Yay or Nay? 
Yay2! (88%)
Yay2! (88%)
Consensus: It’s said to be a “Masterpiece of American Fiction” – that alone should make you want to read it!
Description: 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 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 … [more]
12 Book Reviews for “Freedom: A Novel” by Jonathan Franzen
- It’s such a full novel, rich in description, broad in its reach and full of wry observations, but “Freedom” always comes back to the family…. Mr. Franzen’s greatest tools are his sympathy and understanding. These build well-rounded characters, major and minor. “Freedom” excels on the strength of its believable people and its power to make us care about them.
Published the 22nd day of August, 2010 in The Pittsburgh Post Gazette | Reviewed by Bob Hoover | Full Review
- For Franzen, this is the trick: not to outgrow who we are but instead to accept it, and in so doing, to accept the world of which we are a part. That’s the freedom to which the title is referring, the freedom at the center of this consuming and extraordinarily moving book.
Published the 20th day of August, 2010 in Los Angeles Times | Reviewed by David L. Ulin | Full Review
- Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges.
Published the 15th day of August, 2010 in The New York Times | Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani | Full Review
- I hadn’t expected to be nearly so engaged by all of this. I picked “Freedom” up out of a sense of duty, then read it semi-addictively and finished it in just a few days. The difference between reading Franzen firsthand and thinking about him from a distance is the difference between having a dream and trying to tell someone about it three years later.
Published the 12th day of August, 2010 in New York Magazine | Reviewed by Sam Anderson | Full Review
- Franzen is in many ways a man out of time. But he proves that whatever else has been swept away in the past few years, rumours of the literary novel’s demise were exaggerated. Welcome back, Jonathan Franzen.
- With its all-encompassing world, its flawed heroes and its redemptive ending, “Freedom” has the sweep of a modern “Paradise Lost.”
- Freedom isn’t flawless: Patty’s journal reads more like Franzen than his character, and he gets sidetracked by quirky tangents. But this is a deep dive into a fascinating family that feels very real, and fully grounded in our time.
Published the 25th day of August, 2010 in Entertainment Weekly | Reviewed by Thom Geier | Full Review
- The first thing people are going to want to know about Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom” is if it measures up to Franzen’s last novel, “The Corrections.” It measures up. In fact, if you liked “The Corrections,” you may like “Freedom” even better. Or not quite so much. It doesn’t matter…. The important thing is that “The Corrections” is a great novel. So is “Freedom.”
- Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom,” … is a masterpiece of American fiction…. Like all great novels, “Freedom” does not just tell an engrossing story. It illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew.
Published the 19th day of August, 2010 in The New York Times | Reviewed by Sam Tanenhaus | Full Review
- Yet despite those frequent lapses, “Freedom” remains a weirdly addictive reading experience…. The ending, alas, is anticlimactic, for Mr. Franzen is better at catching people in devilish traps than releasing them.
Published the 20th day of August, 2010 in The Wall Street Journal | Reviewed by Sam Sacks | Full Review
- More mature, but all around less exciting “Freedom.” … Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t offer its themes so much as bully us into accepting them with knife-to-the-throat insistence…. But stop with the complaints! The point to remember is that “Freedom” is big enough and thoughtful enough to engage and irritate an enormous number of readers.
Published the 25th day of August, 2010 in The Washington Post | Reviewed by Ron Charles | Full Review
- Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family’s facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at—incredibly—genuine hope.
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