What is Freedom about?

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.

The novel's great argument is embedded in the title: freedom is what Americans say they want, but the freedom to do whatever you like turns out to be freedom to destroy what you have. Each character is given latitude — to choose, to leave, to betray, to start over — and each uses it in ways they eventually regret. This is not nihilism; Franzen is deeply interested in how people repair themselves and their relationships, and the novel's second half deals with reckoning and reconciliation with unusual honesty.

At 560 pages, Freedom is long and sometimes slow. Franzen's prose is fluent but not pyrotechnic; the pleasure is in the accumulation of specific detail rather than the sentence-level. The political material (Iraq war, Bush era, environmental activism) dates the book somewhat, but the character dynamics feel permanent. If you found The Corrections too cold, Freedom is warmer. If you found it too long, Freedom is longer. It is the kind of novel serious readers argue about in the way people used to argue about novels.