I really should read Freedom

I haven't yet because sometimes I get irritated when the media is all abuzz about how some book is so frickin' brilliant it will blow your mind because I am convinced that if all those people like it, there must be something wrong with it. That's how I feel about Freedom. But I have been wrong before. Case in point: Harry Potter. I remember listening to NPR every day in the Comparative Zoology lab that one summer and they would go on and on about how they all loved Harry Potter. It turned me against the books. "But she stole that idea from Gilbert and Sullivan and that idea from LOTR and that idea from The Once and Future King!" I would rage in my lab as I extracted DNA from the large and loathsome cactus beetles. They also gushed over White Teeth, which I loved, and so I gave HP a try and, well, you know the rest. JKR, so brilliant.

Anyways, to the subject of Freedom. I liked The Corrections, well, up until the end, where I felt things got out of control and became ludicrous. I do remember feeling as if Franzen must have secretly observed les parents because of the detailed descriptions of the crazy behaviors of Enid and Alfred that seemed to have been taken exactly from our lives. I knew that JF's parents must have been crazy and not in the "Oh my mom is so crazy she always cooks my favorite meals when I go home for Christmas" kind of way but in a tight smile and sudden dread kind of way when people ask,"Aren't you excited to be going home for the holidays?"

I was reminded of all this by the article "What To Buy Your Favorite Drunk" (thanks Charles for the link!) and their quotation of a passage from The Corrections.

"Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections contains an early scene where the character Chip Lambert, a depressive alcoholic professor of "textual artifacts" who has recently been fired for having an affair with an entitled undergraduate, spends Christmas alone at a Dunkin Donuts. He then goes back to his faculty housing flat — he's being evicted — and decides to get drunk and open the Christmas presents that his parents and siblings have sent him. By kicking each package up the stairs.

'When he punted the box from Gary it exploded in a cloud of white Styrofoam saucers. A bubble-wrapped bottle fell out and rolled down the stairs. It was a bottle of vintage California port. Chip carried it to his bed and worked out a rhythm whereby he swallowed one large mouthful of port for each gift that he succeeded in unwrapping. From his mother, who was under the impression that he still hung a stocking by his fireplace, he'd received a box marked Stocking Stuffers containing small individually wrapped items: a package of cough drops, a miniature second-grade school photo of himself in a tarnished brass frame, plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner and hand lotion from a Hong Kong hotel where Enid and Alfred had stayed en route to China eleven years earlier, and two carved wooden elves with sentimentally exaggerated smiles and loops of silver string that penetrated their little craniums so they could be hung from a tree. For placement under this presumptive tree, Enid had sent a second box of larger gifts wrapped in Santa-faced red paper: an asparagus steamer, three pairs of white Jockey underwear, a jumbo candy cane, and two calico throw pillows. From Gary and his wife, in addition to the Port, Chip received a clever vacuum-pump system for preserving leftover wine from oxidation, as if leftover wine were a problem Chip had ever had."

I think we get the exact same items in our "stockings". The cough drops! The old hotel shampoos! It is just too real. Which brings me back to my original statement; I should really read Freedom. (And as an aside, because the book involves birding. Can I just say that I actually thought to myself earlier this fall that I should take up birding now that I have more free time. Birding, really. Most single girls my age take up book clubs, yoga, and dating, not birding. Please save me from myself.)