Freedom

A Novel

By: Jonathan Franzen

Narrated by: David LeDoux

Length: 24 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.

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 neighbor, 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, total 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 college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” 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 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.

©2010 Jonathan Franzen (P)2010 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"The Great American Novel." ( Esquire)

"It’s refreshing to see a novelist who wants to engage the questions of our time in the tradition of 20th-century greats like John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis . . . [This] is a book you’ll still be thinking about long after you’ve finished reading it." (Patrick Condon, Associated Press)

“Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges. He proves himself as adept at adolescent comedy as he is at grown-up tragedy; as skilled at holding a mirror to the world his people inhabit day by dreary day as he is at limning their messy inner lives . . . 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." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)

What a slog

What would have made Freedom better?

Freedom can't be better. The author apparently believes that people fall into one of 2 categories: pure Republican and pure Democrat. It's clear that he hates Republicans but then he goes on to make the main characters (Democrats) completely unlikable. People do not fall into pure categories and I think his approach is an example of a lazy writer.

Would you ever listen to anything by Jonathan Franzen again?

Absolutely not.

What three words best describe David LeDoux’s performance?

The narrator did a fine job and deserves hazard duty page for having to slog through this book.

What character would you cut from Freedom?

All of them. The characters are so self-absorbed and incapable of dealing with any of life's difficulties. They deserved to be miserable!

Sad, Self-Absorbed, Miserable...

And I mean the book's characters. If you want to spend hours pulled into a quagmire of depressive dribble about every one of the characters, this is the book for you!

Great Story, but couldn't get all the way through

loved the story, thought it was great, then in Chapter 30 it became very political. i don't read books to listen to every one of Jonathan Franzen's qualms with modern society and the state of politics in the United States. After that, I decided to not read the rest of it and am writing this review. I really liked The Corrections so I am disappointed.

Save your money and credits

Boring, boring, boring! What else can one say about such a boring senseless, unentertaining work? It is boring!

A book to make you feel sad and obsolete

I read this because I loved the humor of his earlier novel The Corrections, but Freedom lacked the hilarity and kindness toward the characters necessary for a book that includes so much marital betrayal and neighborhood bickering. In the end you just feel like all characters are older and while nothing has changed in their proximity to each other, the pain they have caused each other is astronomic. This book brings to light that while we all get older and make life decisions to make our lives better we will be unhappy no matter what and old. It's just a bummers of a book.

Too long, tedious, poor narration

The main problem with this book is it is way longer than it needs to be, which means you have to slog your way through way too much tedious crap. I mean, there is only so much of the inner workings of a horny and uncaring teenage boy's mind you can take, for example. So much same old, same old, you said that a hundred times in a hundred ways so move on already. But what I disliked most was the narration, and what I disliked most about the narration was the way he made caricatures out of the female characters. I love audible books, and I recognize that this is a problem to some degree with all of them, as a single narrator tries to come up with different sounds for the different characters so you know who is talking when it doesn't specifically say. And male voices don't generally make attractive female voices, or vice versa. But it is the intonations he gives his female characters more than the voices themselves that just make them seem like airheaded nitwits. He was generally pretty good when just reading text, but when he took on characters, including Walter and all the female characters, it was just awful. Usually I plug myself into my iphone to listen to my audible books at every spare moment during the day, but not this one.

Couldn't take it anymore...

I made it most of the way through Part One of this three part audiobook. The narrator was a little whiny, but I don't blame him because the book is VERY whiny. After 8 hours I have no idea what this book is about. It seems to be telling the story of a woman who shares my age, my ethnicity, my social standing, much of my history, so if I found it totally unappealing, for whom was this massive volume written? Dull dull dull. The writing is a snorefest and the characters would be better off joining a suicide cult or going to work for the GOP. Anything would be interesting. Maybe Audible will refuse this review because I didn't finish the book but nobody should be compelled to make that sacrifice. They should be happy I didn't ask for my credit back.

Dragged on, Worst book I have purchased yet.

I have bought many books from Audible in the past years. This was not a good one. I felt the story would never end and it dragged. I assumed being on the Oprah book list and reading some reviews I would really enjoy this. Not so. If you read other reviews you will see similar. I don't suggest it save your point. The author is talented and a good writer, this book just did not work and the same story could have been told in 8 or 9 hours in stead of the more than 20.

A Disappointment

I had such high hopes, but had trouble from the beginning. I could not engage with these characters, though I tried. I kept reading, looking for connections, reasons for the story, some kind of redeeming plot. I found these shallow, boring to read about. These people just didn't matter, and while many good books are written about shallow lives, this wasn't one of them. I didn't want anyone to know, thinking I was the only reader who didn't like this much-hyped book, but more and more friends are admitting they shared my disappointment. On to something better.

A waste of time.

What a horrible story filled with whiny, narcissistic characters. It makes me embarrassed to be from Minnesota. The overwrought political commentary quickly gets tiresome. It is difficult to be interested in characters who display such obvious contempt for someone like myself.