Patty 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 an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter – environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, 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 old college friend and rival – still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become ‘a very different kind of neighbour’, 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 too much 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.
Industry Reviews
'Deeper, funnier, sadder and truer than a work of fiction has any right to be' - Independent on Sunday
'Head and shoulders above any other book this year: moving, funny and unexpectedly beautiful. I missed it when it was over' - Sam Mendes, Observer, Books of the Year
'A cat's cradle of family life, and if the measure of a good book is its afterburn, 'Freedom' is a great book' - Kirsty Wark Observer, Books of the Year
'I loved 'Freedom'. His acute observations of emotional faultlines, his dialogue and above all his wry humour are delightful' - Antony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year
'Franzen pulls off the extraordinary feat of making the lives of his characters more real to you than your own' - David Hare, Guardian, Books of the Year
'No question about it: 'Freedom' swept everything before it in intricately observed, humane, unprejudiced armfuls. There was no novel to touch it in 2010' - Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
'By the end of 'Freedom' you may feel you understand its protagonists better than you know anyone in the world around you' - Nicholas Hytner, Evening Standard, Books of the Year
'The novel of the year. Its portrait of a marriage, luminously and wittily drawn against a backdrop of modern America, is as good as literature gets' - Sarah Sands, New Statesman, Books of the Year
