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)

NOT FOR ME

I FOUND THIS TO BE A VERY TEDIOUS LISTEN. UNHAPPY PEOPLE TREATING EACH OTHER BADLY.

Boring, improbable, tiresome

I stopped listening after 30 minutes, improbable and irrelevant, and very boring. Switched to Ken Follett's Fall of Giants -- what a difference in prose; what a pleasure.

awful

Dry, boring and worst of all...irrelavant. Narrator does his best but so little to work with.

In short, a largely disappointing book.

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

In my 50+ years of being an avid and voracious reader, there are only two books that I have not finished. Finishing a book was a big deal to me, even if I really disliked it, I ploughed through them in the hope that they would surprise me in the end. The two were "Last Man in Rome" and this one. The portrayal of the characters, in my opinion can be negative, or positive but should at the very least be interesting. The ones in this book were simply boring, petty and small minded. There seemed to be no passion in any of them, and the book was merely a narration of the lives of irritating people, with little or no guiding principles in their lives, going through very ordinary troubles.

What was most disappointing about Jonathan Franzen’s story?

The fact that I couldn't be bothered to finish the novel bothers me, disappoints me. I read/listen to 3-4 books a month, and eventually this one just irritated me to the point where I couldn't force it any longer. In every fictional work I've read, there is at least one character whose viewpoints, characteristics, or actions, were interesting at the least. I don't need to like them, they just need to be interesting enough to help carry the story line.

How could the performance have been better?

The story.

Could you see Freedom being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

No

Couldn't Finish the Book. Had to Give Up.

What disappointed you about Freedom?

What disappointed me about this book was that the story was interesting in part one. I got into the characters and tried to hang in there during part two so I could find out what happend to them.

However, in part two, the story caved as the author went back and forth between explicit sexual scenes and political, environmental rantings. I couldn't take it anymore. The characters got stuck in the background while the author used this forum to highlight his political beliefs and strange sexual descriptions. (phone sex that includes pooping in the mouth...disgusting stuff!)

Don't waste your time on this one.

Not on the bandwagon

Sorry, I don't get the Franzen thing. I find him occasionally funny, mostly a crashing bore and a self indulgent one at that.

Barely finished it...ugh

I don't know what all the hype was about..... I can only read about selfish characters so long. The author pretends to know how a woman thinks... but he does a poor job

My Eyes Glaze Over

Reading these reviews of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom a Novel" certainly proves the old maxim "do not argue over matters of taste." I hesitate to post my review, as I don't really have the right to review a book I did not finish. However, as I grow older I find my time is too valuable and life too short to bother with books I hate so vehemently, and I feel I must spare some innocent Audible fan so many hours of pain and boredom. In a nutshell: I hated the characters, didn't care anything about them, and very, very strongly disliked the narrator. b e w a r e

Franzen invents emote-a-man, droning ensues

How stupid, really. On and on and on. The first chapter is magical, spare and transcendent with not a word out of place. I recalled reading this select piece as a short story back in 2009 in The New Yorker as "Good Neighbors" and loved it then as now. What follows is 20-hours of pointless and relentless nattering of men getting in touch with their real feelings and "finding themselves". Shut up already. And the over-baked political and social justice commentary that infuses the novel everywhere is so over-done it comes across as pantomime, almost The Colbert Report for liberals. [I'm a committed tree-hugger and could not stand it myself]. Content-wise either society in general has spent so much time these past 10 years exposing the dark side of previously private lives; or maybe my own life has become so particularly disturbing that the twisted family issues that were so shocking back in The Corrections here just seem par for the course. Throw in as extra bonuses an ending that out of nowhere gives minor and tiny characters full wrap-up appearances; a bizarre caricature of a south eastern Indian young woman and a tidy everything-wrapped-up-in-a-bow ending. I found the narration and sound perfectly fine. Go ahead and buy Freedom, it is worth reading just to be able to talk about it. At the end though you will be rooting for Bobby the killer cat rather than the songbirds. I certainly was.

SURPRISINGLY DISAPPOINTED

I read Corrections and I found it interesting. I only got through 1/3 of
Freedom:A Novel. It just became tedious. (Considering all the fanfare, I'm wondering "what's wrong with me?") I found Jonathan Franzen a poor man's John Updike. Thought the reader was just so so.