By Jonathan Franzen
He is a No 1 bestseller who is also hailed as the foremost literary novelist of his generation. Nine years after the phenomenal success of The Corrections, has Jonathan Franzen pulled off the same feat with his new novel?
Back in 1996, with two novels behind him but blocked in his efforts to write a third, Franzen wrote a gloomy essay for Harper's magazine about the difficulty of being a novelist in a culture dominated by television – and cited the cover of Time as clinching evidence of "how much less novels now matter to the American mainstream than they did when Catch-22 was published". Once (indeed twice) the face of James Joyce had appeared there. So, too, James Baldwin and John Cheever, which meant that Franzen's father, though not a reader, got to hear about them. But nowadays, Franzen complained, Time was giving its covers to the likes of Scott Turow and Stephen King, novelists better known for the size of their contracts than for their literary talent. "The dollar is now the yardstick of cultural authority," Franzen lamented, "and an organ like Time, which not long ago aspired to shape the national taste, now serves mainly to reflect it."
When Franzen appeared on the cover of Time in August, his earlier putdown wasn't mentioned in the accompanying interview. But he was described as "uneasy", and perhaps the unease arose from a suspicion of Time's rationale for choosing him. Was he being put forward as the foremost literary novelist of his generation, one whose best-known work stands comparison with The Naked and the Dead, Gravity's Rainbow, American Pastoral, Beloved and Underworld? Or because that book, The Corrections, has been a phenomenal commercial success, with sales – nearly 3 million copies worldwide – that put him up there with King and Turow? Unease about being categorised as a popular novelist – "schmaltzy and one-dimensional" – was what led to his being disinvited by Oprah Winfrey's book club in 2001; since he was "uncomfortable and conflicted", she said ("a pompous prick", as someone else put it), it would be wrong to have him on the show. And yet it's clear Franzen wants to reach a large audience – to be the kind of writer his father might have read had he been a reader, a Tom Wolfe as well as a Thomas Wolfe, a No 1 bestseller who's also a literary heavweight.
Like most writers, Franzen is a mass of contradictions. His fiction is generous and expansive, but it's achieved through monastic discipline: no children, no holidays, several years spent working on each book (seven for The Corrections, nine for Freedom). He has a great ear and eye for contemporary speech and manners, but during spells of writing The Corrections he sat in the dark with earmuffs and a blindfold. He's up-to-speed with technological developments and how they're changing the world, but he doubts whether anyone with an internet connection at the workplace can write good fiction. His literary taste is sternly high-minded but he claims not to understand how anyone can enjoy reading Samuel Beckett. He thinks of fiction as a "form of social opposition", but his prevailing tone is sociable, ironic, forgiving. He's widely acclaimed for having written the first great novel of the 21st century, but the form of that novel – state-of-the-nation social realism – looks back to Dickens and George Eliot.
Most of these contradictions, especially the last, aren't contradictions at all. The 19th-century novel had, at best, a moral complexity and social range that allowed readers to understand the world they lived in. And although Franzen knows that television, radio and the internet have supposedly replaced fiction as "the pre-eminent medium of social instruction", he doubts whether they can offer what the novel does. "More than ever, to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," he has said, books being the place "where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world".
The characters in Freedom are, on the whole, a well-educated bunch, whose reading matter includes Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Thomas Bernhardt, Thomas Pynchon's V and Ian McEwan's Atonement. But the novel most frequently mentioned is War and Peace, which one of three main protagonists, Patty, adjudges "the best book I've ever read". Franzen isn't so hubristic as to call himself Tolstoyan. And his output at the age of 51 is comparatively modest: four novels, a memoir and a book of essays. But each of those novels runs to more than 500 pages, and their themes are correspondingly large-scale.
His first, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), set in St Louis, his home town (the 27th largest city in the US), features a woman police chief, hired from Bombay, caught up in civic conspiracy: a "dark, contrarian entertainment" Franzen called it. In Strong Motion (1992), as a series of earthquakes hit Chicago, a seismologist and her boyfriend join forces to trace the links between the quakes and corporate malpractice; violent clashes between pro- and anti-abortionists form a sub-plot. Plenty happens in these two novels, with capitalist corruption laid bare and liberal sensibilities much in evidence. But the action is too frantic at times – with rapid cutting, rather than subtly unfolding scenes – and the narrative voice sometimes turns sanctimonious ("In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence", etc). The novels had a good reception and earned Franzen a place in Granta's list of 20 best young American novelists. But by the mid-90s he felt a failure, as if he'd been writing in a vacuum rather than producing "the work of transparency and beauty and obliqueness that I wanted to write". When he published his essay in Harper's he was beginning to come out of his depression, and to aspire to a fiction that was less issue-based and theory-bound. But he had yet to find his true subject: family.
Happy families are all alike; the dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way. The miracle of The Corrections is that by focusing on a single family, the Lamberts, Franzen somehow encompasses a whole culture. Enid Lambert's wish, in the face of her husband Alfred's Alzheimer's, to have her three grown-up children come home to suburban St Jude for "one last Christmas" might seem too slender a thread to hold together a 600-page novel. But the horribly recognisable family tensions that ensue allow Franzen to move far beyond St Jude and to examine the state of his nation, with everything from drugs, prison, railways, haute cuisine and cruise ships brought under the lens. The title has multiple resonances. The comedy is hilarious. The backstory never drags. It's hard to imagine Franzen pulling off anything comparable. But in Freedom, nine years later, he has.
Whereas the prologue to The Corrections, set in Alfred's basement and carrying the promise that "something terrible was going to happen", has a touch of DeLillo and the grandiose about it, the prologue to Freedom is closer to Couples. "What did you make of the new couple?" Updike's novel begins, and what the neighbourhood makes of Walter and Patty Berglund is the issue here. By the time the story opens, in 2002, the Berglunds are no longer new; in fact, they've just moved away. But we see them arriving in St Paul as young pioneers, Patty tall and pony-tailed ("a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee"), Walter pale, earnest and bespectacled. Patty's very into her children, solemn Jessica and precocious Joey, and gives herself to motherhood with a fervour that at least one neighbour dismisses as "regressive housewifely bullshit". There's a suspicion that her niceness is only skin-deep and that the doll's house world she's building is too good to be true.
And so it proves. At 11 or 12, no one is quite sure, Joey starts fucking Connie from next door, "a grave and silent little person" who has been fixated with him since infancy. Patty, distressed, develops a drink habit. Suddenly everything looks dirty and ugly to her, not least the view from her backyard, denuded of trees when Connie's mother's blue-collar boyfriend builds a massive extension. In hopes of curing Joey of Connie, she takes him off for the summer, to the lakeside cottage inherited from Walter's mother. But Joey is resolute as well as resourceful, and at 16, still a schoolkid, he ditches his parents and moves into Connie's house. Patty becomes even more distressed. Walter buries himself in work and is rewarded with a job in Washington. Soon enough, "two weeks after the great national tragedy", the Berglunds put their house on the market and – minus Joey, now at university – move away.
There's a novel's worth of material here – a novel like Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, charting the impact on a community of a single shocking act. Joey's slap in the face to his parents is certainly transgressive, "a stunning act of sedition and a dagger to Patty's heart". But we're only 26 pages in, and the rights and wrongs of Joey's defection is not the story Franzen wants to tell; his time-frame is more ambitious and there are other issues at stake. Though Joey and Connie figure again, the real story of Freedom is the love triangle between Patty, Walter and Richard, a man who doesn't even appear in the opening section.
In fact Richard doesn't appear for another 40 pages, by which point there's been a further episode resonant enough to make a novel – Patty's rape as a schoolgirl and, more traumatic than the rape itself, her parents' failure to support her when she tells them. A hotshot basketball player in a family where sport isn't valued, Patty feels alienated even before the rape, and despite her immersion in team games the feeling persists at university, where she's doted on – stalked – by a disturbed girl with drug issues called Eliza. It's through Eliza that she meets the nerdy but devoted Walter and his sexy musician friend Richard (who's reminiscent of Chip in The Corrections). Feckless in all other respects, Richard feels protective towards Walter, which is why he won't sleep with Patty. Rebuffed, she marries Walter, who is "unsurpassable in providing the rabid fandom which, at the time, she needed even more than romance".
The three are far too entangled for marriage to be an ending. The men, friends and rivals, stay in touch. Walter's career as a conservationist takes off. Richard's band, Walnut Surprise, enjoys unlikely success. Patty's life is her kids, until they leave home and her attention turns back to Richard, with whom she finally gets a chance to be alone, at the lakeside cottage. The consummation is so intense she feels it's the first time she has ever really had sex, but it also plunges her down a "mental health mine-shaft" and returns the novel to where it began, with the Berglunds leaving for Washington in the spring after 9/11.
We learn all this in a 160-page tranche of confessional autobiography composed by Patty at her therapist's suggestion. "Mistakes Were Made", she calls it, disinclined to take the blame for all of them. ("I have made mistakes" is one of the last things Alfred says – or fails to say – in The Corrections.) Franzen makes no attempt to create an authentic Patty "voice": eerily distanced from the events she describes, she refers to herself in the third person, and has a novelistic command of character and dialogue, only occasionally intruding to remind us that she, "the autobiographer", is telling the story: "the autobiographer is adamant in her insistence that she was not awake at the moment of betraying Walter and feeling his friend split her open."
After the manuscript of Patty's confession, the disclosure of which, to her lover and husband, will later have serious consequences, the narrative baton is handed on, first to Richard, then Walter, then Joey. If it's breaking the rules for a novelist to adopt the perspective of several different characters but to speak in the same authorial voice throughout, it isn't, in this case, a failing; Franzen inhabits his subjects so deeply that mimicry seems beside the point. There are other rules he breaks, such as introducing a new character in the penultimate chapter and allowing himself a page-long sentence. But he knows what he is up to (the page-long sentence perfectly reflects the procrastination, Richard's, which it's describing), and even the occasional archaic-seeming idiom ("bethought", "betake", "smallened") has its place, if only to remind us that, contemporary though the setting is, the author has a respect for old-fashioned ways, in language and in life.
In The Corrections, old-fashioned midwest values are represented by Alfred and Enid, who were not so loosely modelled on Franzen's parents. In Freedom, he has said, all the characters are made up. Traces of autobiography are present, nevertheless. His memoir The Discomfort Zone describes his older brother Tom leaving home after a row with his father: mystified and ashamed, the Franzen family "quarantined itself and suffered by itself", much as the Berglunds do after Joey moves out. The memoir also tells how Franzen took up birdwatching in 1999, after his mother's death, and how in 2005, after hearing Al Gore speak about global warming, he began to worry about the thousands of avian species facing extinction worldwide: "I couldn't find a way not to care . . . This was my bird problem."
The bird problem is also Walter's problem in Freedom. In his role as conservationist, he succeeds in persuading an oil billionaire to fund a nature reserve which will preserve the cerulean warbler, the fastest-declining songbird in North America. But there's a payback: mining companies will be allowed to extract coal on the reserve, via "mountaintop removal". Walter tries to persuade himself that the ecological damage can be minimised and is worth the price of saving the warbler. But his position looks increasingly invidious. And meanwhile he has a second bird problem: his beautiful young Indian assistant Lalitha, who seems very fond of him and whose fondness he might be tempted to reciprocate were it not for his loyalty to Patty – that's assuming Patty is loyal to him . . .
Richard can't understand what's wrong with Walter: the girl is obviously gagging for it, he tells him, man-to-man. Richard's position on women is unreconstructed, and he's given some witty misogynist lines, which isn't the same as authorial endorsement. The Great American Novel has tended to be a male preserve, and there have been complaints, from Jodi Picoult and others, that Freedom would have had less of a fanfare if written by a woman. Franzen can't help being male, but his novel doesn't revel in masculinity. Patty's sporty competitiveness inverts a few gender stereotypes. And feminism has left its mark on Walter, to whom the thought of a blowjob is troubling because "there's something objectively demeaning about a woman on her knees". Lalitha matters to him as a fellow eco-warrior, not a sexual companion. Or so he thinks.
The environmentalist theme gathers strength in the second half of the novel but, like Ian McEwan in Solar, Franzen is anxious not to be heavy or pious. Though his heart's in the right place, connubially and ecologically, Walter is no less flawed than the other characters, and his fanatical campaign, in the novel's coda, to have his neighbours keep their cats indoors so as to save the local bird-life, is comic as well as sad. The novel has a solemn message, nonetheless. There's a bravura passage about migrant birds returning each year "to find more of their former homes paved over for parking lots or highways, or logged over for pallet wood, or developed into subdivisions, or stripped bare for oil drilling or coal mining, or fragmented for shopping centres, or plowed under for ethanol production, or miscellaneously denatured for ski runs and bike trails and golf courses." And it isn't only birds that concern Walter but the problem of what's ethical to eat:
"Between the horrors of bovine methane, the lakes of watershed-devastating excrement generated by pig and chicken farms, the catastrophic overfishing of the oceans, the ecological nightmare of farmed shrimp and salmon, the antibiotic orgy of dairy-cow factories, and the fuel squandered by the globalization of produce, there was little he could ever order in good conscience beside potatoes, beans, and fresh-water farmed tilapia.
"'Fuck it,' he said, closing the menu, 'I'm going to have the rib-eye.'"
The Corrections had comic brio, including a sequence in which the hapless Chip is reduced to stealing a $78 fillet of salmon by tucking it into his pants and is then waylaid for eternity at the checkout by the husband of his agent. Alfred's hallucinations of turds were grimly funny, too, though Franzen is well aware that humour like this carries a risk. In Freedom, Patty's scornful sister Abigail complains of the "testosterone and potty humour" which has kept her from succeeding in the New York theatre world. If there's a sly self-critique here, Franzen isn't deterred by it. The book's funniest sequence finds Joey on the floor of a hotel bathroom in Argentina trying to extract, by fork, from one of four large turds floating in the toilet bowl, the wedding ring he accidentally swallowed two days earlier before leaving the US, while the hot date he's come on holiday with hammers on the bathroom door.
"Shit happens," says Joey, whose romantic fling is aborted by a summons to Paraguay, where he's supposed to buy several tons of obsolete military truck parts to ship to Iraq – a scam of no benefit to the US forces that will earn him close to a million dollars. The action turns manic here and the tone satirical, along the lines of M*A*S*H or Catch-22. Like Chip's Vilnius adventure in The Corrections, the Paraguay trip sits oddly with the rest. But Joey's on a learning curve that will earn him redemption. And Franzen rightly judges that an American novel set in the century's first decade cannot ignore Iraq.
If Barack Obama reads the novel – and a bookshop owner in Martha's Vineyard pressed a proof copy on him while he was holidaying there last month – he'll be cheered by its anti-Republican ethos and made to ponder the resonance of the title, the word "freedom" being one which US Presidents like to invoke. In his introduction to his book of essays, How to Be Alone, in 2002, Franzen took a swipe at the president of the Ford Motor Company for patriotically defending fuel-squandering SUVs on the grounds that Americans must never accept "boundaries of any kind". It may be that chance remark was the seed of this novel, for Walter feels the same indignation, arguing that the American obsession with personal liberty breeds self-absorption and global irresponsibility. "USE WELL THY FREEDOM" reads a wall engraving at Patty's daughter's university, but few people do use it well and the cost of failure is destructive: "The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage." To be free as a bird is an empty metaphor when even birds are losing their freedom.
Personal freedom is on trial here, too, and the problem of achieving it within a relationship. Joey has opportunities to free himself from Connie but chooses not to take them. Walter and Patty can't live together but suffer when apart. Even Richard, who won't compromise his independence, is unable to survive alone. All the characters in Freedom have periods – long periods – of being on their own, and try to embrace the isolation. Walter, in particular, whose fear of global over-population is tinged with misanthropy, gives solitude his best shot. But people need their chains – of work, marriage, family. The subtext of Freedom is something Franzen himself learned while blocked and depressed in the 1990s – that anyone suffering from "an overwhelming estrangement from humanity" needs to get out more. Other people might be hell, but loneliness is worse.
In his Harper's essay Franzen defined the fiction he admired as "tragic realism", an antidote to "the rhetoric of optimism that so pervades our culture". All the elements for tragedy are present in Freedom: war, rage, grief, jealousy, hubris, vengeance, illicit passion. Lousy childhoods leave their impress, parental flaws are passed down and material comfort is no stay against self-pity. But the protagonists – Patty especially – are constantly making new discoveries about themselves: redemptive insights, lessons in the contradictoriness of the human heart. And bleak though the prospects look, the reader approaches the last pages with some hope that the tale won't end in tragedy.
"I grew up in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class," Franzen writes in his memoir The Discomfort Zone, and those Wasp origins have occasionally been held against him, as if he's bound to be mediocre or "DeLillo-lite". But you can occupy the centre-ground without being middling. And even if Franzen's territory remains, by and large, the American middle class, now Updike has gone no one writes about it better. "Who's number one?" It doesn't matter. It's enough that Franzen has written two terrific novels in a single decade and that the new one is just as good as the last.
Freedom is published by Fourth Estate for £20.
Blake Morrison
The Guardian,
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Curtis Sittenfeld
guardian.co.uk Sun 19 September 2010
guardian.co.uk Sun 19 September 2010
It was somewhere around page 158 of Freedom that I managed to forgive the book for not being The Corrections and begin enjoying it for what it is: an ethnography of a particular marriage; a meditation on the disappointments and compromises of approaching and then inhabiting middle age; and a long, juicy, scathing, funny and poignant indictment of contemporary American life. All of which, come to think of it, does sound an awful lot like The Corrections, with Freedom offering the bonus, for those of us tickled by such subject matter, of a scene in which a newly married man accidentally swallows his wedding ring and subsequently finds himself hunched over a toilet bowl in a hotel bathroom, examining his own faeces with his bare hands while a comely woman who isn't his wife impatiently knocks on the door.
One of those novels that arrives loaded down with an absurd amount of baggage, Freedom is a book people are eager to love or hate for reasons mostly unrelated to the words on the pages. Because The Corrections was so successful and acclaimed; because when Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club, Jonathan Franzen allegedly dissed her (though in reality, and I say this as both an Oprah admirer and a Franzen admirer, that's not exactly what happened); because nine long years have elapsed since The Corrections was published; because Franzen is not just White and Male but also Tall and Handsome (albeit, according to a Time magazine article, also Excruciatingly Awkward); because shortly before Freedom's US publication, for that same Time article, Franzen appeared on the magazine's cover, the first novelist to do so since Stephen King 10 years ago. Amid such cultural static, it can be hard to focus on the facts of the book itself its characters and plot and language which is, appropriately enough, one of Freedom's concerns: how to find meaning in a world of cheap distractions.
Franzen kicks off with a sort of panoramic introduction to Walter and Patty Berglund as seen through the eyes of their neighbours in the gentrifying section of St Paul, Minnesota, where the couple have lived and raised their two children for close to 20 years. The Berglunds are earnest and socially conscious and admirable; they are annoying and judgmental and self-congratulatory. The implosion of their pleasant existence starts, but doesn't conclude, when their smug, smart and decidedly underage son Joey begins sleeping with the slightly older girl next door.
After this introduction, we spin off in several directions, first encountering a 160-page unpublished memoir Patty has written, in the third person, at the behest of her therapist. Via the memoir, we travel back in time to Patty's privileged but unhappily complicated childhood and adolescence in a suburb of New York; her college years as a basketball star and her blossoming relationship not only with Walter but also with his rock musician best friend Richard Katz, a man whose acerbic misanthropy serves as a counterpoint to Walter's calm kindness. Patty's memoir concludes with a cataclysmic betrayal of Walter, after which she follows him from Minnesota to his new job in Washington, DC.
We then enter a new section of rotating close third person perspectives Richard's, Joey's and Walter's set in or shortly before 2004. These overlapping and progressing narratives carry us through the bulk of the novel, until an addendum to Patty's memoir appears it is by this point 2010 followed by another marital panorama, through the eyes of yet another set of post-DC neighbours, that bookends our first introduction to the Berglunds.
If such a structure sounds confusing, it's not. It allows for tantalising foreshadowing and cliffhangers in which one character's story is interrupted just as something terrible or delicious or deliciously terrible is about to occur. It offers the pleasure of experiencing the same scene from different perspectives and thereby seeing it with fresh significance. And all along, Franzen's strengths as a writer are on giddy and unapologetic display: his superb facility for writing dialogue; his willingness to be shockingly, entertainingly dirty on matters of sex; and his terrific and terrifying sense of humour, which makes it impossible to read his vivisections of people's flaws and delusions without anxiously imagining what short work he could make of you and pretty much everyone you care about. Of a chubby high school girl: "She was like a walking advertisement of the late-model parenting she'd received: You have permission to ask for things! Just because you aren't pretty doesn't mean you don't!" Or, when a more attractive middle-aged woman (alas, a disproportionate number of Franzen's scathing observations do seem to be about females) tells the newly famous musician Richard Katz that she's not a fan of his early work: "Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence the drama of being her was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy's doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity."
As it happens, I found it difficult not to see Richard Katz as a stand-in for Franzen himself: an artist whose efforts are for 20 years met with critical acclaim and commercial silence, until, in 2001 (also, ahem, the year The Corrections came out), he produces a huge hit whose popularity and attendant widespread adulation make him squirming and scornful. Katz is the book's best character, an unrepentant speaker of truths, and perhaps it goes without saying that the possible parallels between him and the author only make him more intriguing.
And yet, if I enjoyed all of Freedom, I can't say I was persuaded by all of it. What I was least persuaded by was the character of Patty. In part, the Patty problem arises because of how powerful the introduction to the Berglunds is, an introduction that defines Patty, wholly plausibly, as a specific and familiar type: "She might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint, and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street."
If the point of view of this early section can be attached to any individual character, it's that of the Berglunds' merciless neighbour Merrie Paulsen, "who was 10 years older than Patty and looked every year of it." Merrie thinks that Patty's "supposed neighbourliness... was all just regressive housewifely bullshit, and, frankly, in Merrie's opinion, if you were to scratch below the nicey-nice surface you might be surprised to find something rather hard and selfish and competitive and Reaganite in Patty; it was obvious that the only things that mattered to her were her children and her house not her neighbours, not the poor, not her country, not her parents, not even her own husband."
If Merrie is to be believed, and to me she is, then Patty is a not particularly likeable force of nature, which is to say a person I'd be happy to read about for hundreds of pages. But the Patty we encounter in her own memoir, and in the subsequent scenes focused on other characters, is weak and pathetic, a woman adrift in her own life to the point of not seeming fully developed as a character. We see little of her as the zealous mother she apparently was during her children's youth and instead follow her mostly after she's thrown in the towel on mothering and, seemingly, on much else. Yet even before adulthood has broken her, in the passages when she is a college student, she is tossed and blown by the whims of others: whether in forming an intense friendship with a girl because that girl is obsessed with Patty but not because Patty reciprocates any real fondness, or in ending up with Walter mostly because she's not sure what else to do after his friend rejects her. The males in Patty's life frequently remark on how interesting and funny she is, but I didn't find her much of either, which was notable in a book that's interesting and funny on just about every page.
If my primary criticism of Freedom concerns Patty, my secondary one centres around a death that feels incompatible with the book's tone as well as overly convenient in serving the plot. I also found some of the social commentary, as voiced by various characters, a bit self-important and lengthy, if depressingly apt. But that's it: I didn't buy one of the characters, I didn't buy one of the plot twists, I found the stuff about a Halliburton-esque company rather convoluted and I was completely absorbed by the rest. Without question, Freedom is a book that grabs hold of you. When I was in the middle, I thought of its characters even while I wasn't reading about them, and when I was reading it, I read several lines aloud to my husband.
If you loved The Corrections as much as I did, then cracking open Freedom is a bit like returning to a restaurant where you had an outstanding meal. Your expectations may be high, but it's still possible to come away feeling satisfied and if we're lucky, perhaps we'll all eat there again before another nine years go by.
