Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

This 2010 novel by Jonathan Franzen was his long delayed follow up to his famously popular novel of 2001 The Corrections. For all the wait this book delivers. For me this book actually surpasses it's predecessor and hit home in ways for me that the fist book did not.

Franzen returns to the Midwest to the suburbs of Minnesota, suburbs that are fast becoming his known place and setting as much as Faulkner and Cheever traditional settings that appeared over and over.

The story centers around Walter and Patty Berglund a couple who has raised two children, and now as the children are almost grown see their marriage disintegrating. The book is told in several flashbacks and time settings.

Much of the book is told under the section heading " Mistakes Were Made" an autobiography written by Patty at the urging of her therapist. We learn of Patty's problems growing up, her escape from her emotionless family and her meeting both Walter her future husband and his best friend, the cool as a cucumber narcissitic futire rock star Richard Katz. Attacted to Richard and comfortable in the knowledge that Walter adores her she wiggles on the hook of both until she takes the easy route and marries Walter.

Walter is a good man. He is a feminist, a proto typical liberal in everyway. He rides a bike to work, even in snow, to reduce his carbon footprint. Despite these eccentries Walter is a genuinly good person. His displeasure with good old boys can be traced to his childhood and his being invisible to his father and older brothers, none of whom could Walter be described as being remotely like.

Richard is the man we all know. He treats women like objects. He runs from success like it compromises his vision of a struggling future. Richard and Patty share a passion for each other that is kept at bay until way too late. Richard and Patty also share a love for Walter and his inate goodness that makes their passion for each other shrink.

We also meet Jessica and Joey, the children of Patty and Walter. We see Walter's passion for the environemnt lead him into the employ of a wildlife orgainziation run by a rich oilman who plans to use mountaintop mining to pave the way for a wildlife preserve. Truth to say that Walter is conflicted.

In the end Walter is a hermit living at his family's secluded camp in upstate Minnesota watching himself be fenced in even here by development and the enemies of his beloved songbirds, doemstic cats.

Patty is in New York having effected a settlement of her feelings with her family and at the same time her father's estate.

This book is too wide ranging to describe easily. For me the relationship between Walter and his son and Walter's struggles to deal with his son's differences from him felt like I could have wrote it. One has to be happy in having those feelings seeing the eventual resolution of that heartache for Walter and his son. It gives one hope.

In the end this novel Freedom is about hope, and second chances, and third chances, getting what you want and finding out you really want what you had and didn't want. It is the story of the emotions we all feel.

This is a monumental book.