2010 was a banner year for Jonathan Franzen. In August, the author released his fourth novel, Freedom, a piece of literature so deftly crafted it instantly garnered him the kind of attention usually reserved for movie stars and heads of state. He graced the cover of Time Magazine in September (the first living writer in more than a decade to do so) above the headline “Great American Novelist.” He appeared on Oprah, where the daytime talk show Queen-pin heaped on the praise and the two buried the hatchet after a 2001 dust-up regarding her selection of his novel The Corrections for her Book Club.
Even the Commander-In-Chief gave his seal of approval; President Obama was spotted with his nose in a copy of the 562-page tome on vacation in August. On Thursday, Franzen will speak to a sold-out crowd at Santa Cruz High School about the book that vaulted him to super-stardom this year.
Freedom is a “way-we-live-now” portrait of a Midwestern American family, and by extension the American middle class, over the last 30 years. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s a “way-they-live-now,” since in Freedom, Santa Cruz is portrayed as an exception. It is the place that protagonist Walter Berglund steals away to after experiencing a series of personal and professional disappointments. Franzen writes of Berglund, “He was relieved to escape and go hiking with Professor Connery in the free spaces surrounding Santa Cruz, through the brown hills and dripping redwood glades, listen to Connery’s optimistic prophecies of global economic collapse and workers’ revolution, see the unfamiliar birds of coastal California, and meet some of the young freegans and radical collectivists who were living on public lands in principled squalor. I should have been a college professor, he thought.”
If Franzen’s description of our sleepy seaside hamlet smacks of first-hand experience, it’s for good reason—when the author needs respite from life in New York City, he heads to the home he shares with girlfriend Kathryn Chetkovich on Santa Cruz’s Westside.
JONATHAN FRANZEN reads from ‘Freedom’ on Thursday, Jan. 6 at 7pm at Santa Cruz High, 415 Walnut Ave., Santa Cruz. Tickets $8 at Bookshop Santa Cruz.
