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)

Worthy of much of the praise

Or so I thought. In dissecting the lives of a somewhat dysfunctional middle class family, Franzen shows an incisive understanding of the way people make and rationalize bad decisions, then later find them difficult to live with. On a scene-by-scene level, the way the characters struggle with each other, themselves, their neighbors, and the country as a whole is believably complex and readable. I often felt frustrated and annoyed with Franzen???s protagonists, but the messiness of their lives also felt familiar to me, and part of me wanted them to succeed.

I think that many of the reviewers who attack "believability" are confusing reasonable behavior and realism. Based on my decade-and-a-half of adult experience, depressed people really do act like Patty, frustrated environmentalists really can turn into seething cranks a la Walter, angry sons sometimes do move out of the family home after big fights, like Joey, and aging bad boys do flit between relationships in a Richard-like way. And it???s not hard to real-life examples of shady Iraq war profiteering similar to the one here. It may be a dramatized, ???literary??? version of America, but it???s the real America.

That said, I do understand a little of the backlash. Some characters are a little uneven and/or stereotype-ish, and could have been better fleshed out -- for example, Connie is a bit of a blank outside her unhealthy relationship to Joey. Though, as a liberal, I thought Franzen was pretty honest about some of the inconsistencies of the American liberal, Walter's rants get a little soapbox-y. And there???s the matter of the ending, in which the characters redeem themselves perhaps a little too neatly. As for the audiobook narrator, his arch tone will either fit the novel, or further compound what people already don't like about it.

Is this the great American novel critics want it to be? I don't think it quite has that resonance, but it's certainly one of the better works of 2010, in my opinion.

Can't Believe it Got all the hype it did

The first 35% of the book was good and then it went on and on and on and then all of a sudden he wrapped it up.

An Unexpected Delight

Jonathan Franzen staged an ambush with Freedom-- from the outset, I was determined not to like any of the characters, and I didn't expect to like the book much. However, despite the extremely unlikeable state in which the main characters are introduced (particularly Patty, who monopolizes the beginning of the book and insinuates herself throughout the rest of it), I somehow found myself loving them for their humanity. And it's all very naturally produced by Franzen-- he neither contrived nor manipulated my feelings. David LeDoux puts forth a great performance in the reading, as well, and executes even the female voices in a smooth, natural way. It's been about a year since I listened to this audio book, but it was so memorable that the story and the lush pictures that it painted in my head are still with me.

Worst narrator I have heard

What did you like best about Freedom? What did you like least?

OK story, but goes on too long.
I gave up because I couldn't stand the narrator any more. HIs voice is beyond annoying.

Would you be willing to try another one of David LeDoux’s performances?

Absolutely not

Enjoyable

Franzen is an extremely talented narrator. Overall it was a well developed story even though some of the characters seemed to be based on cheesy stereotypes (re Indian-Americans, West Virginians). Will I read more stuff my Franzen in the future? Probably. Do I think his stuff will be read 100 years from now? Probably not.

Loved it

Franzen really captures the middle american psyche. His characters are so identifiable. Of course I say that because I am of the same age as the central characters. The reader, David LeDoux is excellent, brings an authentic voice to each of the characters. A great audible performance. Truely enjoyed the book. Even loved the non-ending. Was surprised and thought I was missing some of the download.

Not what I was expecting...

Where does Freedom rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

its a really good story, but the performance left quite a bit to be desired.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Patty. While at times it felt like there was too much of her, it seemed to be pretty necessary in then end. Specifically her type of Freedom is the most prevalent I see in our world today. I can't say I loved her, but by the end I was rooting for her and very much understood her plight.

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

The voices, especially the females, did not sound like a real people. More like something behind the curtain at a puppet show. The characters were very hard to capture so that deserves to be said, however it was pretty distracting at times, but the narration was good for the most part.

If you could rename Freedom, what would you call it?

The Lessons of Nameless Lake

Any additional comments?

There should have been some sort of chapter tell. While I was listening all of a sudden I'd be hearing a different characters perspective and I'd wonder if I was mixing people up, only to realize I have a new perspective because its a new chapter, because they were POVs they rarely mentioned themselves in the first sentences

Loved it so much!

This was an amazing book. I listened to it every spare minute. And the performance was simply outstanding. It was so good, in fact, I'm probably spoiled. Highly recommend this book. Love. Love. Love.

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.

Oh The Humanity!

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