Freedom (novel)
Encyclopedia
Freedom is a novel
by American author Jonathan Franzen
. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
and released on August 31, 2010.
.
Freedom opens with a short history of the Berglund family from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. The Berglunds are portrayed as a quintessential liberal
middle-class family, and they are among the first families to move back into urban St. Paul
, Minnesota
after years of white flight
to the suburbs. Patty Berglund is an unusually young and pretty homemaker with a self-deprecating sense of humor; her husband Walter is a mild-mannered lawyer with strong environmentalist
leanings.
They have one daughter, Jessica, and a son, Joey, who early on displays an independent streak and an interest in making money. Joey becomes sexually involved with a neighborhood teen named Connie, and begins to rebel against his mother, going so far as to move in with Connie and her mother, making Patty and Walter increasingly unstable. After several unhappy years the family relocates to Washington, D.C.
, abandoning the neighborhood and house they worked so hard to improve. Walter takes a job with an unorthodox environmental project, tied to big coal.
The second portion of the book takes the form of an autobiography of Patty Berglund, composed at the suggestion of her therapist. The autobiography tells of Patty's youth as a star basketball player, and her increasing alienation from her artistically inclined parents and sisters. Instead of attending an East Coast elite college like her siblings, she gets a basketball scholarship to the University of Minnesota
, and adopts the life of the hardcore jock. Here she meets an attractive but unattainable indie rock
musician named Richard Katz, and his nerdy but kind roommate, Walter Berglund. After her knee gives out and her basketball career is over, Patty suddenly becomes desperate for male affection, and after failing to woo Richard, she settles down with Walter, who has been patiently courting her for more than a year. We learn that Patty retained her desire for Richard and eventually had a brief affair with him at the Berglunds's lakeside cabin.
The novel then jumps ahead to New York City
in 2004 and shifts to the story of Walter and Patty's friend Richard, who has finally succeeded in becoming a minor indie rock star in his middle age. His hit album, Nameless Lake, tells the story of his brief love affair with Patty at the Berglund's lakeside cabin in Minnesota. Richard is uncomfortable with commercial success and has thrown away his new found money and gone back to building roof decks for wealthy people in Manhattan
. Walter calls him out of the blue to enlist his help as celebrity spokesman for an environmental campaign. Walter has taken a job in Washington, D.C. working for a coal mining magnate who wants to strip mine a section of West Virginia
forest before turning it into a songbird preserve of future environmental value. Walter hopes to use some of this project's funding to hold a concert to combat overpopulation
, the common factor behind all his environmental concerns, and he believes that Richard will be able to rally well known musicians to his cause. Meanwhile, Walter's marriage to Patty has been deteriorating steadily and his pretty young assistant Lalitha has fallen deeply in love with him.
In parallel, the Berglunds's estranged, Republican son Joey attempts to finance his college life at the University of Virginia
by taking on a dubious subcontract to provide spare parts for outdated supply trucks during the Iraq War. While at college, he marries his childhood sweetheart, but dare not tell his parents. After visiting his roommate's family in the DC suburbs, he also pursues his friend's beautiful sister Jenna and is exposed to her father's Zionist
, neoconservative politics. After months of pursuing Jenna, when she finally wants him to have sex with her, he cannot maintain an erection. Later he becomes conflicted after making $900,000 selling defective truck parts to military suppliers in Iraq. In the end Joey gives away the excess proceeds of his profiteering, reconciles with his parents, settles down with Connie, and moves into a sustainable coffee business with the help of his father Walter.
Now, Richard's re-appearance destroys Walter and Patty's weakening marriage. Richard tries to convince Patty to leave Walter, but she shows Richard the autobiography she wrote as "therapy", trying to convince him that she's still in love with Walter. Richard deliberately leaves the autobiography on Walter's desk, and Walter reads Patty's true thoughts. Walter kicks Patty out of the house and she moves to Jersey City
to be with Richard, but the relationship only lasts six months. Later, she moves to Brooklyn
alone and takes a job at a private school, discovering her skill for teaching younger children. When Patty leaves him, Walter has a catharsis on live television, revealing his contempt for the displaced West Virginian families and his various commercial backers. Local rednecks respond by dragging him from the platform and beating him up. He is promptly fired by the environmental trust, but his TV debacle makes him a viral video hero to radical youth across the nation. He and his assistant Lalitha become lovers and continue their plans to combat overpopulation through a concert to rally young people in the hills of West Virginia. Lalitha is killed in a suspicious car accident a few days before the concert is due to take place. Shattered, and having lost both of the women who loved him, Walter retreats to his family's lakeside vacation house back in Minnesota. He becomes known to a new street of neighbors as a cranky old recluse, obsessed with house cats killing birds nesting on his property.
After a few years living in Brooklyn, Patty's father dies and she is forced to settle the fight that erupts within her family of spoiled bohemians as they attempt to split up the much-diminished family fortune. This experience helps Patty to mature. After a few years of living alone, she appraises the emptiness of her life and honestly faces her advancing age. She decides to hunt down Walter, the only man who had ever really loved her. She drives to the lakeside cabin in Minnesota, and despite his rage and confusion, he eventually agrees to take her back. The book ends in 2008 as they leave as a couple to return to Patty's job in New York City, after turning their old lakeside vacation home into a cat-proof fenced bird sanctuary, named in memory of Lalitha.
in 2001, Franzen began work on his fourth full-length novel. When asked during an October 30, 2002 interview on Charlie Rose how far he was into writing the new novel, Franzen replied:
Franzen went on to suggest that a basic story outline was in place, and that his writing of the new novel was like a "guerilla war" approaching different aspects of the novel (alluding to characters, dialogue, plot development etc.). Franzen also agreed that he would avoid public appearances, saying that "...getting some work done is the vacation" from the promotional work surrounding The Corrections and How To Be Alone.
An excerpt entitled "Good Neighbors" appeared in the June 8 and June 15, 2009 issues of The New Yorker
. The magazine published a second extract entitled "Agreeable" in the May 31, 2010 edition.
On October 16, 2009, Franzen made an appearance alongside David Bezmozgis
at the New Yorker Festival at the Cedar Lake Theatre to read a portion of his forthcoming novel. Sam Allard, writing for North By Northwestern website covering the event, said that the "...material from his new (reportedly massive) novel" was "as buoyant and compelling as ever" and "marked by his familiar undercurrent of tragedy". Franzen read "an extended clip from the second chapter."
On March 12, 2010, details about the plot and content of Freedom were published in the Macmillan fall catalogue for 2010
In an interview with Dave Haslam
on October 3, 2010 Franzen discussed why he had called the book Freedom:
wrote "Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family’s facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at—incredibly—genuine hope."
Alan Cheuse
of National Public Radio wrote "Despite the brilliance, or maybe even because of it, I found the novel quite unappealing, maybe because every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didn't want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to. His book just has too much brightness and not enough color."
After Franzen appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" on December 6, 2010, Alexander Nazaryan wrote in the New York Daily News
, "Leo Tolstoy
- whose Anna Karenina
also was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, though a little posthumously - could write of Russian peasants with the same candor and curiosity he had for St. Petersburg high society. Franzen can write about a gentrifying family in St. Paul. Or maybe in St. Louis. But that’s about it. 'Maybe I’m doomed as a novelist never to do anything but stories of Midwestern families,' Franzen suggested earlier this year, and I don’t think he was joking."
In The Millions
, Garth Risk Hallberg wrote "Readers looking for the pleasures of The Corrections will find all of them here, in force. But they are also likely to come away from this novel moved in harder-to-fathom ways – and grateful for it. Which is to express the hope that, amid the general childishness of the cultural scene he skewers so lovingly, Jonathan Franzen and his audience may be growing up together."
Michiko Kakutani
wrote "Jonathan Franzen’s galvanic new novel, “Freedom,” showcases his impressive literary toolkit — every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean
picture window on American middle-class life. With this book, he’s not only created an unforgettable family, he’s also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters... This time, in creating conflicted, contrarian individuals capable of choosing their own fates, Mr. Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet — a novel that turns out to be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times."
Sam Anderson, in a review for New York
magazine, wrote "[T]he book would probably be insufferably dull if it weren’t for the fact that it also happens to be a work of total genius: a reminder both of why everyone got so excited about Franzen in the first place and of the undeniable magic—even today, in our digital end-times—of the old-timey literary novel...[however] Freedom is not, by any means, a perfect book...most obviously, there’s Franzen the crank—mighty detester of Twitter, ATVs, and housing developments—who occasionally steps in to overpower Franzen the artist. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it’s the author or his characters ranting about consumerism, the bloodlust of America’s domestic cats (they kill something like one billion songbirds a year), and the younger generation’s disturbing habit of wearing flip-flops...But if crankiness is the motor that powers Franzen’s art, I’m perfectly willing to sit through some speeches. My irritation with crabby manipulative Franzen is, after all, just a testament to the life of his characters, who are so real I desperately want him to leave them alone, and let them run free."
In Esquire
, Benjamin Alsup wrote "The first thing people are going to want to know about Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom is if it measures up to Franzen's last novel, The Corrections. It measures up....The important thing is that The Corrections is a great novel. So is Freedom...Freedom doesn't name check War and Peace for nothing. It's making a claim for shelf space among the kind of books that the big dogs used to write. The kind they called important. The kind they called greats... Freedom reminds us just how much these things matter, reminds us that they matter more than Scotch and jeans and Jake Gyllenhaal. It lets us know that these things are worth thinking and fighting and maybe even reading about."
The Economist
wrote "Mr Franzen’s work will not appeal to those seeking sharp-edged experimentalism in their fiction. But for readers who believe the novel to be an old-fashioned thing that, at its best, should bring alive fully imagined characters in a powerful narrative with a social context, his new book will be a huge draw. The author has spent the past ten years doing what he does well and making it better. “Freedom” has all its predecessor’s power and none of its faults...With its all-encompassing world, its flawed heroes and its redemptive ending, “Freedom” has the sweep of a modern “Paradise Lost."
Ron Charles
of The Washington Post
wrote "We've read this story before in The Corrections
, back when it was witty, when its satire of contemporary family, business and politics sounded brash and fresh, when its revival of social realism was so boisterous that it ripped the hinges off the doors of American literature. The most anticipated, heralded novel of this year gives us a similarly toxic stew of domestic life, but Franzen's wit has mostly boiled away, leaving a bitter sludge of dysfunction...Love him or hate him — the critical extremism he inspires demands that everybody pick a side — you've got to admit he's an extraordinary stylist, America's best answer to Martin Amis
. In dialogue that conveys each palpitation of the heart, every wince of the conscience, and especially in those elegantly extended phrases of narration, Franzen conveys his psychological acuity in a fugue of erudition, pathos and irony that is simply fantastic. But how many readers, even the long-suffering readers of literary fiction, will settle for linguistic brilliance as sufficient compensation for what is sometimes a misanthropic slog? What else does "Freedom" offer as it churns over the detritus of one middle-class family?"
made Freedom her first book club selection
of 2010, saying "this book is a masterpiece." US President Barack Obama
hailed the book as "terrific" after reading it over the summer.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by American author Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His third novel, The Corrections , a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction...
. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John C. Farrar. Known primarily as Farrar, Straus in its first decade of existence, the company was renamed several times, including Farrar, Straus and Young and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
and released on August 31, 2010.
Plot
Freedom follows several members of an American family, the Berglunds, as well as their close friends and lovers, as complex and troubled relationships unfold over many years. The book follows them through the last decades of the twentieth century and concludes near the beginning of the Obama administrationPresidency of Barack Obama
The Presidency of Barack Obama began at noon EST on January 20, 2009 when he became the 44th President of the United States. Obama was a United States Senator from Illinois at the time of his victory over Arizona Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election...
.
Freedom opens with a short history of the Berglund family from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. The Berglunds are portrayed as a quintessential liberal
Liberalism in the United States
Liberalism in the United States is a broad political philosophy centered on the unalienable rights of the individual. The fundamental liberal ideals of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion for all belief systems, and the separation of church and state, right to due process...
middle-class family, and they are among the first families to move back into urban St. Paul
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Saint Paul is the capital and second-most populous city of the U.S. state of Minnesota. The city lies mostly on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the area surrounding its point of confluence with the Minnesota River, and adjoins Minneapolis, the state's largest city...
, Minnesota
Minnesota
Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...
after years of white flight
White flight
White flight has been a term that originated in the United States, starting in the mid-20th century, and applied to the large-scale migration of whites of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions. It was first seen as...
to the suburbs. Patty Berglund is an unusually young and pretty homemaker with a self-deprecating sense of humor; her husband Walter is a mild-mannered lawyer with strong environmentalist
Environmentalist
An environmentalist broadly supports the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities"...
leanings.
They have one daughter, Jessica, and a son, Joey, who early on displays an independent streak and an interest in making money. Joey becomes sexually involved with a neighborhood teen named Connie, and begins to rebel against his mother, going so far as to move in with Connie and her mother, making Patty and Walter increasingly unstable. After several unhappy years the family relocates to Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, abandoning the neighborhood and house they worked so hard to improve. Walter takes a job with an unorthodox environmental project, tied to big coal.
The second portion of the book takes the form of an autobiography of Patty Berglund, composed at the suggestion of her therapist. The autobiography tells of Patty's youth as a star basketball player, and her increasing alienation from her artistically inclined parents and sisters. Instead of attending an East Coast elite college like her siblings, she gets a basketball scholarship to the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
, and adopts the life of the hardcore jock. Here she meets an attractive but unattainable indie rock
Indie rock
Indie rock is a genre of alternative rock that originated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1980s. Indie rock is extremely diverse, with sub-genres that include lo-fi, post-rock, math rock, indie pop, dream pop, noise rock, space rock, sadcore, riot grrrl and emo, among others...
musician named Richard Katz, and his nerdy but kind roommate, Walter Berglund. After her knee gives out and her basketball career is over, Patty suddenly becomes desperate for male affection, and after failing to woo Richard, she settles down with Walter, who has been patiently courting her for more than a year. We learn that Patty retained her desire for Richard and eventually had a brief affair with him at the Berglunds's lakeside cabin.
The novel then jumps ahead to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in 2004 and shifts to the story of Walter and Patty's friend Richard, who has finally succeeded in becoming a minor indie rock star in his middle age. His hit album, Nameless Lake, tells the story of his brief love affair with Patty at the Berglund's lakeside cabin in Minnesota. Richard is uncomfortable with commercial success and has thrown away his new found money and gone back to building roof decks for wealthy people in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
. Walter calls him out of the blue to enlist his help as celebrity spokesman for an environmental campaign. Walter has taken a job in Washington, D.C. working for a coal mining magnate who wants to strip mine a section of West Virginia
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...
forest before turning it into a songbird preserve of future environmental value. Walter hopes to use some of this project's funding to hold a concert to combat overpopulation
Overpopulation
Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. The term often refers to the relationship between the human population and its environment, the Earth...
, the common factor behind all his environmental concerns, and he believes that Richard will be able to rally well known musicians to his cause. Meanwhile, Walter's marriage to Patty has been deteriorating steadily and his pretty young assistant Lalitha has fallen deeply in love with him.
In parallel, the Berglunds's estranged, Republican son Joey attempts to finance his college life at the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
by taking on a dubious subcontract to provide spare parts for outdated supply trucks during the Iraq War. While at college, he marries his childhood sweetheart, but dare not tell his parents. After visiting his roommate's family in the DC suburbs, he also pursues his friend's beautiful sister Jenna and is exposed to her father's Zionist
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
, neoconservative politics. After months of pursuing Jenna, when she finally wants him to have sex with her, he cannot maintain an erection. Later he becomes conflicted after making $900,000 selling defective truck parts to military suppliers in Iraq. In the end Joey gives away the excess proceeds of his profiteering, reconciles with his parents, settles down with Connie, and moves into a sustainable coffee business with the help of his father Walter.
Now, Richard's re-appearance destroys Walter and Patty's weakening marriage. Richard tries to convince Patty to leave Walter, but she shows Richard the autobiography she wrote as "therapy", trying to convince him that she's still in love with Walter. Richard deliberately leaves the autobiography on Walter's desk, and Walter reads Patty's true thoughts. Walter kicks Patty out of the house and she moves to Jersey City
Jersey City, New Jersey
Jersey City is the seat of Hudson County, New Jersey, United States.Part of the New York metropolitan area, Jersey City lies between the Hudson River and Upper New York Bay across from Lower Manhattan and the Hackensack River and Newark Bay...
to be with Richard, but the relationship only lasts six months. Later, she moves to Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
alone and takes a job at a private school, discovering her skill for teaching younger children. When Patty leaves him, Walter has a catharsis on live television, revealing his contempt for the displaced West Virginian families and his various commercial backers. Local rednecks respond by dragging him from the platform and beating him up. He is promptly fired by the environmental trust, but his TV debacle makes him a viral video hero to radical youth across the nation. He and his assistant Lalitha become lovers and continue their plans to combat overpopulation through a concert to rally young people in the hills of West Virginia. Lalitha is killed in a suspicious car accident a few days before the concert is due to take place. Shattered, and having lost both of the women who loved him, Walter retreats to his family's lakeside vacation house back in Minnesota. He becomes known to a new street of neighbors as a cranky old recluse, obsessed with house cats killing birds nesting on his property.
After a few years living in Brooklyn, Patty's father dies and she is forced to settle the fight that erupts within her family of spoiled bohemians as they attempt to split up the much-diminished family fortune. This experience helps Patty to mature. After a few years of living alone, she appraises the emptiness of her life and honestly faces her advancing age. She decides to hunt down Walter, the only man who had ever really loved her. She drives to the lakeside cabin in Minnesota, and despite his rage and confusion, he eventually agrees to take her back. The book ends in 2008 as they leave as a couple to return to Patty's job in New York City, after turning their old lakeside vacation home into a cat-proof fenced bird sanctuary, named in memory of Lalitha.
Development
After the critical acclaim and popular success of his third novel The CorrectionsThe Corrections
The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-twentieth century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium...
in 2001, Franzen began work on his fourth full-length novel. When asked during an October 30, 2002 interview on Charlie Rose how far he was into writing the new novel, Franzen replied:
I'm about a year of frustration and confusion into it...Y'know, I'm kind of down at the bottom of the submerged ice berg peering up for the surface of the water...I don't have doubt about my ability to write a good book, but I have lots of doubt about what it's going to look like.
Franzen went on to suggest that a basic story outline was in place, and that his writing of the new novel was like a "guerilla war" approaching different aspects of the novel (alluding to characters, dialogue, plot development etc.). Franzen also agreed that he would avoid public appearances, saying that "...getting some work done is the vacation" from the promotional work surrounding The Corrections and How To Be Alone.
An excerpt entitled "Good Neighbors" appeared in the June 8 and June 15, 2009 issues of The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. The magazine published a second extract entitled "Agreeable" in the May 31, 2010 edition.
On October 16, 2009, Franzen made an appearance alongside David Bezmozgis
David Bezmozgis
David Bezmozgis is a Canadian writer and filmmaker.Born in Riga, Latvia, he came to Canada with his family when he was six. He graduated with a B.A. in English literature from McGill University. Bezmozgis received an M.F.A. from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television....
at the New Yorker Festival at the Cedar Lake Theatre to read a portion of his forthcoming novel. Sam Allard, writing for North By Northwestern website covering the event, said that the "...material from his new (reportedly massive) novel" was "as buoyant and compelling as ever" and "marked by his familiar undercurrent of tragedy". Franzen read "an extended clip from the second chapter."
On March 12, 2010, details about the plot and content of Freedom were published in the Macmillan fall catalogue for 2010
In an interview with Dave Haslam
Dave Haslam
Dave Haslam is an author and DJ. Originally from Moseley, Birmingham, and educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham. Having moved to Manchester in 1980, he DJ'd over 450 times at the Haçienda nightclub, including Thursday's Temperance club night in the late 1980s...
on October 3, 2010 Franzen discussed why he had called the book Freedom:
The reason I slapped the word on the book proposal I sold three years ago without any clear idea of what kind of book it was going to be is that I wanted to write a book that would free me in some way. And I will say this about the abstract concept of 'freedom'; it's possible you are freer if you accept what you are and just get on with being the person you are, than if you maintain this kind of uncommitted I'm free-to-be-this, free-to-be-that, faux freedom.
Reviews
Publishers WeeklyPublishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
wrote "Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family’s facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at—incredibly—genuine hope."
Alan Cheuse
Alan Cheuse
Alan Cheuse is an American writer and critic, the son of a Russian immigrant father and a mother of Romanian descent. He graduated from Perth Amboy High School in 1957 and Rutgers University in 1961. After traveling abroad and working for several years at various writing and editing jobs, he...
of National Public Radio wrote "Despite the brilliance, or maybe even because of it, I found the novel quite unappealing, maybe because every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didn't want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to. His book just has too much brightness and not enough color."
After Franzen appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" on December 6, 2010, Alexander Nazaryan wrote in the New York Daily News
New York Daily News
The Daily News of New York City is the fourth most widely circulated daily newspaper in the United States with a daily circulation of 605,677, as of November 1, 2011....
, "Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
- whose Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger...
also was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, though a little posthumously - could write of Russian peasants with the same candor and curiosity he had for St. Petersburg high society. Franzen can write about a gentrifying family in St. Paul. Or maybe in St. Louis. But that’s about it. 'Maybe I’m doomed as a novelist never to do anything but stories of Midwestern families,' Franzen suggested earlier this year, and I don’t think he was joking."
In The Millions
The Millions
The Millions is an online literary magazine created by C. Max Magee in 2003. It contains articles about literary topics and book reviews.The Millions has several regular contributors as well as frequent guest appearances by literary notables, including Rosecrans Baldwin, Josh Bazell, Mark Binelli,...
, Garth Risk Hallberg wrote "Readers looking for the pleasures of The Corrections will find all of them here, in force. But they are also likely to come away from this novel moved in harder-to-fathom ways – and grateful for it. Which is to express the hope that, amid the general childishness of the cultural scene he skewers so lovingly, Jonathan Franzen and his audience may be growing up together."
Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani
is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times and is considered by many to be a leading literary critic in the United States.-Life and career:...
wrote "Jonathan Franzen’s galvanic new novel, “Freedom,” showcases his impressive literary toolkit — every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
picture window on American middle-class life. With this book, he’s not only created an unforgettable family, he’s also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters... This time, in creating conflicted, contrarian individuals capable of choosing their own fates, Mr. Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet — a novel that turns out to be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times."
Sam Anderson, in a review for New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
magazine, wrote "[T]he book would probably be insufferably dull if it weren’t for the fact that it also happens to be a work of total genius: a reminder both of why everyone got so excited about Franzen in the first place and of the undeniable magic—even today, in our digital end-times—of the old-timey literary novel...[however] Freedom is not, by any means, a perfect book...most obviously, there’s Franzen the crank—mighty detester of Twitter, ATVs, and housing developments—who occasionally steps in to overpower Franzen the artist. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it’s the author or his characters ranting about consumerism, the bloodlust of America’s domestic cats (they kill something like one billion songbirds a year), and the younger generation’s disturbing habit of wearing flip-flops...But if crankiness is the motor that powers Franzen’s art, I’m perfectly willing to sit through some speeches. My irritation with crabby manipulative Franzen is, after all, just a testament to the life of his characters, who are so real I desperately want him to leave them alone, and let them run free."
In Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
, Benjamin Alsup wrote "The first thing people are going to want to know about Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom is if it measures up to Franzen's last novel, The Corrections. It measures up....The important thing is that The Corrections is a great novel. So is Freedom...Freedom doesn't name check War and Peace for nothing. It's making a claim for shelf space among the kind of books that the big dogs used to write. The kind they called important. The kind they called greats... Freedom reminds us just how much these things matter, reminds us that they matter more than Scotch and jeans and Jake Gyllenhaal. It lets us know that these things are worth thinking and fighting and maybe even reading about."
The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
wrote "Mr Franzen’s work will not appeal to those seeking sharp-edged experimentalism in their fiction. But for readers who believe the novel to be an old-fashioned thing that, at its best, should bring alive fully imagined characters in a powerful narrative with a social context, his new book will be a huge draw. The author has spent the past ten years doing what he does well and making it better. “Freedom” has all its predecessor’s power and none of its faults...With its all-encompassing world, its flawed heroes and its redemptive ending, “Freedom” has the sweep of a modern “Paradise Lost."
Ron Charles
Ron Charles
Ron Charles is deputy editor and a weekly fiction critic of The Washington Post "Book World", the book review section of the Post...
of The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
wrote "We've read this story before in The Corrections
The Corrections
The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-twentieth century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium...
, back when it was witty, when its satire of contemporary family, business and politics sounded brash and fresh, when its revival of social realism was so boisterous that it ripped the hinges off the doors of American literature. The most anticipated, heralded novel of this year gives us a similarly toxic stew of domestic life, but Franzen's wit has mostly boiled away, leaving a bitter sludge of dysfunction...Love him or hate him — the critical extremism he inspires demands that everybody pick a side — you've got to admit he's an extraordinary stylist, America's best answer to Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
. In dialogue that conveys each palpitation of the heart, every wince of the conscience, and especially in those elegantly extended phrases of narration, Franzen conveys his psychological acuity in a fugue of erudition, pathos and irony that is simply fantastic. But how many readers, even the long-suffering readers of literary fiction, will settle for linguistic brilliance as sufficient compensation for what is sometimes a misanthropic slog? What else does "Freedom" offer as it churns over the detritus of one middle-class family?"
Endorsements
Oprah WinfreyOprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011...
made Freedom her first book club selection
Oprah's Book Club
Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996, selecting a new novel for viewers to read and discuss each month. The Club ended its 15-year run, along with...
of 2010, saying "this book is a masterpiece." US President Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
hailed the book as "terrific" after reading it over the summer.
External links
- Publisher information from Farrar, Straus and Giroux about the novel.
- Excerpts from The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
- "Good Neighbors" (June 2009)
- "Agreeable" (May 2010)