Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another outstanding novel from Jonathan Franzen, after The Corrections and Purity, which I reviewed here. The narration in Freedom spans over 20 years, and, superficially, it may be summarized as an account of an unusual romantic triangle of Patty, Walter, and Richard, combined with the stories of their children's generation.

The characterizations of the protagonists as well as their children are uniformly excellent. All of them are fully believable people whom I feel I might know in real life. For various reasons, I don't particularly like any of them, but this is irrelevant to evaluating a novel. However, even with masterly psychological portrayals, the most important aspect of the novel for me is that it captures the zeitgeist of the 2000s. I am fascinated by the author's insights into the unclean world where business meets politics and how lofty ideas may be perverted in pursuit of financial gain. Naturally, the narrative makes the reader think about the concept of freedom, its meaning, its dimensions, and its cost and consequences.

Inserting the autobiography of one of the main characters in the third-person narration that is used in other parts of the novel turns out to be a successful narrative device. There is one scene, set in Argentina, so utterly hilarious that I was laughing out loud even though it was about midnight.

So why not five stars? The main reason, for me, is that the world created by the author is too big. I believe trimming some tertiary characters and eliminating many events and relationships would not hurt the narrative or the realism of the story, and it would make the novel even more compulsively readable.

View all my reviews