Freedom

A Novel

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

Reseñas de la Crítica

"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)

Brilliant Start Sputters Toward End

Any additional comments?

I'm very late to the Franzen party. I'd heard so much about him over the years that I thought I knew what I was going to get: a modern day Dickens who's exploring wide swaths of contemporary culture.

I was more than pleasantly surprised by the first half, particularly the long first-person narrative. It felt as if Franzen weren't merely casting a wide cultural net but that he was also playing with form. A novel can sprawl, but it feels organic when it introduces characters from so many different perspectives.

As it went on, though, and on and on, I kept hoping some central conflict or concept would emerge. The novel is called "Freedom," so that's clearly a big part of it, but he keeps redefining the term. At times it applies to post 9/11 matters; at times to the freedom that the breakup of a relationship might bring; and at times to the freedom of wild life to wander in lands unspoiled by humans. I'd be fine with something that broad if the novel thought to connect and contrast such ideas more forcefully, but each is exposed and considered for a time, then it's sort of just left behind -- less something the novel dealt with and more something it simply pointed out.

For all of that, I found myself enjoying the central characters very much. They have rich lives that seem well-rooted in generations of experience, and they act from history, unable ever to win to a freedom that might let them choose the paths of their greatest happiness.

So I held on -- more than that, I read with great pleasure -- the first two-thirds or so of the book. Then things became more and more conventional. Richard's 'selfless' move to break up Walter and Patty, is simply too pat. Too many strands converge for that decades-in-the-making event to come off as it does, allowing both husband and wife to feel fully victimized.

And I began to get tired of relationships in which one character approached another in a fully submissive manner: Walter woos Patty that way; Lalitha waits for Walter that way; Walter's mother can't stand up in any way to Walter's father; Connie abases herself before Joey, waiting forever for him; and Joey initially abases himself before Jenna. Some relationships are like that, but aren't most between people who have a kind of mutual self-respect? Don't most relationships involve two people who can look each other in the eye and say what they want? The pattern got old the longer it went.

Finally, I found the end of the novel disappointing and ultimately unearned. It felt to me as if Franzen couldn't bear to leave his characters in the unhappy places that their choices took them. From the time of Lalitha's death -- which felt too convenient (really, the one time Walter isn't in the car with her?) -- it took far-fetched coincidences to bring about the reunion.

Despite such flaws, I'm still on for The Corrections and Purity. I may take a breather, but I look forward to seeing more of what he does. I may not see as much depth as I'd like, but there's no doubting an extraordinary breadth.

Unparalleled Performance

I am an avid audio books fan with a background in performance. This is one of the best, if not THE best readings I have heard. I highly recommend!

Oh The Humanity!

Wow—never read Jonathan Franzen before and now I can’t wait to read everything he’s written.

One of the best books I have read in years.

Jonathan Franzen has an insight into human emotion like no other. Because it is set in the recent past, It’s a wonderful way to look at previous decades, particularly should you be a person over 50. However, there is value in this book to people of any age. I will miss Walter and his family.

Great story made even better by the Narrator.

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Franzen's ability to create and get you deep into his characters is phenomenal.

Who was your favorite character and why?

This is the not the type of story where you relate to a character. This is far more sweeping and spans an incredibly wide swatch of characters and their lives.

What does David LeDoux bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I have thoroughly enjoyed what the performers bring to most audio books of mine. But David LeDoux goes beyond all that. The strength of conveying emotion and the richness of the telling of the story make a great book even better. Bravo!