosity by ignoring Patty's own daughter, Jessica, and doting inappropriately on her son, Joey ("How about another smooch from the lady-killer?"), and standing very close to Walter at neighborhood functions, in her filmy blouses and her cocktail-waitress heels, praising Walter's home-improvement prowess and shrieking with laughter at every thing he said; but for many years the worst that Patty would say of Carol was that single moms had a hard life and if Carol was sometimes weird to her it was probably just to save her pride.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen EXCERPT PART4
To Seth Paulsen, who talked about Patty a little too often for his wife's taste, the Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege. One problem with Seth's theory was that the Berglunds weren't all that privileged; their only known asset was their house, which they'd rebuilt with their own hands. Another problem, as Merrie Paulsen pointed out, was that Patty was no great progressive and certainly no feminist (staying home with her birthday calendar, baking those goddamned birthday cookies) and seemed altogether allergic to politics. If you mentioned an election or a candidate to her, you could see her struggling and failing to be her usual cheerful self—see her becoming agitated and doing too much nodding, too much yeah-yeahing. Merrie, who was ten years older than Patty and looked every year of it, had formerly been active with the SDS in Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau. When Seth, at a dinner party, mentioned Patty for the third or fourth time, Merrie went nouveau red in the face and declared that there was no larger consciousness, no solidarity, no political substance, no fungible structure, no true communitarianism in Patty Berglund's supposed neighborliness, it was all just regressive housewifely bullshit, and, frankly, in Merrie's opinion, if you were to scratch below the nicey-nice surface you might be surprised to find something rather hard and selfish and competitive and Reaganite in Patty; it was obvious that the only things that mattered to her were her children and her house—not her neighbors, not the poor, not her country, not her parents, not even her own husband.
And Patty was undeniably very into her son. Though Jessica was the more obvious credit to her parents—smitten with books, devoted to wildlife, talented at fl ute, stalwart on the soccer field, coveted as a babysitter, not so pretty as to be morally deformed by it, admired even by Merrie Paulsen—Joey was the child Patty could not shut up about. In her chuckling, confiding, self-deprecating way, she spilled out barrel after barrel of unfiltered detail about her and Walter's difficulties with him. Most of her stories took the form of complaints, and yet nobody doubted that she adored the boy. She was like a woman bemoaning her gorgeous jerky boyfriend. As if she were proud of having her heart trampled by him: as if her openness to this trampling were the main thing, maybe the only thing, she cared to have the world know about.
"He is being such a little shit," she told the other mothers during the long winter of the Bedtime Wars, when Joey was asserting his right to stay awake as late as Patty and Walter did.
"Is it tantrums? Is he crying?" the other mothers asked.
"Are you kidding?" Patty said. "I wish he cried. Crying would be normal, and it would also stop."
"What's he doing, then?" the mothers asked.
And Patty was undeniably very into her son. Though Jessica was the more obvious credit to her parents—smitten with books, devoted to wildlife, talented at fl ute, stalwart on the soccer field, coveted as a babysitter, not so pretty as to be morally deformed by it, admired even by Merrie Paulsen—Joey was the child Patty could not shut up about. In her chuckling, confiding, self-deprecating way, she spilled out barrel after barrel of unfiltered detail about her and Walter's difficulties with him. Most of her stories took the form of complaints, and yet nobody doubted that she adored the boy. She was like a woman bemoaning her gorgeous jerky boyfriend. As if she were proud of having her heart trampled by him: as if her openness to this trampling were the main thing, maybe the only thing, she cared to have the world know about.
"He is being such a little shit," she told the other mothers during the long winter of the Bedtime Wars, when Joey was asserting his right to stay awake as late as Patty and Walter did.
"Is it tantrums? Is he crying?" the other mothers asked.
"Are you kidding?" Patty said. "I wish he cried. Crying would be normal, and it would also stop."
"What's he doing, then?" the mothers asked.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen EXCERPT PART5
"He's questioning the basis of our authority. We make him turn the lights out, but his position is that he shouldn't have to go to sleep until we turn our own lights out, because he's exactly the same as us. And, I swear to God, it is like clockwork, every fifteen minutes, I swear he's lying there staring at his alarm clock, every fifteen minutes he calls out, 'Still awake! I'm still awake!' In this tone of contempt, or sarcasm, it's weird. And I'm begging Walter not to take the bait, but, no, it's a quarter of midnight again, and Walter is standing in the dark in Joey's room and they're having another argument about the difference between adults and children, and whether a family is a democracy or a benevolent dictatorship, until finally it's me who's having the meltdown, you know, lying there in bed, whimpering, 'Please stop, please stop.'"
Merrie Paulsen wasn't entertained by Patty's storytelling. Late in the evening, loading dinner-party dishes into the dishwasher, she remarked to Seth that it was hardly surprising that Joey should be confused about the distinction between children and adults—his own mother seemed to suffer from some confusion about which of the two she was. Had Seth noticed how, in Patty's stories, the discipline always came from Walter, as if Patty were just some feckless bystander whose job was to be cute?
"I wonder if she's actually in love with Walter, or not," Seth mused optimistically, uncorking a final bottle. "Physically, I mean."
"The subtext is always 'My son is extraordinary,'" Merrie said. "She's always complaining about the length of his attention span."
"Well, to be fair," Seth said, "it's in the context of his stubbornness. His infinite patience in defying Walter's authority."
"Every word she says about him is some kind of backhanded brag."
"Don't you ever brag?" Seth teased.
"Probably," Merrie said, "but at least I have some minimal awareness of how I sound to other people. And my sense of self-worth is not bound up in how extraordinary our kids are."
"You are the perfect mom," Seth teased.
"No, that would be Patty," Merrie said, accepting more wine. "I'm merely very good."
Merrie Paulsen wasn't entertained by Patty's storytelling. Late in the evening, loading dinner-party dishes into the dishwasher, she remarked to Seth that it was hardly surprising that Joey should be confused about the distinction between children and adults—his own mother seemed to suffer from some confusion about which of the two she was. Had Seth noticed how, in Patty's stories, the discipline always came from Walter, as if Patty were just some feckless bystander whose job was to be cute?
"I wonder if she's actually in love with Walter, or not," Seth mused optimistically, uncorking a final bottle. "Physically, I mean."
"The subtext is always 'My son is extraordinary,'" Merrie said. "She's always complaining about the length of his attention span."
"Well, to be fair," Seth said, "it's in the context of his stubbornness. His infinite patience in defying Walter's authority."
"Every word she says about him is some kind of backhanded brag."
"Don't you ever brag?" Seth teased.
"Probably," Merrie said, "but at least I have some minimal awareness of how I sound to other people. And my sense of self-worth is not bound up in how extraordinary our kids are."
"You are the perfect mom," Seth teased.
"No, that would be Patty," Merrie said, accepting more wine. "I'm merely very good."
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen EXCERPT PART6
The news about Walter Berglund wasn't picked up locally—he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now—but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times. According to a long and very unflattering story in the Times, Walter had made quite a mess of his professional life out there in the nation's capital. His old neighbors had some difficulty reconciling the quotes about him in the Times ("arrogant," "high-handed," "ethically compromised") with the generous, smiling, red-faced 3M employee they remembered pedaling his commuter bicycle up Summit Avenue in February snow; it seemed strange that Walter, who was greener than Greenpeace and whose own roots were rural, should be in trouble now for conniving with the coal industry and mistreating country people. Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.
Walter and Patty were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier. They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it. Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt. Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweatclothes and said, "Hey, you guys, you know what?" Patty frightened nobody, but she'd been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfedupon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.
In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else's children's sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.
Walter and Patty were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier. They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it. Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt. Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweatclothes and said, "Hey, you guys, you know what?" Patty frightened nobody, but she'd been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfedupon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.
In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else's children's sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.
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