First, I read these books wrong. I read Freedom in the waning days of Chicago winter and Anna Karenina in days so humid that I forgot it could ever snow again. People told me, mostly the internet, that this was incorrect. Everyone knew that Karenina was winter reading and Freedom was summer. They were just that different. But the whole time I was reading Karenina, I thought of Freedom. Mostly, I thought of the cliché, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” For those who hope that we learn from the past, in both books, the authors signify that the mental anguish we put ourselves through is never out-dated. Prosperity, in both books, allows the main characters ample time to unravel themselves. Both Tolstoy and Franzen allow the mental anguish that the characters weave themselves into to be also dependent on the subtle influence that economic and political climates have on our thought processes. And our thought processes are not displayed epically; both authors are also able to illustrate their revolving characters insanity by making their works archetypes of realist fiction: it all exists in the details.
In Anna Karenina and Freedom, both Anna Karenina and Patty Berglund, respectfully, have too much free-time. While the characters are 230 years apart, one has the drawing room to write notes and knit and the other has the 21st century equivalent: internet and gym shoes. Both characters are possessed with jealousy and a nagging sense of declining worth to their husbands and their societies. While Anna is ostracized from those she finds her purpose in being a part of, her high-society set and son, because of her decision to follow her passionate love affair with Vronsky, Patti is ostracized by her husband, Walter, and her son, Joey, because of her lack of passion about Walter’s environmental vision and her son because of his resentment of her obvious obsessive need of him. These isolations allow them both to act erratically. Anna convinces herself that Vronsky no longer loves her and pushes him away with her passive-aggressive behavior while Patti turns her affections towards her husband’s lifelong best friend. But while Anna kills herself in the end; Patti goes back to her husband. Both Patti and Anna are not in love with their husbands, but Patti matures and can accept the love that Walter has for her as enough. Anna can’t accept her husband, although it ruins her relationship with her son and society, Anna allows her need for passion destroy her.
Anna Karenina and Freedom both take place on the brink of a new world order that impact the characters' internal conflicts. Karenina is set about 30 years before the Bolshevik Revolution, while the main action in Freedom takes place at the dawn of post-9/11 America. In Karenina, the character Levin and his relationship with his peasants and his dealings with Russian government through his relationship with his brother-in-law, Oblonsky, makes him obsessed with figuring out a way to get the Russian peasant to derive more self-interest in their work, especially since serfdom has recently been abolished. However, Levin isn’t a budding communism, he is all about self-interest, but Tolstoy definitely recognizes the broken, redundant Russian bureaucracy through Levin’s eyes and slips in jabs about the current sad state of bureaucracy by having Oblonsky chasing a post entitled the “Joint Head of the Committee of the Joint Agency of the Mutual Credit Balance of the Southern Railways”. Tolstoy signifies that Russian government has significant issues and foreshadows, through the presence of Levin and his intellectual sparing, that something big will have to change for it to work properly.
In Freedom, 9/11 occurs with the Berglund’s son, Joey, watching the coverage from his dorm room, mourning the fact his gilded Clinton-era childhood just exploded. In the face of neo-con George Bush America, Joey joins in hoping to ride high on a Halliburton type auto-parts exchange in Iraq meanwhile his liberal father zealously pursues the opposite with a huge, flawed federal conservation effort. Father and son, never BFF in the novel, now despise each other, not merely for politics but what for their politics say about the other and themselves. Joey sees his father as a passive romantic not driven by reality but the beauty in his mind which also conveys his father’s love for his disinterested mother, while Walter sees his son as a self-serving, handsome WASP, which makes Walter both jealous and disgusted. Neither needs the other as an enemy; both their endeavors are destroyed by their own passion to see them succeed. A 21-year old Joey gets in over his head trying to close an illegal contact worth millions in South America, while Walter’s anger towards West Virginian rednecks that won’t move to save an “almost endangered” bird results in a television misstep that gets him fired and, later, his assistant killed. However, Freedom ends with the father and son actually close coinciding with the impending Obama administration and the less black and white morality of the Bush administration.
Both books succeed in showcasing the flaws of their characters by being masterpieces of realist fiction. The authors setting their characters mental states in relatable activities not in grand arches but in the play-by-play of routine reinforcing our mental neurosis live in the details. While insanity is evident in Anna’s suicide, the gearing up towards her suicide, all of her irrational thoughts while going about her everyday activities is in her misconstruing Vronsky’s lateness as a sign he no longer loves her and letting her mind loose to crash with this falsity. The mental anguish resides in the details in Freedom too. No one in Freedom kills themselves but Patti’s depression and Joey’s hubris take place in the banal. Joey battling with himself over committing to his girlfriend is a chapter of manic cell phone calls overlaid with a stream of consciousness that is battling three ideas of how to manipulate, fess up, or detonate the situation.
Although both over 500 pages and sprawled over the years, both books aren’t epics in the way you expect. They are character studies about the same kind of characters. The ones that are filled with self-doubt and with an ear towards neurotic behavior, just like one’s you would find at your dinner table or lunchroom. It’s comforting, in cold weather and in humid weather, to know that the mental anguish you go through is not a sign of the times but a truth of the ages.
