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Review
Praise for The Corrections:
'Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture – our culture. And he has done it with a sympathy and expansiveness that bends the edgy modern temper to a generous breadth of vision.' Don DeLillo
‘Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords.'
David Foster Wallace
'In its complexity, its scrutinizing and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, The Corrections stands in the company of Mann's Buddenbrooks and DeLillo's White Noise. It is a major accomplishment.'
Michael Cunningham
'A book which is funny, moving, generous, brutal and intelligent, and which poses the ultimate question, what life is for - and that is as much as anyone could ask.' Blake Morrison, GUARDIAN
'A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike & Roth. That's why there is so much excitement about it.' David Sexton, EVENING STANDARD
'A novel of outstanding sympathy, wit, moral intelligence and pathos, a family saga told with stylistic brio and psychological and political insight. No British novelist is currently writing at this pitch.' Jeremy Treglowen, FINANCIAL TIMES
'Impossible to dislike, an unpretentious page-turner.' Zadie Smith, GUARDIAN Books of the Year
'The Corrections is a wonderful book. Every page simmers with wit, close observation and intelligence. Franzen has delivered as wounding and thoughtful an indictment of contemporary existence as it is possible to make.' John Burnside, SCOTSMAN
Product Description
The new novel from the author of The Corrections.
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbour who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world.
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter's old college friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbour," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?
In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of too much liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
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Customer Reviews
- If you enjoy a very generous smattering of blow-you-sideways in-their-entirety quotable sentences
it's very likely then that you will enjoy Freedom.
it's set during the Bush 43 era and is about the Berglund family and their two kids. But it delves into their pasts and I left it feeling that jonathan franzen is deeply intelligent and very astute about our very human frailties and foibles (however much we like to kid ourselves that we are so perfect and wise)
He manages to tell a very compelling story through the eyes of all the various participants with a rare skill in the use of language. He's also by turns very slyly witty and deeply humane in his view of how we conduct our lives.
This is novel-writing in a league of its own, whatever its faults and it has been vilified and attacked, it's wonderfully interesting, warm and just as importantly highly readable and enjoyable.
My own guess is that Franzen is an extremely hard working writer and he won't release a book into the world, until he has worked it and worked it to a thoroughly satisfying wholeness and unity.
Over a third of the book is told from Walter's wife Patty's point of view, but she's writing in third person, on her therapist's suggestion. This gives rise to the one glaring technical fault with the book: her voice is exactly the same as Franzen's own omniscient narrator's voice: arch, amusedly distant, and so forth. That means it's still fun to read, but it's easy to forget, and hard to accept, that it's supposed to be Patty writing. There's also comment on the Iraq war, 9/11, lots of anti-consumerist stuff. There's a secondary character called Jonathon, a very conscientious young man, vocally anti-war - I'm guessing his first name's not accidental.
Another qualm I had about "Freedom" is the dialogue. Franzen is very good at dialogue, his dialogue is very contemporary, he's up with all the latest slang, but he goes too far in this direction in this book, for me. The dialogue is too quirky, too many little nuances and plays on words, people don't talk like that.
Overall, this book is a bit self-consciously engaging in all of the hot-button problems of our times. It's slightly didactic, and will probably annoy persons of a right-wing persuasion, as it seems to have a political bias. It's witty, and smart, and well-written, sometimes funny, some great lines, and some endearing characters. Whether it's as great as its champions proclaim it, or as bad as the people who don't like it say, - well, it's probably somewhere in the middle, like everything. It's definitely worth reading. It'll give every reader something to chew on. Further than that, I really cannot say.
'Born Free, as... Read more
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