Book of the week: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 562 pages, $28)

A novel that’s “probably destined to be read 200 years from now” deserves a more distinctive title than Freedom, said Craig Seligman in Bloomberg.com. But that’s about the only complaint one can reasonably lob at Jonathan Franzen’s “monumental” new tragicomedy about a seemingly perfect American family torn apart by mishandled love. Walter and Patty Berglund are the “irresistibly disconsolate couple” at the center of Franzen’s first novel since 2001’s much-praised, but less appealing, The Corrections. Walter is a naïve Minnesota environmental lawyer. Patty is a former college hoops star whose life as a stay-at-home mom leaves her too much time to think about her attraction to Walter’s onetime roommate. Their marriage’s slow unraveling provides an axis for a novel that in readability ranks with Gone With the Wind and in quality stands “approximately on a level with The Great Gatsby.”

Unfortunately, every brilliant sentence or insight that Franzen serves up “seems covered with a light film of disdain,” said Alan Cheuse in NPR.org. This is an author who apparently has never “met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didn’t want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to.” To be fair, Franzen seems to be aware of his own tendency, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Initially, he’s careful to frame his “disagreeable caricatures” of Walter, Patty, and their two teenage children by presenting them through the eyes of envious neighbors. Yet gradually all four are transformed into enormously sympathetic characters by Franzen’s painstaking psychological story­telling. The author’s “most deeply felt novel yet,” Freedom turns out to be “both a compelling biography of a family and an indelible portrait of our times.”

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While Freedom may win praise for its “highly polished narrative realism,” it’s actually an elaborate, 500-page argument, said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. Franzen is convinced that “the original sin of free-market capitalism” lies at the root of all the hurt Americans inflict on one another, and he’s carefully engineered the plot to make the case that our entire culture is poisoned by an infatuation with personal freedom. Even readers who don’t find his arguments convincing, though, will tear through the book wondering if its “vicious” characters will be destroyed by their self-absorption or if any can be saved.