Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Walter’s parents, who were merely social churchgoers, opened their home to the tall orphan. Dorothy was especially fond of Richard—may, indeed, have had a demure little Dorothyish thing for him—and encouraged him to spend his vacations in Hibbing. Richard needed little encouragement, having nowhere else to go. He delighted Gene by showing interest in shooting guns and more generally by not being the sort of “hoity-toity” person Gene had been afraid that Walter would take up with, and he impressed Dorothy by pitching in with chores. As previously noted, Richard had a strong (if highly intermittent) wish to be a good person, and he was scrupulously polite to people, like Dorothy, whom he considered Good. His manner with her, as he questioned her about some ordinary casserole she’d made, asking where she’d found the recipe and where a person learned about balanced diets, struck Walter as fake and condescending, since the chances of Richard ever actually buying groceries and making a casserole himself were nil, and since Richard reverted to his ordinary hard self as soon as Dorothy was out of the room. But Walter was in competition with him, and though Walter may not have excelled at picking up townie chicks, the province of listening to women with sincere attentiveness most definitely was his turf, and he guarded it fiercely. The autobiographer thus considers herself more reliable than Walter regarding the authenticity of Richard’s respect for goodness.

What was unquestionably admirable in Richard was his quest to better himself and fill the void created by his lack of parenting. He’d survived childhood by playing music and reading books of his own idiosyncratic choosing, and part of what attracted him to Walter was Walter’s intellect and work ethic. Richard was deeply read in certain areas (French existentialism, Latin American literature), but he had no method, no system, and was genuinely in awe of Walter’s intellectual focus. Though he paid Walter the respect of never treating him with the hyper-politeness he reserved for those he considered Good, he loved hearing Walter’s ideas and pressing him to explain his unusual political convictions.

The autobiographer suspects there was also a perverse competitive advantage for Richard in befriending an uncool kid from the north country. It was a way of setting himself apart from the hipsters at Macalester who came from more privileged backgrounds. Richard disdained these hipsters (including the female ones, though this didn’t preclude fucking them when opportunities arose) with the same intensity as the hipsters themselves disdained people like Walter. The Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back was such a touchstone for both Richard and Walter that Patty eventually rented it and watched it with Walter, one night when the kids were little, so that she could see the famous scene in which Dylan outshone and humiliated the singer Donovan at a party for cool people in London, purely for the pleasure of being an asshole. Though Walter felt sorry for Donovan—and, what’s more, felt bad about himself for not wanting to be more like Dylan and less like Donovan—Patty found the scene thrilling. The breathtaking nakedness of Dylan’s competitiveness! Her feeling was: Let’s face it, victory is very sweet. The scene helped her understand why Richard had preferred to hang out with unmusical Walter, rather than the hipsters.

Intellectually, Walter was definitely the big brother and Richard his follower. And yet, for Richard, being smart, like being good, was just a sideshow to the main competitive effort. This was what Walter had in mind when he said he didn’t trust his friend. He could never shake the feeling that Richard was hiding stuff from him; that there was a dark side of him always going off in the night to pursue motives he wouldn’t admit to; that he was happy to be friends with Walter as long as it was understood that he was the top dog. Richard was especially unreliable whenever a girl entered the picture, and Walter resented these girls for being even momentarily more compelling than he was. Richard himself never saw it this way, because he tired of girls so quickly and always ended up kicking them to the curb; he always came back to Walter, whom he didn’t get tired of. But to Walter it seemed disloyal of his friend to put so much energy into pursuing people he didn’t even like. It made Walter feel weak and small to be forever available for Richard to come back to. He was tormented by the suspicion that he loved Richard more than Richard loved him, and was doing more than Richard to make the friendship work.

The first big crisis came during their senior year, two years before Patty met them, when Walter was smitten with the evil sophomore personage named Nomi. To hear Richard tell it (as Patty once did), the situation was straightforward: his sexually naïve friend was being exploited by a worthless female who wasn’t into him, and Richard finally took it upon himself to demonstrate her worthlessness. According to Richard, the girl wasn’t worth competing over, she was just a mosquito to be slapped. But Walter saw things very differently. He got so angry with Richard that he refused to speak to him for weeks. They were sharing a two-room double of the sort reserved for seniors, and every night when Richard came in through Walter’s room, on his way to his own more private room, he stopped to engage in one-sided conversations that a disinterested observer would probably have found amusing.

Richard: “Still not speaking to me. This is remarkable. How long is this going to last?”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “If you don’t want me to sit down and watch you read, just say the word.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “Interesting book? You don’t seem to be turning the pages.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “You know what you’re being? You’re being like a girl. This is what girls do. This is bullshit, Walter. This is kind of pissing me off.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “If you’re waiting for me to apologize, it’s not going to happen. I’ll tell you that right now. I’m sorry you’re hurt, but my conscience is clear.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “You do understand, don’t you, that you’re the only reason I’m even still here. If you’d asked me four years ago, what are the odds of me graduating from college, I would have said small to nonexistent.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “Seriously, I’m a little disappointed.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “OK. Fuck it. Be a girl. I don’t care.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “Look. If I had a drug problem and you threw away my drugs, I’d be pissed off at you, but I’d also understand that you were trying to do me a favor.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “Admittedly not a perfect analogy, in that I actually, so to speak, used the drugs, instead of just throwing them away. But if you were prone to crippling addiction, whereas I was just doing something recreational, on the theory that it’s a shame to waste good drugs . . .”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “All right, so it’s a dumb analogy.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “That was funny. You should be laughing at that.”

Walter: silence.

So, at any rate, the autobiographer imagines it, based on the later testimony of both parties. Walter maintained his silence until Easter vacation, when he went home alone and Dorothy managed to extract the reason he hadn’t brought Richard along with him. “You have to take people the way they are,” Dorothy told him. “Richard’s a good friend, and you should be loyal to him.” (Dorothy was big on loyalty—it lent meaning to her not so pleasant life—and Patty often heard Walter quoting her admonition; he seemed to attach almost scriptural significance to it.) He pointed out that Richard himself had been extremely disloyal in stealing a girl Walter cared about, but Dorothy, who herself perhaps had fallen under the Katzian spell, said she didn’t believe that Richard had done it deliberately to hurt him. “It’s good to have friends in life,” she said. “If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody’s perfect.”