Freedom (Book)

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: 'Freedom: A Novel' - Book review

Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 576 pages, $28

JONATHAN FRANZEN may be the country's most popular literary novelist. In Freedom, his aptly titled new book, he takes on the question of American liberty: what it means and what it's worth. He stumbles over some political stereotypes along the way, but in the end Franzen's fatalistic message has an optimistic edge: that there just might be something noble about our freedom to fail.

Freedom is superficially focused on a single couple, Patty and Walter Berglund, as they meet, marry, raise kids, and eventually grow middle-aged and apart. In tracking the lives of the Berglunds and their acquaintances, Franzen touches on topics as diverse as parenting, gentrification, real estate, mid-life crises, coal mining, population growth, environmentalism, the war in Iraq, crony capitalism, neoconservative dynasties, punk rock, alt-country, marriage, and sexual commitment.

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But the novel is more than a guide to the enthusiasms, vanities, and complications of America's educated upper-middle class. And though Franzen dips in and out of half a dozen narrative threads, the maze of story lines is not the real point of the book either.

At its core, Freedom explores the tension between the stability of communal bonds and the constant quest for self-definition; its theme is whether and how freedom exists amid individuals' fraught relationships with their families and communities. More broadly, it is about how Americans go about choosing what we want to do and who we want to be. In Franzen's vision of bourgeois life during the George W. Bush administration, those decisions turn out to be made mostly by looking at what your parents and predecessors did and then trying to do the opposite, even if it means screwing up everything in the process. Underlying the novel's family tensions and social convulsions is a question: Is this cycle of social and personal upheaval the inevitable cost of freedom?

Like his most famous book, 2001's The Corrections, Franzen's new novel is a snapshot of a recent era--in this case, the second Bush presidency. The plot features a dash of political intrigue, as Walter Berglund cuts deals with a mining company linked to Vice President Dick Cheney and Berglund's son becomes involved in a kooky plot to defraud the U.S. military. But Franzen is chiefly interested in politics as it is experienced by Americans outside the professional political...