Freedom

The most talked-about book of the year arrives with the patronage of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and every broadsheet. Jonathan Franzen, author of the marvellous The Corrections, returns nine years later with his new novel, Freedom. But is it any good?
It is and it isn't. On one hand, it's a beautiful dissection of the perfect suburban idyll, a deconstruction of white middle-class urban gentrification and its impact behind closed doors and white picket fences. On the other hand, it's over-written and full of overblown sentences that need a good hedge-trim. You'll find said hedgetrimmer in the Berglunds' garden shed, I'm sure.

Freedom is about Patty and Walter Berglund and their precocious son and their perfect daughter. Freedom is about how their pasts swirl around this seemingly perfect family into a series of repressions, depressions and obsessions. Patty, a former sports prodigy, now married to the best friend of the man she wanted, tries to maintain a perfect idyll. However, on the advice of her psychiatrist, she writes an autobiography that reveals a history of disappointment and frustration. Walter, the once enviro-activist, finds he has to work with a coal company in order to save nature. Their son Joe is refusing to come home, opting to live with his girlfriend's family next door.

The simmering dysfunctions of the family, against a backdrop of recent American history, all bring together a sterling plot, worthy of Tolstoy in its expanse, about family and about being middle-class in America. It could do with some serious trimming, in plot and sentence-length but the sum of Freedom's parts is Franzen deft hand.