

Freedom
Books | Fiction / Literary
3.9
(619)
Jonathan Franzen
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 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.
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More Details:
Author
Jonathan Franzen
Pages
576
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date
2010-08-31
ISBN
1429979437 9781429979436
Ratings
Google: 3.5
Community ReviewsSee all
"It was okay. Franzen is a good writer. I know the point was for the characters to be "real" people but I had no interest in any of them. They were all crappy people, which can be fine, but there wasn't a single person in the book who was likable. I liked the beginning, but it got boring. It was obnoxious that a decent amount of the book was about all the background of Walter and Lalitha's organization. It's fine to go over it a little, but this just dragged."
E
Emily
"Like the great American poet Carlton Douglas Ridenhour said: "Don't believe the hype"<br/><br/>Well written yes, but I found myself not caring about any character in the book."
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Matt Kamin
"I love Franzen. Reading a novel by Franzen is like none watching reality tv. I Love getting to know the characters, to understand what drives them, what formed them, their cities and their flaws. In some way Franzen has a writing style similar to Tolstoy, minus the preaching undertone and the 19th century drama.<br/><br/>I can understand why some people might find Franzen boring. The setting of his novels is always so mundane, the people so average, the plot babbles along like a small stream. But it's the reality aspect that pulls me out of my own mundane life, into the shoes of Walter, Patty and Richard. Their flaws make me forget about my own. It makes me appreciative of literature: the ultimate artform, nothing more than a string of letters, that brings us together into a shared experience with no other senses than our mind."
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Lisa Mallinckrodt
"Rarely do I find an audiobook that makes you want to go out of the way to hear what happens next and that was the case here. The characters are all miserable in their own pathetic way and that's why I can't give it a five."
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Brian Berness
"Fantastic. Subtle writing, sprawling effort, fantastic character development for a group of people that are hard to like - just like the majority of us out there."
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Andrew Greene