Joe's Reviews From The Field: Freedom

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 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 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.

Joe says: "Wow. I have just finished "Freedom", Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, and I am sitting here, utterly blown away. This is a huge story, not really in pages (although it isn't a short novel) but in scope, and in humanity. This is the story of Walter and Patty Berglund. Of their marriage, of their friendship with rockstar Richard Katz, Walter's best friend. Franzen's style is alive, is personable, is real. These characters are not written on the page, they are alive in this world, in our world. We follow their lives together, and how they got together, and what happened to them, of their children, of their interests, of their hopes, their failures, their successes. This was a book that I craved to return to. That as I sit here, sad that it is over. This is a book I want others to read so I can revisit it, so that we can discuss it."

The publication date is 8-31-10. You can reserve your copy here.

Franzen is the first living novelist to grace the cover of Time Magazine in 10 years. Click here to read an article on that cover and on Time's literary history.