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Loading... Freedom (2010)by Jonathan Franzen
  
» 7 more No current Talk conversations about this book. Wow! Franzen's going to win a Nobel Prize someday. Couldn't rave enough about this fine book. (  ) authorknows | Apr 3, 2017 |  This book received so many rave reviews that I really can't add anything except to say that it did deserve every word of praise. ( ) maryhollis | Feb 20, 2017 | Ok to read, but nothing special. Can't identify with the world it describes. (  ) jmhdassen | Jan 26, 2017 | This was not a book that kept me turning pages, and I thought it would be. It's a story about people and all their human traits. Some reviewers on various sites have said the characters weren't believable, while others disagree. I do think they were believable, though possibly not relatable to every reader. There are all kinds of people in the world, and here are some fairly regular ones in a story of their lives authored with keen insight into families, individuals, relationships, mistakes and what small things can change the course of a life. While I admire the author for all these words, the story could have been told in less words, but then, maybe that's like saying an artist could have left out a few brush strokes to please some people. The story didn't grab me. That's the bottom line for me. Time will tell whether the story is nonetheless memorable after some time passes. Some stories sneak up on readers that way. It's a modern story of our time. ( ) Rascalstar | Jan 21, 2017 | I read this when it first came out four years ago and really liked it, but I liked it even more on a second reading. Franzen has been accused of sexism and misanthropy, and it's easy to see why: his female characters sometimes seem like caricatures of irrationality (as in The Corrections), and his narrative voice smacks of condescension. But I think Freedom evinces a startling degree of empathy for its main characters, the Berglunds, and the sections of the novel narrated from Patty's point of view are masterful. It's a heartbreaking novel about the thousands of ways we hurt the people we love the most in pursuit of our own happiness. (  ) jalbacutler | Jan 10, 2017 |
 One keeps waiting for something that will make these flat characters develop in some way, and finally the Nice Man is struck by a great blow of fate. But rather than write his way through it, Franzen suspends things just before the moment of impact, then resumes Walter’s story six years later—updating us with the glib aside that the event in question “had effectively ended his life.” A writer’s got to know his limitations, but this stratagem is clumsy enough to make one want to laugh for the first time in the book. It certainly beats the part where a wedding ring is retrieved from a bowl of feces. Franzen is an amateur ethnographer impersonating a fiction writer. His novel is overstuffed with finger-puppet characters and the clutter of contemporary life: there's no reason to know that someone is wearing "Chinese-made sneakers" or that someone else watches Pirates of the Caribbean during a transatlantic flight. Freedom is crammed as well with rants passed off as dialogue and dialogue that either serves no narrative purpose or reeks of research done in the lifestyle pages of the New York Times.  The freedom of Freedom isn't freedom of choice, it's freedom from it; not an expansion but a narrowing. The book's movement is from the abyss of the abstract to the surety of the concrete, from the potential to the actual. You get there not by reinventing yourself in the American vein, by hatching a plan or heading west or donning a disguise. You do it by going home again, by seeing, as if for the first time, what you've already done, and claiming it as your own. I didn't buy one of the characters, I didn't buy one of the plot twists, I found the stuff about a Halliburton-esque company rather convoluted and I was completely absorbed by the rest. Without question, Freedom is a book that grabs hold of you. When I was in the middle, I thought of its characters even while I wasn't reading about them, and when I was reading it, I read several lines aloud to my husband.
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The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.… (more)
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