Freedom by Jonathan Franzen 3. Review

This review is from: Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (Kindle Edition)
I will avoid the plot review, because so many others seem compelled to summarize, and the repetition becomes tiresome. I enjoyed this novel, and I think you will too. I gave it four stars because it is not perfect, but it is better than most current fiction. Franzen may be a "serious" writer, but he is also highly readable, with an interesting story that can be enjoyed for itself alone, absent any considerations of literary aspirations.

This is a big, rambling tale of modern Americans in their modern lives, people who reminded me of real people, a plot which kept me turning the pages of this compulsively readable, mostly entertaining novel. The tone is slightly condescending, as the quote above my review would suggest, mostly cynical, and ultimately hopeful by the end of the story, when his battered, bruised and bruising characters emerge from the wreckage of their lives, and bravely carry on.

In many ways this novel is similar to his previous work, The Corrections. I remember enjoying that novel a few years back, although I could not understand why the critics raved about it. Franzen proves yet again that he is a very good writer, building a complicated but workable plot, creating characters who are real, complex and often disappointing, showing us his American self-portrait in 2010. He reaches for a big theme, as the title implies, but he doesn't quite achieve his goal of demontrating the illusory nature of our freedom (or alternatively that all this freedom is killing us). Like Sophocles, Franzen seems to take a dim view of freedom. I probably should not compare Franzen to Sophocles, or other great writers, past or present. He has a genuine voice, a straightforward style, but he does not possess lyrical abilities, nor great thematic breadth. His writing style is similar to Paul Murray's, serving up a cast of mostly unremarkable people who screw up their lives by means of their character defects, giving you a funny and sad slice of everyday life, saying something profound in the process.

Amazon reviewers were much less enamored with The Corrections than the professional reviewers: they gave only three stars on average, with almost as many one star reviews as five star. Franzen's self portraits are closer to the world of the publishing industry than the world of amazon readers. His characters are based in the Midwest, at least in the beginning of the novel, but they are not the American everyman or woman. They are highly educated, well read, socially evolved and spiritually lost in the manner of the wealthy white specimen liberalis americanus. This writing feels too focused upon their world to allow for universal appeal. Nevertheless, Freedom is a very well and carefully written novel. Only time itself will reveal if this is the work of the moment, or a work for all time.