Freedomland by Richard Price

First published: 1998

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: The 1990’s

Locale: New Jersey

Principal Characters:

• Lorenzo Council, a detective
• Jesse Haus, a newspaper reporter
• Brenda Martin, a troubled woman and distraught mother
• Cody Martin, her four-year-old son
• Danny Martin, Brenda’s brother, a Gannon police officer
• Ben Haus, Jesse’s brother
• Karen Collucci, the head of a volunteer group that searches for missing children

The Novel

The report of a carjacking in the no-man’s land between a violence-ridden black housing project in the fictional city of Dempsy and the white, working-class town of Gannon sets the stage for high drama in Richard Price’s well-informed and subtly sympathetic look at life on America’s mean streets. Freedomland opens with an unidentified white woman, Brenda Martin, “marching” through an urban wasteland, oblivious to her surroundings and its dangers. Arriving at the local hospital, she reluctantly reveals her painful story. While driving home late at night from Dempsy to her apartment in Gannon, she became lost; a black man, pretending to offer directions, took her car and her four-year-old son, who was asleep in the back.

After this brief prologue, the novel is divided into four parts, each named for the pop songs Brenda favors. Within each of the four, the narrative alternates between two very different investigations. One focuses on Dempsy detective Lorenzo Council’s efforts to learn all he can about the carjacking so that he can apprehend the “actor” and recover the boy or his body. The other involves newspaper reporter Jesse Haus’s efforts to get the story. Their separate and differently motivated but parallel investigations unfold against the backdrop of “the real mess shaping up” in the projects. To catch one black carjacker and save one white child, the police seal off the entire housing project. As the state of siege, or lockdown, drags on, black anger grows, exploding shortly after Brenda admits that the carjacking was merely a story she invented to conceal her own part in Cody’s accidental death. For all its gritty, street-smart realism, Freedomland unfolds as tragedy in which, as in William Shakespeare’s King Lear, “The worst is not/ So long as we can say, This is the worst.’” The growing sense of inescapable violence and Faulknerian doom, the growing list of confrontations and horrific revelations do more than complicate the plot; they create a sense of tragic inevitability in which the death of one “white” child becomes entwined with and emblematic of the larger tragedy of an entire community.

The detective and the reporter do not narrate their alternating sections directly; rather, they function as the novel’s twin centers of consciousness and points of reference. The individual sections and the novel as a whole alternate in another way, between scene and picture, dialogue and description (as well as commentary). The dialogue helps to propel the novel forward at a brisk pace and effectively captures the various rhythms and the languages of the characters (police, reporters, politicians, community activists, angry residents, racists). Price’s detailed yet unobtrusive rendering of these various languages contributes to the novel’s aura of authenticity.

Although the novel is long (546 pages), the action is highly compressed, taking place over a few hot summer days and in a similarly confined, almost claustrophobic space. Although the year is not specified, time matters in Freedomland. The pressing concerns of the moment loom largest, the past only as it explains the present, the future hardly at all. The painfully slow pace at which Council’s investigation proceeds plays itself out against two deadlines: the point at which the investigation will be taken from him and handed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and, more important, the point at which Armstrong will erupt.

Price’s fictional setting occupies the economically depressed industrial wasteland that stretches from Jersey City south to Bayonne. The poorest blacks live in the violent housing projects, while second-generation immigrant whites hunker down in working-class Gannon. The novel works hard to blur the line dividing the two communities (the “white” boy, Cody, is half black) and to show that Dempsy is only a specific instance of a much larger societal failure. That failure extends beyond the projects to a nearby children’s home that became a political boondoggle and snakepit before becoming the haunt of a serial killer; it also extends to Freedomtown, the small-scale local version of the actual Freedomland theme park in the Bronx. Each is a symbol of urban promise transmogrified into the grave of area hopes and, in Freedomtown’s case, the grave of Cody Martin as well.

The Characters

Sporting a shaved head, black rumpled jeans, and positive-message T-shirt, Lorenzo Council is the local boy who, at age forty-seven, has made good and remains committed to his old neighborhood. He has a good job and three grandchildren, has been the subject of a write-up in the local newspaper, and has appeared on a local television talk show. Yet his relative triumph over alcohol, drugs and poverty, his “tireless presence” in Armstrong, and his “social ability to bat from either side of the plate” are offset by a failing marriage, a son in prison, and an inability to stem the tide of violence and despair in the projects. Worse still, his work on the case further strains his relationship with a community he wants to protect rather than punish. Despite his commitment to “Darktown’s” residents, he feels increasingly marginalized by community activists and sympathetic toward Brenda Martin. He also comes under increasing pressure either to solve the case or hand it over to the FBI, a move that will further erode his credibility and effectiveness while simultaneously making the racial situation even more volatile:

Every facet of the investigation seemed to elude his grasp. Military occupations, civic demonstrations, wrongful arrests, civilian search parties, baby-sitting journalists, outraged families—he seemed unable to control or prevent any of it.

The “baby-sitting journalist” is Jesse Haus, street reporter for the Dempsy Register. She at first seems nothing more than a frustrated ambulance chaser, more interested in getting copy than in finding the truth, who capitalizes on the story she wrote about Council to gain access to Brenda Martin. Once she has this access, however, she finds herself in a moral quandary not unlike his. She has a job to do and a career to think about, but she also comes to sympathize with Brenda Martin, with whom she identifies in several ways: “No child, no husband, no lover, no constant friends, just a brother and a job.” If the job is in some ways a dead end, in others it is not, particularly in the way it satisfies her desire for or addiction to something she calls “the Infilling”:

the compulsive hankering to witness, to absorb, to taste human behavior in extremis; the desire to embrace, to be filled with, no matter how fleetingly, the power of human grief, human rage; to experience it over and over; to absorb the madness of others, the commitment of others, the killers, the killed, the bereaved, the stunned. . . . Jesse needed these people to come inside her, to give her life, a life, and she loved them for it.

The reader comes to know these two characters from the inside. Brenda Martin is seen largely from the outside. At first merely “the woman,” Brenda is slowly revealed as an emerging composite picture (and complex character) drawn, as it were, by Council and Haus. Neither quite the victim she first claims to be nor the murderer proclaimed in front-page headlines, Brenda is, like her apartment, “more sad-ass than sinister,” as her brother puts it. Brenda’s desire to love is evident in her work with disadvantaged black children, but greater still is her need to be loved, as she never was by her own mother. It is this need that drives her to addiction and a cult therapy group, that causes her to hold desperately to anyone who shows even the slightest interest in her, and that makes her alternately possessive as a mother yet disturbingly detached from her child, whom she sees as both her sole emotional support and the one obstacle to her finding love. Briefly “in love” with another loser, Billy Williams, she begins dosing Cody with Benadryl to make him go to sleep so that she will have time for Billy. Cody proves no less needy than Brenda, whom he warns not to leave him. When she does, ironically enough on the night she knows Billy will break off their affair, Cody drinks the rest of the medicine and is (or appears to be) dead by the time she returns. Unable to admit to this, her greatest failure, the fullest proof of her own inadequacy, she has Billy bury the body and then concocts the all-too-believable story that ends up doing her no good and many others much harm. These include the novel’s large supporting cast, each representative of some aspect of the larger society, none without fault, none without some redeeming quality.

Critical Context

Price’s first four novels drew extensively on his early life in the Bronx. His fifth, Clockers (also set in Dempsy), was something of a departure in its even grittier depiction of New Jersey drug dealers and police officers and in its being researched at firsthand rather than remembered. Clockers was also more cinematic than the earlier work, clearly influenced by Price’s writing of a number of high-profile screenplays: The Color of Money (1986), The Sea of Love (1989), “Life Lessons” (1989), and Ransom (1996). Far from limiting its effectiveness, the fact that Freedomland reads like a screenplay contributes to it, leading one to suspect that, as with Clockers, no film adaptation can begin to do justice to this hybridized novel’s effective pacing, complex narration, and sympathetic but unsentimental tone. Equally important is the way the novel resonates with well-known news stories that Price recycles to telling effect, most notably the 1992 Charles Stuart case in Boston and the 1994 Susan Smith case in Union, South Carolina. In both those real-life cases, white accusers put the blame for murders they had committed (Stuart of his pregnant wife, Smith of her two young children) on black men who then became the subject of police manhunts. Price’s highly descriptive yet strangely meditative detective novel goes beyond the sensationalism of tabloid headlines to offer understanding and forgiveness, along with a glimmer of hope amid Darktown’s grim reality. Jesse Haus, for example, decides to stay in Dempsy rather than to accept a job offer in Arizona. Despite misgivings, moreover, Lorenzo Council decides to direct a curfew program for the city’s youth. As he says, and as the novel argues, “You do what you can do . . . that’s all you can do.”

Bibliography

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 31, 1998, p. 10. A review of Freedomland.

National Review. L, July 6, 1998, p. 50. A review of Freedomland.

Nicholson, David. “Urban America and Its Racial Faultlines.” Washington Post, May 12, 1998, p. D1. Nicholson comments that Freedomland “transcends mere journalism,” giving the reader “characters who are terrifyingly real in situations so complex they break your heart.”

Price, Richard. “The Art of Fiction CXLIV: Richard Price.” Interview by James Linville. The Paris Review 38 (May 12, 1998): 132-169. Price discusses his work as both novelist and screenwriter.

Price, Richard. “The Birth of a Novel: Up North, Down South.” Interview by Peter Applebome. The New York Times, July 9, 1998, pp. 50-52. Price discusses the influence of the Susan Smith murder case on Freedomland.

Price, Richard. “Portrait.” Interview by Adam Clark. Guardian, July 9, 1998, p. II-6. Price discusses his own troubled past and interest in “disenfranchised” characters and in giving “a shape to the urban nihilism that moves him.”

Prose, Francine. The New York Times Book Review, June 7, 1998, pp. 14-15. Prose comments that like the novels of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevski, Freedomland has the “capacity to shake up our unexamined assumptions.”

Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, April 6, 1998, p. 56. A review of Freedomland.

Sante, Luc. The New York Review of Books 45, no. 10 (June 11, 1998): 30-31. Sante observes that like the nineteenth century naturalists, Price believes that a novel can affect public perception.

Seymour, Gene. “Race by Tabloid Light.” Nation 267, no. 3 (July 20, 1998): 25-27. Seymour concludes that Freedomland evokes news stories in order to “challenge . . . Tabloid Culture’s dominion over our collective psyche.”

Time. CLI, May 18, 1998, p. 93. A review of Freedomland.

The Times Literary Supplement. July 10, 1998, p. 25. A review of Freedomland.