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Loading... Freedom (2010)by Jonathan Franzen
  
» 9 more No current Talk conversations about this book. Wow, I'm not sure what to say about this one. I must admit that I scanned through some of the political ramblings and, underneath, I think there was a decent storyline. I would have to re-read it to catch every detail. Wordy, yes, but an interesting read overall. I thought the afterward (that's not what it's called but you know what I mean) was the best part of the book. Wish he had written the whole thing that way! It would have been a lot shorter, that's for sure. Maybe I'll go back someday and delve into it again. For now, I'm on to Franzen's first novel. Whew! (  ) LizBurkhart | Sep 5, 2019 |  I read this in a literary book club at church. No one else liked it. Few even bothered to finish it. I really enjoyed it. Yes, many of the the characters start off unlikeable, and few become all that likeable (and some get more unlikeable). But you begin to understand them and their foibles, recognizing the impact of sin and seeing a measure of common grace. My book club was also put off by what they described as a post-modern structure--multiple voices. I thought that added to the understanding of the characters. There is some content that made me a little uncomfortable; yet, even that seemed to be a part of the novel, not just added for prurient interest. Oh, well, they missed out. I still think it is a good read. (  ) ckadams5 | Jun 19, 2019 | I read this in a literary book club at church. No one else liked it. Few even bothered to finish it. I really enjoyed it. Yes, many of the the characters start off unlikeable, and few become all that likeable (and some get more unlikeable). But you begin to understand them and their foibles, recognizing the impact of sin and seeing a measure of common grace. My book club was also put off by what they described as a post-modern structure--multiple voices. I thought that added to the understanding of the characters. There is some content that made me a little uncomfortable; yet, even that seemed to be a part of the novel, not just added for prurient interest. Oh, well, they missed out. I still think it is a good read. ( ) ckadams5 | Jun 19, 2019 | It ended up being a much larger, more sprawling story than I'd anticipated at the outset. I haven't read The Corrections (yet), so this was my first taste of Franzen. The characterizations are masterful, his wit is biting and often hilarious, and I did feel all the emotional turmoil of each character. I also feel like more of an adult, somehow, having read it. Very few books engross me and, I think, change me the way this one did. ( ) xiaomarlo | Apr 17, 2019 | Jonathan Franzen's Freedom follows the lives of middle-class couple Patricia and Walter Berglund, their children and close relatives and friends. Set in the American mid-west at the beginning of the twenty-first century the reader learns about Patricia's and Walter's marriage and their marital problems. The novel illustrates the ups and downs of love and family life in a frighteningly realistic fashion and provides very detailed observations about the characters and their motives. The power dynamic in Patty's and Walter's relationship shifts several times. After they first meet, Patty is everything for Walter while she is more interested in Walter's friend Richard. Although they marry eventually, they never seem overly happy in their relationship. Whenever Walter's friend steps back into their lives Patty is reminded of her feelings for Richard. Growing further apart, Walter loses interest in Patricia and after many events that affect their relationship they finally separate. In the end, Patty becomes active in trying to reconcile with Walter. "The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage." I liked the novel most for its observations on relationships and the concept of personal freedom. While the dynamics in relationships are often hard to understand from the outside they are also not always completely comprehensible from the inside. Relationships can be complicated and messy and at the same time they can be the best thing that ever happened to you and the glue that holds your life together. Working out the perfect amount of personal freedom while in a relationship can be very difficult, sometimes even impossible, but it might just be the right amount of personal freedom that makes a relationship work. In that respect, Franzen's novel can provide you with a deeper insight about your own thoughts on personal freedom and your idea of what you want in a good relationship. All in all, Freedom was a very good book that I enjoyed a lot. 4 stars. (  ) OscarWilde87 | Mar 2, 2019 |
 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.
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