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

Jonathan Franzen
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,163 customer reviews)

Print List Price: $16.00
Kindle Price: $7.99 includes free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
You Save: $8.01 (50%)
Sold by: Macmillan

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Book 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 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.




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

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.

Product Details

  • File Size: 847 KB
  • Print Length: 572 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0374158460
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (August 31, 2010)
  • Sold by: Macmillan
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B003R0LBVW
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • X-Ray: Enabled
  • Lending: Not Enabled
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,341 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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Customer Reviews

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
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.
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456 of 524 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Cycles of Excitement and Tedium September 6, 2010
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.
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833 of 962 people found the following review helpful
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.
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93 of 105 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Gets really good ... around page 382 September 17, 2010
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining
It is an entertaining book I enjoyed reading it and. I really hope it would be turned into a movie
Published 3 days ago by sara
4.0 out of 5 stars A 4 star, but not as good as John Irving
BLURB..........

An international bestseller and the novel of the year, `Freedom' is an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Read more
Published 12 days ago by col2910
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it - beginning to end
A great read - writing style holds my attention completing. I'd been away from reading for a long while and recently received a Kindle and am revisiting and catching up on... Read more
Published 12 days ago by paula r foltz
2.0 out of 5 stars My wife ran away with my best friend, and I really miss him.
I sincerely miss those heavy metal bands
I used to go see on the landing in the summer
She fell in love with the drummer
She fell in love with the drummer
She... Read more
Published 13 days ago by a reader
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting story and characters, lazy writing in stretches.
Took me a while to work my way through this book--some of it out of pure pleasure and some of it because of drudgery. Read more
Published 14 days ago by Mad Man
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding
I enjoyed this much more than 'the corrections". I'm not sure if it was the story, the telling, or the medium. I listened to this rather than read the hard copy. Read more
Published 15 days ago by Ross S. Uhlfelder
5.0 out of 5 stars loved it.
Complex characters that pull you in and keep you reading and thinking. Carefully woven in is a commentary on the environment and American culture. Enjoyed every page.
Published 21 days ago by John K. Bailey
4.0 out of 5 stars Do we really want to be free?
Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' (2010), like 'The Corrections' (2001) before it, uses the lives of one family to tell the story of an age. Read more
Published 21 days ago by Matt Hlinak
4.0 out of 5 stars Thought the Corrections was great but
Found this to be just as good. Read it awhile back so may be forgetting a few things. The story was well written as Franzen is a gifted writer, a master of words, perceptive and... Read more
Published 23 days ago by Lcary655
4.0 out of 5 stars A whirlwind tour of emotions, simultaneously humorous and depressing
** spoiler alert ** Franzen amazed me a few years ago when I read The Corrections, so I had very, very high expectations for Freedom, and it did not disappoint. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Richard Bon
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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.

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Freedom: General Discussion
Writers are funny people. When you think about what it cost Jonathan Franzen to write this book, over nine years, he'd have to be a little obsessed. I watched a bunch of interviews with him on You Tube, and I found the process excruciating but engrossing. He's just not in the same league with... Read more
Sep 29, 2010 by Yours Truly |  See all 39 posts
Genuinely perplexed...
Not sure about any existential influence, although that may be due to my nearly complete ignorance of them. I tried reading them many decades ago, but got nowhere with their thinking. But "self" may be the protagonist of this novel. On p.192, Richard is questing to relocate the self he... Read more
Sep 21, 2010 by Martin Zook |  See all 23 posts
Freedom A Novel
I don't really understand what $9.99 has to do with anything. I like cheap books myself but for every book I decide how badly I want to read and what it costs then make my decision on purchasing or not. $12.99, $9.99, $0.99 all of them can be too high or a great deal depending on the book. I... Read more
Sep 22, 2010 by Joseph P. Weber |  See all 10 posts
Is Amazon going to stop whoever is spamming Freedom w 1-star reviews?
While Amazon reviews certainly won't be hurting the sales of this well-received book, I agree that Amazon is hurting their own credibility by allowing these conspiracy nuts, who obviously haven't even read a synopsis of the book, to spout their drivel here. Just report all the copy and pasted... Read more
Sep 22, 2010 by E. Turner |  See all 34 posts
General Discussion on Freedom
Holy mackerel! I don't see Connie as a stalker IN ANY WAY! She's a woman who decided what she wanted and waited for it. What 'freedom' did Connie have? Joey had all the freedom and sure realized it! The only moving scene in the book for me was when Connie gave Joey her inheritance - that was the... Read more
Sep 26, 2010 by Clem Yeobright |  See all 24 posts
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