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Mrs. Flick has been wholeheartedly pushing this book on Liana & I. &... finally I got my paws on it, and the verdict is this: medium-well. If this were a cut of meat, it would be messy, ugly, but tasteful: there would be much blackness on the outside (Franzen is quite the oxymoron: he’s incredibly vivid in his very opaqueness: there are four members of the Berglund family and only three get to have their stories unfold: the elusive daughter is not worthy, apparently, of a narrative space) and the juices are left in. This, for people with peculiar (and surely refined) tastes to favor. "Freedom" is contrived and elegant, a portrait as sure of its (wide!) scope as Updike in his “Rabbit�� novels proved.

Like the theme itself implies, there are various problems with “Freedom.��

The cover, with a wingless songbird (very relevant to the book’s plot) about to dash an invisible barrier formed by the bold type pronouncing the title and writer (as well as the ever-important “Author of ‘The Corrections’�� tag), is a great one. It encompasses the brave enormous space taken by Franzen’s narrative about a (Dysfunctional? Emblematic? Typical?) family living in the new millennium: about dashed potentials and “mistakes that we(re) made.�� There is here the always-pesky problem which plagued revered “Rabbit Armstrong”’s insipid existence (over 4 decades long): Who really cares for these revolting folks? I agree now with Liana: I will not, however, recant my prior critique of “The Corrections�� since I truly remember being moved profoundly by that one. That one had a certain mechanism which let the reader become hooked to it till the bitter end. But this one is ambiguous in many respects, has no motorized heart, except in explicit sentences with complicated structures & paragraphs almost over-puffed with full-on pretentiousness. It is also a sad victim of the gross crime of “Overthinking It��: Did it really take almost 600 pages to tell the simple tale of infidelity & a family’s total dissatisfaction with modernity? Franzen has a confidence that makes me want to—well, gag. It is saved, I will brave up to say, by a truly clever ending, but the bigness of it is, in hindsight, its overall main detractor.

There are articulate and smart criticisms of (my personal favorite theme:) overpopulation. [I am relieved to say that FINALLY a book, outside of sci-fi or the short tales of J. G. Ballard, has finally the guts to tackle this {sadly�� pretty conservative view} of incredibly large populations of people taking over and their eventual {& uber-understandable!} depletion of the globe’s natural resources!]).

I hated all people in this. Every single one had a fault that lead to my entire uninspired apathy. The husband is blinded by his incredibly-focused dreams of a better world. He lets the siblings have their freedoms and they, in turn, become rebellious. Obviously the main obstacle here is No Understanding, since everyone is definitely quite selfish. The mother is a woman who married the wrong guy and looks for the missing fulfillment: how did she never notice her mistake? (Wow- Madame Bovary—still relevant today, to everyone’s detriment.) & the son�� well, he becomes a young Republican, makes a bundle of money for himself, so let that just speak for itself (on top of which: I really despised this brat�� his idleness I find synonymous with the All-American Useless Straight Guy�� a deplorable contemporary archetype in whose presence I refuse to be�� Imagine me sitting through 200 plus pages of his infamous adventures, his altogether selfish persona... the reading truly becomes a chore).

Here, the decade may have been personified to a tee, but I honestly KNOW that there is better fiction out there, one that does away with this new brand of American Coolness: too detailed and too psychotic, altogether tragic, sometimes dull and persistently l-o-o-OOOn-g. I had very little “Freedom�� to envision anything other than a pathetic portrait of the contemporary family picture—and not much American beauty in it at all.