Product Description

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 neighbour 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 neighbour," 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5581 in Books
• Published on: 2010-08-23
• Released on: 2010-08-31
• Binding: Hardcover
• 576 pages

Amazon.ca
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010: "The awful thing about life is this:" says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. "Everyone has his reasons." That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it's very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues--among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock'n'roll--and in some ways can't be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them. --Tom Nissley

Review
“A masterpiece.” ---The New York Times

“Franzen has an uncanny knack for capturing the torturously self-justifying rhetoric and trendy slang of educated Gen Xers rebelling against their suburban childhoods by seeking “authenticity” in the grungy core of the American city. The details of time and place and attitude are so sharp as to induce frequent wincing.” ---Toronto Star

“Freedom is filled with vividly rendered characters.” ---National Post

Franzen’s coup is that he has figured out how to be both entertaining, sharp-witted and accessible while maintaining a sense of higher purpose. I “thoroughly enjoyed this intellectual soap opera of love, sex, liberal guilt and flawed parenting (viz. Philip Larkin), and got sucked into the travails of the Berglunds and their constellation.” ---The Globe and Mail

“A superb confrontation of the family construct and the illusion of liberty. Written with a heavy hand and edited with a light one, it is correctly being called the year's required North American fiction.” ---Vancouver Sun

About the Author
JONATHAN FRANZEN won the National Book Award for Fiction for The Corrections in 2001 and is the author of two other critically acclaimed novels, The Twenty- Seventh City and Strong Motion, and a collection of essays, How to Be Alone. He lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

9 10
Stuck with it for little pay off
By Kadi Kaljuste
What an unsympathetic, unlikeable cast of characters. Given the buzz about this book, I stuck with it even though I was tempted to bail midway, particularly when the book gets heavy into an environmental theme. Just didn't like the characters and found the plot plodded. Typically, I burn through books; this one took me weeks to finish. Now that I've finished it, I feel I've got my freedom back to read something I'll actually enjoy.

1 1
Don't be put off by all those unfavourable reviews on this site!
By julov
I cannot beleive all those people who thought this book was boring and uninteresting! I thought it was brilliant, gripping and couldn't put it down. I had previously enjoyed The Corrections very much too. Jonanathan Franzen is a brilliant writer and what I admired most here was his emphasis on contemprary themes, all the while interspersing them with a great story and interesting characters. Of course the characters have flaws but what good would a novel be with only perfect people in it?
Probably, when future generations of literature students are studying this book in university, they'll endlessly discuss the socio-historic context as much as students in past times have studied the world of Dickens, George Eliot or Emile Zola. I am aware that many readers will jump out of their skins at my comparing Franzen to those authors but anyway, read it and see!

4 5
Very disappointing
By Cassandra44
Having really enjoyed "The Corrections" I was very keen to read "Freedom" but what a disappointment it has been. I found the main characters completely uninteresting and I felt no sense of involvement with any of them. I couldn't have cared less about the fates of any of them.
The novel revolves around a middle class family with Walter the father being at the centre of the novel. Walter is a stodgy boring "worthy" man who morphs into an uber- but deluded environmentalist hell-bent on saving habitats for obscure birds and in the process is duped by hard core capitalists.
His wife Patty must be one of the least interesting major characters in any modern novel and the two children of this ill-begotten pair are, if that's possible, even less interesting.
At strategic points in the novel Franzen nudges the reader in the ribs and mouths the word "Freedom" - hence the title but the themes that he uses to explore that issue seem jaded - and there was absolutely nothing new - no eureka moment for the reader when you suddenly realize that you are in the hands of a master.
I soldiered on to the end but had completely lost interest after the first few chapters.
A terrible disappointment.