Customer Reviews

Freedomland

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I'm glad that I read this book, although there were a number of places where I felt that the author should have picked up the pace in order to maintain momentum and reader interest. While this novel is a crime drama, the fact that it deals with matters of race, trust and the elusive nature of truth makes it worthy of more consideration than the usual page turner.

I won't recount the plot, as an outline of the action is easily available elsewhere. I would like to single out a couple of passages, though, because they highlight the elegant prose that Richard Price is capable of and also struck a chord with me in that I have encountered similar situations in my own experience.

Take, for example, the opening of chapter 11, "The Dempsey County jail stood half demolished, and the only surviving section of exterior wall, the southwest corner, was a grotesquely defiant crumble of plaster and brick, a raised fist thrust into the flawless blue of a hot summer morning. The prison bars, running the entire length of the building but hidden from view for ninety years by a sooty gray facade, had now, in these final days, revealed the building for what it truly had been: a seven story cage."

The beauty of the writing, combined with the startling and rather violent imagery of the fist and the cage, made a strong impression on me and bore home the stark reality that jails are cages in which we shut up our fellows like animals, often when they are innocent. I have not read many other novels that are so evocative and at the same time hard hitting.

Another passage that really hit home with me is this one, near the end of the book, which is an excerpt of a conversation between two black men, one a cop and the other a suspect: "I don't know too many bald-faced crackers, to be honest. I mean...but still, it's like most white people -- for me -- I feel like they're not so much talking to me as they're *watching* themselves talk to me -- like, admiring themselves talking to me -- and I play this guessing game. How many minutes into this conversation -- no matter what we're talking about right now -- could be sports, the market, could be the weather -- but how many minutes is it gonna take for *race* to come up. How long is it gonna take for the fact that it's a white person talking to a black person to take over and change the subject, turn the subject into something racial. It never fails. *Never.* And I don't know how you deal with it, but for me it's nerve-racking, and it's boring."

This blew me away, and I found myself thinking back to recent conversations I had with black people, hoping that I didn't do that, but having this underlying worry that maybe I did. The interactions among people in day to day life are never simple, but race makes everything more complex and I really appreciate the way that Price acknowledges that fact.

For me, Price didn't over dramatize or over emphasize the role that race plays in all situations, never mind something as volatile as the disappearance of a child. And his characterizations seem dead on, not only for those characters who exemplified people I have met in my own life, but for characters who I can only imagine knowing. Take the creepy Friends of Kent, for example, who are a group of volunteers who search for missing kids. The personalities of these folks seem very believable, as does the character of Brenda, the mother who is the centerpiece of the story.

Overall, I recommend this book to those who enjoy a provocative character study. But if you're looking for a good crime thriller, Freedomland is probably a bit heavier than you really want. This is actually a story about a woman's denial of her failure to be a good parent, and the shattering results that her denial entails for many others in her community.

Hmmmm....with all due respect, I think some of the other reviewers here are missing the point. You don't pick up a 700+ page novel and not gear up for a long read, and if you know Price at all, you know he's not your standard thriller writer (which is a good thing, believe me). I'm a little mystified by the Price fan that didn't like it though--seems like we were reading two different books. And why see the titles of soul music songs in the book as a tired racial comment rather than the product of a character's completely deranged mind? At any rate, I found Freedomland to be an astounding achievement, with beautifully drawn fully human characters, pitch-perfect dialogue, plenty of action and tension, and a bone-deep sadness beneath it that's miles away from the prickly optimism of Clockers. Unlike Price's recent excellent Samaritan, it's not emotionally claustrophic either--Freedomland is in fact a modern urban epic, rich in character, depth, and texture. This is a book I continually recommend to people who believe that commercial fiction can't stir the soul. I will grant that reading Freedomland can ultimately be an emotionally exhausting experience, but that is what I look for in books--to paraphrase Kafka (at least I think it was Kafka), a book should be the axe that breaks the frozen lake inside us. And Freedomland is a great big axe.

Like many of the others who have reviewed this book, I felt like it started out promisingly enough. It seemed like a nice, little ripped from the headlines drama with some open-ended observations about race and poverty and the enormous cultural and experiential divide that separates the haves from the have nots. But, apparently, that early promise was built on characters of sand, because they and their stories became a bit of an endless loop of shell-shocked realization and sweating inertia. If I were to give Price the benefit of the doubt I would say that his character's inability to act effectively, say anything succinctly or solve even the most basic of their own problems was a purposeful mirror held up to urban America. Hamlet-like, Price's characters wallow and writhe and go mad, and when they act, they do the wrong thing. Perhaps, he meant his character's sluggishness to be representative. Maybe he meant us to feel as trapped in the Armstrong Houses, in poverty, in addiction, in stupidity, in injustice as the characters who live there. If that was his intent, he definitely succeeded. At some point, however, it got to be too much. All the characters just allowed themselves to be buffeted about by circumstance until I felt like screaming. The character of the reporter, Jesse was the worst of the offenders. I found myself hoping that I would be provided front row seats to something really terrible happening to her. To sum up, I felt that this book had some structural problems. But, maybe this long road to nowhere is as good a metaphor for race relations in America as any other.

This was a slog, which I avoided by skimming after the first hundred pages. Too bad, because the writing is sound, and the characters almost came to life. Why do so many books have to be about dead kids, missing kids, abused kids? Obviously it's a powerful device to get most readers hooked, but I'm wearing out on the formula. Something fresh please.

This is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. Exhausting, draining, exhilarating, infuriating, it touches every emotion in the human psyche. Richard Price is obviously interested in characters, what motivates them, what can make a broken-down woman tell a calculated lie and send an entire city spinning into an inferno. Devastating moral lessons, compelling interactions between chracters of all racial biases and hidden agendas, and an intense, creeping momentum that sends you to the edge and beyond. Price is an exceptional storyteller, a Pat Conroy of the urban slumscape, with images that will stay with me long after the final chapter is read.

THE BAD FEATURES: 1) Too long; 2) Too many rambling descriptions attempting to "set the scene"; 3) Cliched characters; 4) Predictable; 5) Too slow.

THE GOOD FEATURES: 1) Interesting story; 2) Makes me want to keep reading to "find the truth behind the lies"; 3) Great dialogue - Price has the lingo down pat; 4) I loved Lorenzo's character.

OVERALL: Wait for the paperback version or buy it on audio. "Clockers" fans beware: It's not as good.

A lot's wrong with this overpraised book. It's too long, the story's conventional and slow-moving, it's predictable, the prose is awkward and reads too often like a screenplay, except when it tries to go inside the characters, and then it reads like a parody of every cliche police-story ever written: the hard-nosed female reporter without a social life, the black detective torn between his job and his community, the hot-headed white cop... the book's conflict, as concretized by the black detective Lorenzo, rests in questions of cultural, racial, and economic truth and honesty. Not unworthy subjects, but there's no blazing insights here, and the plot's so shopworn that the story provides no real tangential pleasures either. "Freedomland" is ultimately condescending and manipulative for no good reason. Its first hundred pages paint a compelling picture of Dempsey, and a few of the plot twists will play well in the movie. Producer Scott Rudin will undoubtedly make this a better movie than it is a book.

I really liked this book because I live in the projects out here in Newark...I think he may have actually written the book with a description of this place in mind...and the kinds of seemingly insignificant descriptions he gives really paint life in the projects teh way it is, the same way he projected urban "clocker" life in his other novel. His descriptions of smells, sights, the overreaction of the jakes to every little thing, how we get misrepresented and stuff like that...yo, this was (except for all the parts about Brenda) just like reading a story about me.

I usually don't fall for the critical blurbs on the back of books, but I did in this case. The book was long, and immensely conventional. Nothing happened. You kept waiting for some big revelation, but everything was very predictable. Trite, boring, and a complete waste of time. Buy another book and let this one sit on the shelf and hopefully go out of print.

I have read both Freedomland and Clockers and I love both books, but Freedomland has a harshness/realism in its message that has stayed with me ever since I read it a year ago. Yes, some scenes are drawn out (When the Dempsy and Armstrong cops are scouting the area where Debra claimed she was carjacked did not have to be thirty some pages, and the search for the boy in the woods was too long). But even during scenes like that it still remained interesting and thought-provoking. One of the great things about Richard Price's writing is that he is able to mix mystery, suspense, urban decay, dialogue so searing and real it encaptures you, and plots and subplots that are climaxed beautifully. But what Richard Price does best is make a story using characters that we normally wouldn't feel any sympathy or respect for, least of all able to send a meaningful message, and do just that. Even after Debra tells the truth about what happened to her Cody, I couldn't help but have sympathy for her. And Jesse and Lorenzo were such tragic characters yet by the end you see them for what they really are, two well meaning people caught up in not only a game, but a life that makes them stern and burnt out and hardened.