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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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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Some mistakes are built to last...,
By
This review is from: Freedom (Paperback)
I'm unashamed to confess I absolutely loved this novel from start to finish. At the centre of it is Patty, a woman with many great qualities who misses the opportunities in her youth to fully explore her identity. This has a profound effect on her relationships with her husband, son and a free-spirited family friend. At the heart of the novel too is an exploration of our freedom to know and be ourselves...Frantzen is incredibly perceptive in the way he describes the motivations of the characters, and the way their dreams and frustrations affect their lives and the lives of others. The characters too are portrayed so vividly I half expected them to be sitting on my sofa when I looked up from the book. He makes this seem so easy, but having read so many novels where the characters aren't believable I think this is actually pretty hard. But it's not all heavy stuff. There's so much humour too. Joey, for example, is priceless. The scene where he 'recovers' his wedding ring several days after accidentally swallowing it is a definite highlight. Frantzen I think also has a great time with Richard and his musical endeavours too which are often very funny. Oh, and the acronym RISEN, for the company that won a contract to privatise post-invasion Iraq's bread-baking industry ? Genius. To sum up, I found this novel to be thought-provoking, sad, funny and ultimately life-affirming with some breathtakingly beautiful prose. Not to be condescending, but I have this feeling that it wouldn't necessarily appeal to those under the age of 40 who are yet to be cowed by life's disappointments. I can see how some people might prefer The Corrections and I agree that novel possibly has more range, but I loved Freedom more.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Plodding and self-important,
By David Gee (Sussex, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Freedom (Paperback)
I hate to give up on a novel, but after 300 pages I gave up on FREEDOM. It's a hard read: the story of a marriage that shouldn't have been and an adulterous affair that brings only temporary comfort. Well-worn territory.When John Updike wrote about infidelity and marriages that barely hold together, he did it with touches of humour and a fluid prose style that was a joy to read. John Irving can be long-winded but his characters have an endearing 'oddness' about them. Jonathan Franzen here gives us a frankly plodding minute-by-minute account of a doomed marriage. There's a little humour, but not enough. His long paragraphs and leaden sentences seem to belong to an earlier era in American fiction: Faulkner, say, or Melville - great writers, yes, but stylistically very slow and dense. Franzen needs an editor with a large stash of blue pencils! FREEDOM feels like it's an important novel about contemporary life and mores, but it gets bogged down in its own self-importance. I have similar issues with England's favoured son Martin Amis, so the problem may lie with me rather than with the authors. Reviewer is the author of Shaikh-Down
122 of 141 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Good American Novel,
By
This review is from: Freedom (Hardcover)
Ten years after "The Corrections", Franzen finally comes up with the 562 pages of the follow-up, "Freedom". Such an evocative and multilayered, if unimaginative, title, shows that Franzen is up for the inevitable Great American Novel considerations. It's a lot like its predecessor in being a panoramic view of an average middle-class American family, here the Berglunds, moving back and forward in time to show how they became what they are, and each generation's interactions with the next. Then there's all the environmental stuff: the father of the Berglund family, Walter, is a conservationist nut, albeit one who's kind of in bed with the coal industry for a while: cue much soul-searching.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.
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