Freedom: A Novel

Jonathan Franzen

Aug 2010 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

Franzen's acerbic diatribe on post-9/11 suburban life reiterates the misanthropic themes within his earlier work, "The Corrections". In "Freedom", this brilliant linguistic stylist renders another microscopic, therapeutic narrative of domestic bickering within a dysfunctional family. In writing "How to be Alone" & "The Discomfort Zone", Franzen expressed his residual anger more effectively. Franzen's popularity may derive from his ability to express the repressed frustrations shared among many readers. J.P. Miller. Cambridge, MA

Sorry folks. I continue to find this depressing. It now sits on the toilet tank. It's not at all what I thought it would be. Maybe it's because I didn't read The Corrections that my expectations were off target, maybe not. I can't recommend this story.

To give this book one star is overly generous but there is no option for zero stars! Perhaps the least likeable book I have ever read featuring some of the least likeable characters. Bloated & Boring.

About the author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of novels such as The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010), and Crossroads (2021), and works of nonfiction, including Farther Away (2012) and The End of the End of the Earth (2018), all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.