Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times calls Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life. It is.

It’s a beast of a thing, 576 pages of long paragraphs with long sentences and long names and long scenes, but the length is paired with a depth and breadth that exceeds The Corrections, Franzen’s timbre and tone and keen sight earns him a spot among novelists that could make even Oprah forget about the sticker debacle. Freedom is a pleasure, a heaping helping of American work. It comes out Tuesday from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  Here’s some of its whim and punch:

Other amusing methods of tormenting Patty were to hide the family dog, Elmo, and pretend that Elmo had been euthanized while Patty was at late basketball practice. Or tease Patty about certain factual errors she’d made many years earlier– ask her how the kangaroos in Austria were doing, and whether she’d seen the latest novel by the famous contemporary writer Louisa May Alcott, and whether she still thought funguses were part of the animal kingdom. ” I saw one of Patty’s funguses chasing a truck the other day,” her father would say. ” Look, look at me, this is how Patty’s fungus chases a truck.”

Most nights her dad left the house again after dinner to meet with poor people he was defending in court for little or no money. He had an office across the street from the courthouse in White Plains. His free clients included Puerto Ricans, Haitians, Transvestites, and the mentally or physically Disabled. Some of them were in such bad trouble he didn’t even make fun of them behind their backs. As much as possible, though, he found their troubles amusing. In tenth grade, for a school project, Patty sat in on two trials that her dad was part of. One was a case against an unemployed Yonkers man who drank too much on Puerto Rican Day, went looking for his wife’s brother, intending to cut him with a knife, but couldn’t find him and instead cut up a stranger in a bar. Not just her dad but the judge and even the prosecutor seemed amused by the defendant’s haplessness and stupidity. The kept exchanging little not-quite winks. As if misery and disfigurement and jail time were all just a lower-class side-show designed to perk up their otherwise boring day.

On the train ride home, Patty asked her dad whose side he was on.

“Ha, good question,” he answered. “You have to understand, my client is a liar. They’re all liars. Of course, my client is entitled to a vigorous defense. But you have to try to serve justice, too. Sometimes the P.A. and the judge and I are working together as much as the P.A. is working with the victim or I’m working with the defendant. You’ve heard of our adversarial system of justice.”

“Yes.”

“Well. Sometimes the P.A. and the judge and I all have the same adversary.  We try to sort out the facts and avoid a miscarriage. Although don’t, uh, don’t put that in your paper.”

“I thought sorting out the facts was what the grand jury and the jury are for.”

“That’s right. Put that in your paper. Trial by a jury of your peers. That’s important.”

“But most of your clients are innocent, right?”

“Not many of them deserve as bad a punishment as somebody’s trying to give them.”

“But a lot of them are completely innocent, right? Mommy says they have trouble with the language, or the police aren’t careful about who they arrest, and there’s prejudice against them, and lack of opportunity.”

“All of that is entirely true, Pattycakes. Nevertheless, uh. Your mother can be somewhat dewey-eyed.”

Patty minded his ridiculing less when her mother was the butt of it.

“I mean, you saw those people,” he said to her. “Jesus Christ. El ron me puso loco.”