Going for the slow burn

One of the cinema highlights we can look forward to next year is Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, which stars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. The director notoriously leaves a long hiatus beween films - 20 years in the case of Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998). Compared with that, the five-year gap to his last film, The New World, is nothing.

Another director I love who we haven't heard much of in a while is Vincent Ward. The New Zealander made his name in 1988 with The Navigator and followed it up five years later with the epic Map of the Human Heart but then lost his way with mythical What Dreams May Come (1998), starring Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra; I trust we'll hear from Ward again. Basque director Julio Medem is another major talent who's recently reemerged, with the small-scale Room in Rome, which has gone straight to video in the UK.

In difficult times for film funding, it won't come as a surprise if we see more of these lapses in the future, however. (I've written before about Hal Hartley and Whit Stillman.) Some authors are famous for it in the book world: Thomas Pynchon made his debut in 1963 with V. but, perhaps understandably, hit a 17-year silence following Gravity's Rainbow prior to Vineland (1990). Recently he's been downright prolific and the psychedelic prose of his latest, Inherent Vice (coming three years after Against the Day, 2006), makes a damn fine read.

The biggest novel of 2010 - Freedom - came nine years after its predecessor, The Corrections. The same gap followed author Jonathan Franzen's previous work, Strong Motion (1992).

Some of my favourite musicians are famous for having long breaks between albums; take The Blue Nile, who left a five-year gap between beautiful debut A Walk Across the Rooftops (1984) and the equally lush Hats, before waiting a further seven years for the disappointing Peace at Last (1996). Their fourth album, High, was released in 2004, so it's about time for a follow-up.

Even less in a hurry to get back in the studio is the formidable Scritti Politti (Green Gartside). Here are the years of release of his last three albums: 1988, 1999 and 2006. Importantly, every time he does deliver, it's worth the wait. Don't rush back.

Freedom: what's in a word

I'm slightly surprised that nobody so far has got some poor intern to go through the two versions of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom looking for the 50 or so changes that he's supposed to have made between them. I don't have the time to do that, but I am intrigued by the occasions the title crops up in the text. The book begins with a 24-page form of prologue that's breathtaking in its breadth and splendour, describing the marital life of the Berglunds, Walter and Patty.

The next section, however, an 'Autobiography of Patty Berglund by Patty Berglund (Composed at her Therapist's Suggestion)', smacks of a disappointing version of David Foster Wallace. In it, 'freedom' is used for the first time: 'She [Patty] had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.' Visiting her daughter at college a few pages later, Patty notices 'a stone graven with words of wisdom from the Class of 1920: USE WELL THY FREEDOM.'

The F-word appears again in the book's second section, 'Mountaintop Removal', but this time applied to major corporations and the way they can act in respect of environmental/wildlife concerns: 'The coal companies had reason to fear that the warbler would soon be listed under the Endangered Species Act, with potentially deleterious effects on their freedom to cut down forests and blow up mountains.'

Though I'm not convinced by all of the writing in Freedom, Franzen, like Douglas Coupland, is a very good reader of his own work and, at the point you're wondering what happened to the Berglunds' enigmatic son Joey, there he is. And he is accorded the fourth mention of the title when, despite his differences with the parents from whom he is essentially divorced, he suddenly recognises the consequences of his personal choices: 'He'd asked for his freedom, they'd granted it, and he couldn't go back now.'

Post 9/11, this freedom thing is a double-edged sword; as the Iraq invasion looms, the neocons are pictured 'waving their hands and acting as if it didn't even matter if any WMDs came to light; as if the freedom of the Iraqi people were the main issue.' Drawn into an argument about Iraq and the Middle East with a roommate's politico father, Joey says: 'Isn't that what freedom is for? The right to think whatever you want? I mean, I admit, it's a pain in the ass sometimes.'

Joey's conflicted father, Walter, progresses the argument 100 pages on: 'People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your own kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want.'

Among those who came to the States for money or freedom is Walter's irascible Swedish grandfather, Einar. We're told: 'America, for Einar, was the land of unSwedish freedom, the place of wide-open spaces where a son could still imagine he was special.' And here, with reference to Einar's aggressive road manners, comes the authorial voice (in brackets): 'The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.' Einar is representative of Walter's immigrant prejudice: 'He hated the blacks, the Indians, the well-educated, the hoity-toity, and, especially, the federal government, and he loved his freedoms (to drink, to smoke, to hole up with his buddies in an ice-fishing hut) the more intensely for being so modest.'

(Spoiler warning! You may want to skip this paragraph if you haven't finished Freedom.) Walter is increasingly the book's central figure and he is the subject when his best friend, Richard, a musician, tries to woo Walter's wife, Patty, the long-time object of a mutual passion. '"Come with me,"' Richard tells her. '"We'll go somewhere and Walter can have his freedom."' Granted his liberation, Walter embarks on an affair with his young coworker on an angry environmental project: 'Like a cold spring at the bottom of a warmer lake, old Swedish-gened depression was seeping up inside him: a feeling of not deserving a partner like Lalitha; of not being made for a life of freedom and outlaw heroics; of needing a more dully and enduringly discontented situation to struggle against and fashion an existence within.'

I've no doubt missed other mentions of freedom; without wanting to give any more away, the book's ending, for Walter, could be seen as a form of surrender. Franzen seems unsure of himself when he goes beyond the world of Patty and Walter (don't get me started on his portrayal of 'dark-skinned' Lalitha, as he likes to draw her; there are some odd, scatological, comic set-pieces here, too). The lack of confidence may have been underlined by the unfortunate kerfuffle over 'the corrections' but it is to the book of that title I'd go if you want to investigate Franzen for the first time. If you're determined for a taste of Freedom, do consider waiting for the paperback: at this heft, the hardback's not the most convenient tube read. (Like those books that come with their own reading stand, this should have its own shoulder bag, marketing folk?)

Everything you always wanted to know about specs...

Poor Jonathan Franzen. First the wrong version of his book is published, then some idiot goes and steals his glasses. I would find that an unforgiveable personal invasion - I've worn glasses since I was a child and can't imagine what I would look or feel like without them, but that's the joy of specs.

His glasses would, however, make a great contribution to the British Optical Association Museum, which was established in 1901 and is now housed in a basement on the same London street as Benjamin Franklin House. Fellow American Herman Melville and German poet Heinrich Heine lived down the road in the 19th century.

What its website styles the 'musEYEum' is said to be 'the oldest and one of the best optical museums in the world'. It has a collection of some 16,ooo objects, only a fraction of which can be exhibited at any time, ranging from an intricate 17th-century model of an eye made from ivory to the latest blister-packed contact lenses. (They don't, however, have T-shirts boasting the legend: 'I went to the Optical Museum and made a spectacle of myself.')

A selection of frames - including a pair with automated wipers - is a great resource for current designers, says the museum's enthusiastic curator (the picture, above, is taken with his kind permission). The collection includes eyewear belonging to Dr Johnson, CP Snow and Ronnie Corbett - yep, they're kept in glasses cases - as well as the arms of spectacles belonging to Dr Crippen. An optician, I'm told, he smashed the lenses in an attempt to kill himself.

I wouldn't have minded seeing more famous frames: I particularly favour those iconic, round-rimmed Windsors, I believe they're called, sported by as various a crowd as Gandhi, Groucho Marx, John Lennon and Harry Potter, but would love to see Woody Allen's classic set - he's said to have given Penelope Cruz a pair after filming Vicky Christina Barcelona - or even those belonging to Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Soku. (Does anyone pass down frames to their children?)

Wandering up Charing Cross Road afterwards I'm struck by the huge variety of spectacles on show worn by passersby. At a time when gene treatment, advances in laser surgery and the like could mean glasses become an idiosyncratic throwback, we should try and compile some form of specs files. With Franzen's pair at the centre of the crime of the hour, where better to start? It could be called You've Been Framed.