Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

I should say upfront that I'm a Franzen fan. I have been since the Corrections was first published and I'm now a happy owner of the uncorrected preprint of Freedom. Did I like Freedom? Yes. If you like Franzen there's no point reading further.

If you didn't like the Corrections (or his others such as Strong Motion) this won't convert you.

If you have never read Franzen and enjoy proper novels (and by proper I mean stories that glory in their own telling and don't need to be driven by a tab A into slot b structure) then this book and indeed all of his works are for you. Would I start with Freedom? Sure, why the hell not.

Freedom. The book is about Freedom. Not politically (well it is but not in some Rawlsian sense) but Freedom as America thinks it understands it. Freedom is about America, about its peoples and the stories they tell themselves about this, their most precious, commodity.

Franzen has taken the pulse perceptively and the story is fantastic, sympathetic, unflinching and poignant. I began it and then couldn't put it down. I nearly missed my stop on the underground more than once and in the end began taking it to bed with me (abandoning another book in the process). Franzen peoples his story with profoundly ordinary people looking to make the best of their lives. Mistakes are made and War and Peace invoked both in terms of the underlying structure of the book but also by the characters.

In some ways it shouldn't work - it's so close to being a pastiche of those books that promise a powerful story of three generations of a family. Yet it does. Here's how it affected me - I spent numerous hours reflecting on my own life, how close it was to those in the story and whether I could fall into the pits they had fallen into whilst trying so hard to avoid them. When one has a chance to wonder about one's own life because of characters with whom one has only passing similarities in real life it's a testament to just how well the author has captured what it means to navigate a normal life.

There's so much here; I'm sure academics will study it. Sure, but the real power? It's layered sympathy for its protagonists leaves you wistful when it finally ends. Sure they've moved on but you wish they hadn't. You wish they'd turned to look at you and wish you well before they left.

So how long do I have to wait until his next book? Anyone?