Talk to Freedom like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Walter and Patty Berglund are the kind of liberal couple that makes their neighbors slightly uncomfortable — too earnest, too visibly trying, their St. Paul, Minnesota life a project of the will rather than a life lived. Freedom is the story of their marriage, their son Joey, and their closest friend Richard Katz, a rock musician, across roughly three decades. Franzen published it to enormous acclaim and immediate controversy — Time put him on the cover and called it a Great American Novel, which is the kind of thing that gets people's backs up. Whether the hyperbole was warranted is a separate question from whether the book is worth reading, and it is.
What Franzen does well in Freedom is write characters who are intelligent enough to understand their own contradictions and weak enough not to resolve them. Patty, who narrates two long sections as an "autobiography" she writes on the advice of a therapist, is the novel's emotional center — a former college basketball star who made choices that seemed reasonable at the time and took decades to fully cost her. Walter's obsession with overpopulation and bird conservation runs through the novel as a form of displacement, a way of caring about the fate of the planet while failing to be present to the people in front of him. Richard Katz serves as the anti-Walter — careless, magnetic, honest about his selfishness in a way that paradoxically makes him more likable.
What it gets right
- 1.
Franzen writes characters whose self-awareness is not a cure for self-defeat — the Berglunds understand their problems better than most fictional characters and change no faster.
- 2.
Patty's 'autobiography' sections are the formal core of the novel, a character study in how we narrate our own lives to minimize our own culpability.
- 3.
Freedom treats American liberalism with unusual critical ambition — Walter's environmental obsession and his political convictions are rendered as real beliefs and as forms of avoidance.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist born in 1959 in Western Springs, Illinois. He is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Strong Motion (1992), The Corrections (2001), which won the National Book Award and became a defining American novel of its era, Freedom (2010), Purity (2015), and Crossroads (2021), the first volume of a planned trilogy. He is also a prolific essayist and memoirist, known for writing about birds, family, and the difficulty of writing seriously in an attention-fractured culture. His public profile has been shaped as much by controversy as by his fiction.
