I haven’t read Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom” yet, but after Frank Rich another Times columnist decided to write about this book.
According to David Brooks ‘“Freedom” tells us more about America’s literary culture than about America itself.’ Brooks adds: “Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation. This message caught on (it’s flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. If you judged by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly no fulfilled ones.
By now, writers have become trapped in the confines of this orthodoxy. So even a writer as talented as Franzen has apt descriptions of neighborhood cattiness and self-medicating housewives, but ignores anything that might complicate the Quiet Desperation dogma. There’s almost no religion. There’s very little about the world of work and enterprise. There’s an absence of ethnic heritage, military service, technical innovation, scientific research or anything else potentially lofty and ennobling.’

It’s easy to pooh-pooh this criticism. Brooks obviously doesn’t get literature, and perhaps more important, because of his ideological preferences he is not interested in getting it.

But an interesting question lurks behind the old truism that literature nowadays isn’t ennobling anymore.

Isn’t it possible that literature is written by people who are unhappier than the average human being? And that therefore literature confronts us with a world view that is much bleaker than most people’s world view.
Romain Gary, an author whom I admire greatly, warns us against the “literature of unhappiness”, a literature that focuses only on sadness and that is blind to the diversity of human experience.

Looking for happiness in American suburbs might be an important task.

My biggest objection again this column is not that Mr. Brooks dismisses most literature, because as I said he raises an important question, my biggest objection is that he doesn’t get happiness.
Perhaps other people’s quiet desperation ennobles us, if it doesn’t ennoble us at least it might make us happy.
Even our own quiet desperation can be a source of happiness.