Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) Kindle Edition

The author is better at writing than storytelling. He describes a story rather than tells it, like when you go home after many years and friends and family catch you up on the neighborhood, telling about multiple people at light speed, jumping around in years, rather than one person explaining everything in chronological order. Nothing is told simply when 1000 details can be added. The 1st chapter starts with a rape, and stays there for many pages. The victim is not mad about the forced sex or the bruises, but that it was done by a golf dude who didn't appreciate her as a real athlete. Well, I found that odd. There's 26 pages before the first chapter, but are not labeled a preface or introduction, though they tell of the victim's later life without mentioning the rape, which should be an important piece of info if he's gonna spend so much time on it later. I bought the book because newspaper reviews call this author a genius, yet his prose is hard to get through, his characters are unlikeable, and his story arc is more like mud splattered on a wall. I was hoping for a good story, told well, and got the oppposite.

What can I say? I really enjoyed this book. I liked the way Franzen began with a tapestry, a lifescape for his characters, I liked the way he meticulously unraveled this tapestry before our reading eyes, and continued to unravel it such that it seemed impossible for the characters, the events, the plot, and the setting to be unraveled any further, and then they are unraveled further, and then the author throws the threads on the ground, tramples on them, and then brings them up again, and carefully, thread by thread, re-weaves the tapestry until it is bigger and grander than it was before. The whole effect is utterly cathartic. I laughed at so many sections, and re-read certain sections that I felt were incredibly odd but delightful. I identified with the characters, mostly with their constant pools of embarrassment, guilt and shame that come with being a human--especially the kind who continues to make terrible mistakes (shame and guilt are exactly those emotions which Franzen enjoys drawing mercilessly, as if to show that once out, it’s no big deal). It’s a satire, but in a subtle way—so yes, laugh, especially when Walter loses himself into all CAPS and Patty sleepwalks against her will. And read with a hearty attitude—it’s no breezy stroll in the park. More like a hike along the ocean in a cold but invigorating gale that blows into your face no matter which way you turn, but which occasionally breaks to allow you fleeting glimpses of magnificent sun-streaked cliffs, reminding you how deep and wide the experience and scope of life can be.

Jonathan Franzen is simply our best male American living novelist. This story of a dysfunctional American family pulls you into their lives and wont let go. Patty is a wife, mother, woman whose mind is divided into two realities - pretty much like most women who decided marriage and children were their main goals in life in their early twenties until they got what they thought they wanted.Patty's husband, Walter, head-over-heels with Patty, is overjoyed she chose him over his best friend, Richard, until a few years go by and the quotidian reality of marriage rears its ugly head.The title FREEDOM is about the choices we make in life, the singular freedom Americans have that most people in the world don't; i.e, whom to marry, where to live, how to raise their children, according to custom, religion, traditions and rules. They don't have the responsibility our Freedoms afford and sometimes devastate us.All the while, Freedom's pages quickly turn to reveal more about the Berglunds and their rebellious teenage children (are there any other kind?) This reader cares what happens to everyone, even the not so likeable.

This reader gets the impression Franzen could have written any other book he wanted—he has that much talent—or he could have written this book in any of several other ways. And just as successfully if not more so. Still, warts and all, I recommend this novel even though Franzen obviously has the power to have crafted it far better.Okay, Franzen does deal with freedom as a theme here and there, but the book should probably have been titled Dysfunction, and man, is it full of that in spades.Structurally, this novel packs more subplots and minor characters into its pages than a Dickens tome. Fortunately, only a few of these become tedious, though some appear irrelevant, at least at the level of detail he presents. He also treats us to some truly idiosyncratic approaches to punctuation and capitalization--especially a liberal use of colons and parenthetical details set off in commas.And talk about hooks and leaving the reader hanging? Franzen constantly jumps around in time, dropping one set of characters in favor of another, at least for the time being. See, he does return through flashbacks to pick up where he left off to fill us in. “Oh, so that’s what happened,” we say. And in some cases, the flashbacks jump through multiple generations. Yikes.Further, he relishes triangles, the type that focus on love, sex, lust, and other human preoccupations that can become quite unhappy. He also gives us his takes on place, such as the upper Midwest, New York and its environs, and Washington DC and vicinity—hey, he spends much time in West Virginia and even South America. The characters change, grow, fade, and are re-reviewed and seen in new lights by their fellow characters from time to time as the plot progresses.

I didn’t read this when it first came out because people were talking about it so much. Actually they were talking about the author and whether it was fair how much critical attention his books got. Yes, it was. This is a masterpiece. It doesn’t seem like it will be interesting but that’s what a brilliant writer can do. That’s why it got so much acclaim. An excellent rendering of a part of society during a crazy period of history. Until 2016 to present of course, which makes all else seem normal. This is a reminder that the W years were pretty crooked too. Long but it didn’t drag at all.

Based on other reviews, this seems to be a real Marmite book, with people either loving it or loathing it. I got it free as some kind of Kindle special offer and I was a bit apprehensive starting it because it has a lot of negative reviews. But luckily for me, it grabbed me immediately and I really enjoyed it. It is a family saga, centred around an ageing couple and their three grown-up children, and I think my enjoyment stemmed from the fact that the dynamics were so instantly familiar. I must admit that my pleasure was tempered in places by the fact that the familiarity was incredibly close to the bone. The story touches on many universal themes - the difficulties we have coping as we get older, the expectations that the older generation have of the younger generation, the need of the younger generation to build their own lives, and the conflicts that all this brings. Despite these "heavy" issues, the book has a humorous tone, and although it is very long, it is extremely well written. I haven't read any Jonathan Franzen before and I was very impressed with his literary style.

Franzen writes such brilliant characters. This isn't a book about plot, although I really enjoyed discovering how the story unfolded. Instead, this is about gaining an understanding of how the characters tick. And Franzen does this brilliantly. You heard the voice of each main character and grow to love them. And then you move on to another, while the plot gives structure. Superb.

Tolstoy said that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but I've never really believed that. Certainly, the families of Walter and Patty Berglund are very similar: each of them is the outsider, the family scapegoat, bullied by both parents and siblings. That should perhaps make them a natural couple, but Patty really yearns for Walter's cool friend Richard, the laid-back, womanising musician. In the end, she settles for Walter and they build a life together in small-town Minnesota with two children of their own.It would be easy to dislike Patty but I didn't. She's an innocent who, when she does bad things, does them not out of malice but almost accidentally. Her one great gift, as a basketball player, is taken from her by injury. Mild-mannered Walter, meanwhile, with his endless concerns for the environment and zero-population growth, matures into a man nearly burned alive by anger.At first I found the prose style annoying, with its very long, rambling, unstructured sentences (I found one that went on for two pages), but I got used to it after a while and it ceased to bother me. The chapters are also long, each centred on one member of the small group of main characters, some of them a sort of autobiography written by Patty, which will come back to bite her in the end.This is a profoundly sad book: people are unhappy; government is corrupt; big business amoral and self-seeking. The fact that it manages to end on a note of hope is a small blessing. Franzen's message may be the same as Forster's in Howard's End -- that what matters is personal relations and being kind to each other.

Franzen's attempt to write a 21st century Tolstoy-style novel almost works except that in Tolstoy's day there was no widespread discussion of the issues so it made sense to have Tolstoy's characters debate land possession, the rights of the proletariat and so on, whereas today we have the internet where the pros and cons of population growth, the Iraq War, or the Environment have already been thrashed to a halt, and so when Franzen repeats them in this novel, they don't carry the same weight and I skipped all the political sections.What Franzen is so good at is family relations and for me, a female, he gives a wondrous look into the masculine mind and sexual drive. Anne Tyler, who insists on writing novels from the male point of view should read this book closely.I found both the sex-crazed Richard and the anal retentive Walter more convincing than the heroine, Patty, whose later persona as a mixed up mother and wife does not follow well from her teenage years as an outstanding athlete.Still, Jonathan is a formidable writer and I think deserves all the accolades.[...]

This is a hugely enjoyable book, mainly because of the excellent writing. The framework is, I suppose, modern American life. I guess it helps a little not to be American, so you can discount the many implausiblilities by telling yourself, ah, well, I suppose this could happen in America. (I was surprised at how many of the local references and current argot were unfamiliar/impenetrable to me). The characters are not exactly grotesques, but there is something of the Dickensian exaggeration about them, which makes it all the more suprising that I was often very moved (at least twice to tears) by what happened to them. But the family saga framework is intricately and skillfully worked out, without exactly being a plot. Franzen manages to touch on just about every current modern theme, most obviously, environmentalism and freedom, though strangely he avoids racism - blacks and the poor get one, totally insignificant walk-on part each. All the themes are treated comprehensively, and all are shown to be intractable. As is the main theme of the book, the puzzling phenonomeon of love. Given the intractability of this, I can't blame him for his method of bringing the book to a conclusion (and not just because I was totally unconvinced at the same time as being totally moved).I was, though, utterly mesmerised by the writing - the prose, and the storytelling, of course, but most of all the constantly surprising and interesting riffs on all sorts of subthemes - in politics, economics, environmentalism, family life, community life, etc. I liked so many of them, and loved the one on cats.I mentionded Dickens, and I suppose the most surprising thing about this book is how old fashioned it really is and how modern it really feels. In this last regard, his treatment of sex is exemplary. Its insistent and troubling nature is there for all to see (and feel!).All its variations are graphically allowed their spot in the limelight (at least the heterosexual ones - the strong, male loves are convncingly matey, and certainly no basis for a life), but it is surrounded by neither moralising mystery nor sub-teen prurience or porn. There is also no feeling of having a writerly sex interlude, it is all part of the grand story. Is that what modern sex is?