Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom–that book everyone keeps talking about–doesn’t come out until August 31st, but the reviews are already piling up. So far, the consensus seems to be that if you liked Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections, you’ll love Freedom. As Sam Anderson explains in New York magazine, “Freedom is a close cousin to The Corrections: a social-realist epic about a depressive, entropic midwestern family being swallowed and digested by the insatiable anaconda of modernity.” But even if you didn’t love The Corrections, you may find yourself connecting to the characters in Freedom. Several critics note that Franzen seems to have more compassion toward Freedom‘s characters, which allows the reader to feel closer to the novel’s central conflicts. But the critics also note flaws, such as the section narrated by Patty Berglund (the book’s central female character) in a voice that sounds just like Franzen, or the sense of disdain that surrounds many observations. It’s impossible to summarize everything the critics have to say in a few sentences, so go ahead and link to the full reviews below.
“Few modern novelists rival Franzen in that primal skill of creating life, of tricking us into believing that a text-generated set of neural patterns, a purely abstract mind-event, is in fact a tangible human being that we can love, pity, hate, admire, and possibly even run into someday at the grocery store.” – Sam Anderson, New York
“[D]espite the brilliance, or maybe even because of it, I found the novel quite unappealing, maybe because every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain.” – Alan Cheuse, NPR
“Mr. Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet — a novel that turns out to be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times.” – Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“It’s not that Franzen’s prose makes other writers seem untalented; it’s that he makes them seem so lazy, so irrelevant, so lacking in the kind of chutzpah we once expected from our best authors.” – Benjamin Alsup, Esquire
“the first question facing Franzen’s feverishly awaited follow-up is whether it can find its own voice in its predecessor’s shadow. In short: yes, it does, and in a big way.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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