Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Freedom: A Novel - Jonathan Franzen

Date Started: May 30, 2014
Date Finished: June 6, 2014

This is a wordy, wordy book. It's kind of depressing, kind of uplifting and it kind of made me think about things I could do better in my marriage, which I suppose is good. I don't know - I feel conflicted about this book. It stuck with me in that I thought about it after I finished it - but I didn't particularly enjoy reading it. I wouldn't read it again, and there are few people I would recommend it to. But it wasn't completely unenjoyable either. So there, you see, conflicted.


 Here's the official lines from Amazon:

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 Walter and Patty Berglund 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.

But I have to admit to agreeing with the review from zashibis which reads:

Besides the lack of originality, the problem, in essence, is this time out I don't believe a single, solitary word of it. I don't believe in liberal middle-class parents who'd let their teenage son move in with their obnoxious Republican neighbors. I don't believe in a talented college athlete who'd let herself be hoodwinked for years by a ditzy, obsessive fan. I don't believe in a committed environmentalist who'd sign off on strip mining vast tracts of virgin forest in the name of reclaiming those tracts many years afterwards for a single-species preserve. I don't believe in a 19-year-old arms dealer making procurement purchases in Paraguay. I don't believe in a couple who remain married, but utterly incommunicado, for 6 years. I don't believe in a 47-year-old man with no religious convictions who is trying beer for the very first time, and is prone to bursting into tears on the least provocation. And that's just for starters.

So, should you read it? Well that depends. If it takes you forever to finish a longer book, then I'd probably say no. Don't invest your time in this one. But if you can speed through books pretty quickly then I'd say why not. It's an interesting trip.

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