You knew this marriage was not going to work out, right? : Franzen's Freedom

As predicted, the Walter-Patty marriage, over the long term, does not work out; Patty obviously settled for the kind but unexciting Walter because his sexy and charismatic best friend, Richard, was a. unwilling to make any kind of commitment to Patty or to anyone for that matter and b. was too loyal to Walter to make a hit on Patty, whom Walter has pursued relentlessly. Anyway: typical triangle, Jules & Jim but much darker and drawn out over years. Patty settles for Walter, they have a seemingly OK marriage, but she yearns for Richard, who basically never grows up, plays increasingly obscure indie rock, has no successful long-term relationships. Interestingly, each of these three main characters has a similar history of alcoholic fathers, uninvolved mothers; each is fixated on proving his or her worth. Patty and Walter do so primarily by being "nice," never saying a bad word about anyone, being loyal. Good traits - except that they're so forced, especially for Patty, who gets increasingly estranged from Walter and increasingly into drink herself. This odd pattern - horrible parents, overcompensating children - will play itself out in some way in the next generation, Patty & Walter's children, as Patty drops hints about her overdetermined relation with teenage son, Joey. We'll see. A curious feature of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," and one of the few things that I seriously question in this otherwise faultless novel: why does Franzen have the first chapters be Patty's "autobiography" (written for her therapist, apparently?, an old trope - cf Portnoy), when he makes zero attempt to try to write these chapters in a woman's voice, in the overbearingly "nice" voice of Patty, or really in any voice other than what's so obviously his own?