Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) [Paperback]

Jonathan Franzen (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 27, 2011 | Series: Oprah's Book Club

#1 National Bestseller

Winner of the John Gardner Fiction Award

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

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 Walter and Patty Berglund 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, August 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
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

When Patty and Walter Berglund's teenage son moves in with their conservative neighbors and their perfect life in St. Paul begins to unravel, out spill family secrets--clandestine loves, lies, compromises, failures. David Ledoux's masterly narration is powerful and well paced, comic and poignant. He expertly captures Walter and Patty--with her anxious whinny of a laugh--and their family life with its satisfactions and histrionics. Ledoux also deftly renders the gossiping of the Berglund's disingenuous neighbors; the frenetic rants of the drug-addled Eliza; and the weary, disaffected drawl of sleazy musician Richard. A Farrar, Straus, and Giroux hardcover (Reviews, July 5). (Sept.) (c)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (September 27, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312576463
• ISBN-13: 978-0312576462
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,163 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,780 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of three novels--The Corrections, The Twenty-Seventh City, and Strong Motion--and two works of nonfiction, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3,102 of 3,536 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars don't believe the hype! September 20, 2010

By zashibis

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Negative reviews get no love on Amazon, but, having been thoroughly taken in by the glowing reviews in the NYT, Time, the Economist, etc., I feel compelled to add a voice of dissent and caution.

I read and enjoyed The Corrections, so was looking forward to seeing what Franzen had been up to for the past 10 years. What he's been up to is, essentially, rewriting The Corrections, but extracting all the humor that leavened the misanthropic bleakness of his vision in the earlier work. Once again we're presented with an outwardly "perfect" nuclear Midwestern family that secretly consists of neurotic hysterics with low self-esteem who ultimately find themselves mired in infidelity and morally dubious business dealings. Once again the focus is on generational conflict, and the "sins of the fathers" revisited in the lives of the children.

Besides the lack of originality, the problem, in essence, is this time out I don't believe a single, solitary word of it. I don't believe in liberal middle-class parents who'd let their teenage son move in with their obnoxious Republican neighbors. I don't believe in a talented college athlete who'd let herself be hoodwinked for years by a ditzy, obsessive fan. I don't believe in a committed environmentalist who'd sign off on strip mining vast tracts of virgin forest in the name of reclaiming those tracts many years afterwards for a single-species preserve. I don't believe in a 19-year-old arms dealer making procurement purchases in Paraguay. I don't believe in a couple who remain married, but utterly incommunicado, for 6 years. I don't believe in a 47-year-old man with no religious convictions who is trying beer for the very first time, and is prone to bursting into tears on the least provocation. And that's just for starters....

Worse, the dialogue this time out is actually painful to read in its patent artificiality. I defy anyone to point to a passage in this book and seriously maintain that this is how parents, children or lovers actually talk to one another, in 2010 or ever. It's as stilted and laden with portentousness as soap opera dialogue. In a plot-driven page-turner in the Grisham mode, this wouldn't be a fatal flaw, but Freedom, with its political and social preoccupations, is a novel that wants to be taken be seriously, and that's simply not possible when the characters speak in an uninterrupted steam of cliche.

The very worst bit, however, is Patty's 200-page "autobiography" which purports to be her life story told in her own voice, but is, in fact, completely indistinguishable from the authorial voice used in the rest of the novel. That this "autobiography" is later part of significant -- and, again, wholly unbelievable -- plot twist compounds this reader's dismay.

A last problem is the characterization in the novel. One-dimensional caricatures abound, from Patty's Hippie-dippy sister Abigail to Walter's starry-eyed, buxom assistant Lalith to Joey's shallow, glamour-puss love-interest Jenna to the shrill Fundamentalist kook who plays a significant role in the final section of the novel. The main characters -- Walter, Patty, Richard, and Joey -- are more developed, but scarcely more believable. Walter's character, for instance, does a 180 -- starting as a preternaturally patient, kind, dutiful son and husband, and becoming an erratic, impatient, unhinged hothead. The problem is not so much the change in personality -- people do change over time -- but the fact that the reader isn't privy to what drives or motivates the change. We see the college-age milquetoast and the middle-aged fanatic, but no steps in between.

It gives me no particular pleasure to trash this novel. Franzen is to be commended for attempting something ambitious in a Tolstoyan mode (Tolstoy is, in fact, referenced directly and indirectly throughout the novel) -- to give an American picture of "how we live now." But, for me, unfortunately, his effort here falls completely flat, and I can't possibly recommend it to anyone. Read more ›

456 of 524 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Cycles of Excitement and Tedium September 6, 2010

By Cary B. Barad

Format:Hardcover

Excellent writing when dealing with the painfully intimate and intricate details of adolescence, marriage, childrearing, infidelity and romantic yearnings. In fact, it approaches the true-to-life fictional style used so successfully by Tom Wolfe in the "Bonfire of the Vanities," and "A Man in Full."

Yet, this saga ominously hits a brick wall when it becomes enmeshed with any number of environomental, social and political issues (incluing mining and overpopulation) that seem to go on for far too long and which consume an excessive amount of time and space. Very "preachy", didactic and repetitive if you will.

As a result, we are confronted with a lengthy novel that is only partially rewarding. It is constucted on cycles of excitement and tedium which make for an erratic reading experience. You really have to invest a good deal of time and effort searching for the literary nuggets that make the effort worthwhile in the end.

833 of 962 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head." August 31, 2010

By BrianB VINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition

I will avoid the plot review, because so many others seem compelled to summarize, and the repetition becomes tiresome. I enjoyed this novel, and I think you will too. I gave it four stars because it is not perfect, but it is better than most current fiction. Franzen may be a "serious" writer, but he is also highly readable, with an interesting story that can be enjoyed for itself alone, absent any considerations of literary aspirations.

This is a big, rambling tale of modern Americans in their modern lives, people who reminded me of real people, a plot which kept me turning the pages of this compulsively readable, mostly entertaining novel. The tone is slightly condescending, as the quote above my review would suggest, mostly cynical, and ultimately hopeful by the end of the story, when his battered, bruised and bruising characters emerge from the wreckage of their lives, and bravely carry on.

In many ways this novel is similar to his previous work, The Corrections. I remember enjoying that novel a few years back, although I could not understand why the critics raved about it. Franzen proves yet again that he is a very good writer, building a complicated but workable plot, creating characters who are real, complex and often disappointing, showing us his American self-portrait in 2010. He reaches for a big theme, as the title implies, but he doesn't quite achieve his goal of demontrating the illusory nature of our freedom (or alternatively that all this freedom is killing us). Like Sophocles, Franzen seems to take a dim view of freedom. I probably should not compare Franzen to Sophocles, or other great writers, past or present. He has a genuine voice, a straightforward style, but he does not possess lyrical abilities, nor great thematic breadth.... His writing style is similar to Paul Murray's, serving up a cast of mostly unremarkable people who screw up their lives by means of their character defects, giving you a funny and sad slice of everyday life, saying something profound in the process.

Amazon reviewers were much less enamored with The Corrections than the professional reviewers: they gave only three stars on average, with almost as many one star reviews as five star. Franzen's self portraits are closer to the world of the publishing industry than the world of amazon readers. His characters are based in the Midwest, at least in the beginning of the novel, but they are not the American everyman or woman. They are highly educated, well read, socially evolved and spiritually lost in the manner of the wealthy white specimen liberalis americanus. This writing feels too focused upon their world to allow for universal appeal. Nevertheless, Freedom is a very well and carefully written novel. Only time itself will reveal if this is the work of the moment, or a work for all time. Read more ›

93 of 105 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Gets really good ... around page 382 September 17, 2010

By E. Whalen

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I bought this book based on two reviews: New York Magazine's ("it reminds you why everyone got so excited about Franzen in the first place") and The Economist's ("brilliant") combined with the fact that I thought The Corrections was a very good book. The Economist gives out reviews like that about as often as Simon Cowell, so I thought, "even I, who am very picky, am going to like *this* book".

For the first 381 pages, though, the only thing I liked was that I was coming closer to either being finished with this book or to what I thought had to be an incredibly good ending to justify the incredibly good reviews. The characters were immature, lacked perspective and were in many ways unconvincing to me. Walter was obsessed with overpopulation issues but directed most of his anger at the Catholic church for this problem and wanted, it seemed, to discourage people from having any children. We humans, he makes very clear, are a "cancer on the planet". I certainly agree the overpopulation is a problem and only growing in scope, but I had a difficult time believing a 50-year old who had supposedly spent so much time "thinking" about the issue was so unwilling to do what it takes to actually make a difference in solving the problem. Instead of advocating policies that might actually work, such as trying to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies in the world, he starts a non-profit to try to encourage 19-year-olds (who will certainly *never* change their minds!) to never have children. Perhaps a 30-year old would be convincing in this role, but not a 50-year old. As a result, it seems Franzen is not trying to make a policy argument but rather using the issue to represent Walter's anger with people in general.... Unfortunately, this did not work for me, and this is just one of many examples of unconvincing behavior by characters combined with the unsuccessful use of metaphors in this book.

Another disappointing feature of the first 381 pages was the onslaught of information about characters, policy issues and family histories, much of which was not directly or even indirectly relevant to the story. Several minor characters and a few subplots could have been eliminated without detracting from the book.

Sexual tension -- will they or won't they?? -- also played a significant role in the first part of the book, but it often felt like a ploy to keep you reading when a good editing job could have achieved the same effect, saved us all a lot of time, and the world some trees. Even Walter would have approved of the saving of the trees!

Finally, beginning with the section entitled "Bad News", the news for the reader actually becomes good. Characters become people to whom we can connect rather than just people about whom we know many facts. The theme of "Freedom" stops being so heavy-handed. The word "somewhat" is used less frequently. The phrase "significant look" finally disappears. Rewards for all the time and energy spent reading begin to appear, and even better ones appear to be coming soon!

I consider myself a patient reader, but as emotionally affected as I was by the ending of this book, I gave it three stars because I do not believe the time spent getting there was worth it. I considered giving up around page 250, and at that point would have given it two stars. If you haven't read The Corrections, I suggest that book instead, but many people (not including me) found the characters to be unlikeable. If you are impatient, or prefer your books to reward you all along the way, as I believe they ought to, skip this one. Read more ›