LARD HAT

You’ve got to hand it to a guy who writes a social novel these days, especially one that’s almost 600 pages long and sprawls across four decades. Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom must have taken some balls to write. 

For those who haven’t read it, the story follows archetypical socially-conscious nice guy Walter Berglund through his troubled marriage, starting in the 1970s and ending around the inauguration of Obama in 2008. 

The book picks apart the psychology of Walter and his family and friends in that way that novels tend to do: psychoanalysis of the upper middle class apparently never gets old. It’s more interesting to read about low self-esteem and self-sabatoge among people who actually have the possibility of achieving what they want, I suppose.

The work Franzen has done to describe and expose the superficiality and egocentrism of American culture is admirable: at times I had to put the book down because the characters were just to realistically irritating.

I know all too well what it’s like to try and talk some sense into well-indoctrinated Americans—everybody in the States seems to be an unreasonable fanatic about something.

I gave up hope of winning that battle years ago, but I’m happy to know that people like Franzen are still out there keeping a critical eye on the idiocy.

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. 

“Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.

“The coals were reddening.

“Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

—Mkgnao!”

(from Project Gutenberg).