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Okay, so earlier this summer I was waiting to see The National play Prospect Park ("Of course you were, Jessica...." -- but bear with me, that's my point), and I sent a text message to the guy who'd given me the tickets, thanking him again and observing that "White People don't LIKE seeing The National play Prospect Park; White People LOVE seeing The National play Prospect Park." This was a reference, of course, to the oft-quoted blog that holds a very high place on the seemingly endless list it identified, of Stuff White People Like. Now, I've always felt a bit annoyed and repelled by the lazy shorthand of race there, then ashamed when I use it myself -- since really the demographic group in question is, like the crowd at the bandshell, not exclusively white, and since there are millions of white people whom it does not describe -- but the concept's too pricelessly apt to resist frequent citing.

The brilliance of Stuff White People Like is in its identification of a socioeconomic group which is, yes, largely white, but more to the point Obama-voting, liberal arts degree-holding, farmers market-shopping, NPR-listening, irony-appreciating, New Yorker-subscribing, boutique cable show-watching, indie-rock-listening, Clash tee-shirt-wearing baby-rearing, freelance-or-nonprofit-job-working, and neighborhood-gentrifying, but also profoundly self-loathing in a weird and specific way that is a bit hard either to detach from or reconcile with its incredible self-absorption and uncomfortable, only partly ironic smugness and conviction that the stuff it likes is good.

Jonathan Franzen should be on the list of Stuff White People Like, but he should also be on the (perhaps equivalent) list of Stuff White People Don't Want To Like But Do, which reflects the ambivalent discomfort of this particular group. We don't want to like Franzen, because we're supposed to, and that contrarian streak is built into our bones. And to add to all that, Franzen writes about -- and nails -- our very essence. I can't think of another book that so perfectly sums up and explores the attributes and complexities of this particular set.

Okay, enough with all this generalization: did this white person like Freedom? Well okay, the first 190 pages was the most fun I've had in years. And I did really like Freedom, and wish I could give it three-point-five stars. My criterion for the fourth star is that I itch to read it, and I itched like crazy while reading it. Yeah, this book was good.

A confession: my behavior while traveling in public, and especially on mass transit, can best be described as sociopathic. If you live in this city -- and perhaps even more likely if you don't, but have visited -- there's a fair chance I've harmed you physically while I ran for the train. Sorry, but you probably don't walk fast enough, and I was trying to get to the platform. The TRAIN might be coming, and I GOT to be on it!!! Understand that I am in a great hurry to arrive in short order wherever I'm going, which is somewhat inexplicable since once I'm there I don't have much to do, and will probably just sit there, dicking around on the Internet; but while I'm en route, I'm a terror, and slow old ladies be damned! I'll hit them with my umbrella! I'll give them all flat tires! But while reading Freedom the number of citywide subway station stair assaults must have dropped; I was in no particular hurry to get where I was headed, and often took the local train or waited for the next less-crowded car. I took crosstown buses where normally I motor on foot, and rode elevators instead of my usual mad running up the stairs. Over the past week, I honestly looked forward to my commute, and to deadtime at work waiting in a courtroom, because these moments gave me another opportunity to read. This is one of two of the most important tests of a book: it was so entertaining and so fabulously engaging that I wanted to pick it up at actually all times.

The other test, though, Freedom didn't really pass. I did vastly enjoy a lot of this book, but it didn't give me the more rare and elusive experience that's the other main thing that I want when I'm reading. I didn't ultimately feel moved, not emotionally or ontologically. I didn't see the world, or my life, in an earthshaking new way (I did start wondering briefly about how my parents might've fucked me up, but not in a fruitful way, so I don't think that counts). And while I did definitely like it, and got involved with the characters, by the end I felt disappointed, and also pretty bored.

Sorry, this is already pretty long and not much of a review. Let's see, Freedom is a novel about a family, the Berglunds, and if you want to read a good review of it, I defer to Mike Reynolds. I myself was instantly hooked from the beginning chapter, which is a description of the family from the perspective of the community where they live, and I loved -- loved -- the next portion, an "autobiography" (wonderfully titled "Mistakes Were Made") by the wife, Patty Berglund, which takes us up to page 187. But I'm afraid that for me, things did peak there, and I'm a bit baffled by all the buzz about "greatest living American writer" and "genius." I did like this book. But it wasn't that great.

So but like, I really don't follow these things, but full disclosure, I couldn't free myself while reading from thoughts about the Author, and I really don't think that this was just me. Other reviews on this site have noted that the characters are all a lot the same, but I don't really see that as a problem, and that's kind of what I liked about it. For me, the only character that never really came off was daughter Jessica, which I maybe took too personally, as that is my name (I did like the part where Jessica agonizes over the impossibility of finding a decent New York guy to go out with, though I liked it more in the abstract, and wanted its execution to be more amazing). I felt a bit shortchanged when it came to the son's relationship with his lady; there were all the seeds to be sown, and then we just stopped hearing about them. But my point partly, with the Franzenness, was that the two parents did feel very real, maybe the more so for seeming like two only slightly varying manifestations of the same certain guy.

Here's my beef about Jonathan Franzen, and I know I should do some more google research before I start on with this, but I'm feeling kind of lazy, and I doubt anyone's still reading this.... See, I associate him, like a lot of people, with that Oprah thing in the nineties, when he withdrew from being in the Oprah bookclub, got lots of shit, and as a result (maybe) became wildly popular. Franzen's Wikipedia article has a quotation from him at that time, in which he explains that he didn't want people thinking The Corrections was a women's book (by "people" I mean men, of course) and therefore not reading it. Now again, I'm only dimly aware of what's been going on recently, but I've heard lady authors are bitching (like we do) about all the press and blowjobs Franzen's been getting, and suggesting that this is really all because of that Y-chromosome he has. And honestly, I was distracted while reading this by my conviction that it's true.

I don't want to plagiarize, though I can't remember who said it, but some upset woman I read at some point was complaining about the "chick lit" ghetto and said that Franzen writes what are essentially domestic novels, and that if he weren't a man they'd be considered women's fiction. And that, friend, is true. It is painfully true. Especially the better, earlier, female-perspectived portion of this novel is all about relationships and a marriage and family, and all those lady things. And if Jonathan were Jessica Franzen, at least half the readers he has (except Mike Reynolds, boy wonder, who actually reads stuff by chicks!) would never have touched it and it would've had some dumb pinky cover, but because he's a man, it's a Serious Novel. Yeah, actually I do really think that. Without all the male masturbation and the obviously male author, this could've so easily been written off as chick lit. And it makes me -- perhaps unjustly -- hate Jonathan Franzen to think that he might not recognize that. It might not seem this way, but I'm not one of those people who carries on endlessly about WhiteMalePrivilege, but I actually do want to with him. Because he gets the kind of attention that similarly talented women wouldn't get, while writing about topics that aren't considered Serious when women write about them.

Okay, I'm sorry, I'm rambling again (really bad day at work, srsly, sorry). This book, hm, well what more can I say? Franzen is a terrific writer, and I loved the addictive easiness of his prose style, which can unfortunately come back and bite an author because it makes any glitch seem egregious. I hated the partial sentences that seemed to creep in more as the novel progressed, though I might not have noticed them if his writing weren't otherwise so perfect. He writes sentences as readable as the most digestible best-seller, but good. The problem is that being that good makes people angrier if you let them down. (Especially if those people are me, and apply ridiculously high standards to anything they have great hopes for, while giving tons of social work sympathy to the obvious losers. You guys should hope that I never have children! I'll criticize and neglect the good kid, while coddling the fuck-up.)

Okay, I did feel let down by this book; again, I really liked it. But by the end I felt bored by the characters, especially by depression (which is deadly boring; note my biases, as a reader who was unable to make it all the way through David Foster Wallace's short story "The Depressed Person" despite thinking it brilliant), and I really thought the plot and characters ran off the road at later points into melodrama. At a certain early juncture I felt sure our Berglunds' marriage would survive, though I wasn't sure I cared that it did, or what that had to do with me.

But don't get me wrong! This was a very fine novel. Frazen's ability to create characters is wonderful, and the whole thing's pretty zeitgeisty, which is nice in this dying form. No, sorry Jonathan: it's not War and Peace. But in its mostly successful efforts to link the narcissistic and eerily familiar concerns of individuals to the larger events and forces of our time, it is a lot closer than anything recent I can think of.

Best of all, now I have something to fall back on, the next time I'm at a Brooklyn party and the White People are all talking about True Blood. "Haven't seen it," I'll admit, as I swig a microbrew. "But have you read Freedom?"

And we'll take it from there.