Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, Oprah's Book Club, Lang:en
Summary
From the National Book Award-winning author of The
Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about familyPatty and
Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the
gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole
Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who
could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get
the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably
perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together
with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total
family man—she was doing her small part to build a better
world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have
become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the
aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken
a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard
Katz—outré rocker and Walter’s college best
friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all,
what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier
Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,”
an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street’s
attentive eyes? In his first novel since The Corrections,
Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and
marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the
temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage
lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of
suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the
mistakes and joys of Freedom’s intensely realized
characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever
more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and
deeply moving portrait of our time.