Freedom by Jonathan Franzen Review

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen Review

Written on 9/30/2014

At a point in this monster of a book, a character reads War And Peace in a three day marathon of reading. At the end of it, she feels as though she has lived and entire compressed lifetime.

I finished Freedom in three weeks and then it took me a week to grieve the loss of the life I lived vicariously through the characters before I could write this blog post. Just as trying to sum up the life and value of a person at their funeral is beyond complicated and not without its difficulties, so is explaining how moved I was by this book.

Franzen unfolds the distorted perfect picture of suburbia in the Burglands - a nuclear family with an always working father, Walter, stay-at-home mom Patty, hardworking older sister Jessica, and independent younger brother Joey....and Walter's rock star college friend Richard Katz.

A seemingly perfect family dissolving into madness isn't an entirely new concept for a book, but the way Franzen tells their story - with multiple perspectives and intensely intricate details always kept me reading late into the night.

As an entire work Freedom is about all the different types of love that exist in modern day America and how every one of them can drive you into insanity and/or grief. Not just the love for your partner, children, parents, friends, and yourself - but the love for competition, money, basketball, ambition, music, horses, sex, drugs, obsession, and any other object of affection or devotion.

Each character has many passions that build depth beyond the characters of many novels I've read before. Patty is a competitor that, as an empty-nester, has run out of things to compete for leaving a feeling of emptiness in her life. Walter is compassionate about the environment and changing the world that pushes him to the point of a fanatic nature freak. Joey wants more than anything to independently become financial superstar at age 19 and gets into a bit of a conundrum in his attempts. And Richard Katz thoroughly enjoys not caring about anything enough to really be in love with it - a true rock star persona.

What was missing from this book was really Jessica - I can't tell you much about her - and the book could've done without intense descriptions of environmental issues that although added to the madness of Walter's conservation aspirations, was hard to get through when I knew I still had millions of questions unanswered at hundreds of pages left to read.

Although, I must admit when I finally turned the to the 562nd page, I was weeping because the life I had lived with the Burglands was all over and was left hoping for a few hundred more pages with this family I so loved and had just started to admire.