Freedom

I downloaded Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom, just a couple of days before leaving the country for a 2-week European vacation. (I went on vacation with my Nook instead of my usual stack of paperbacks, and I loved it! You just have to remember to keep it charged . . . ) It was only on my return that I learned it was the current Oprah pick! Now, I have nothing against Oprah and sometimes she picks really good books. But I consider myself a serious reader, and it’s not often I find myself reading an Oprah book right after she announces it. But, with or without a talk show host endorsement, Freedom is a great read.

I read Corrections way back when, and although I don’t remember it well, I seem to remember it being hard to get into. Freedom, on the other hand, is captivating right from the start. It’s the story of Walter and Patty Berglund, and their two children. It has a lot of the components of my favorite genre—the mutli-generational American family saga—but, unlike most of those stories, it isn’t told sequentially. In the first section, Patty’s son Joey gets fed-up with his parents and moves in with his girlfriend’s family instead. The next lengthy section flashes back to Patty’s college years, when she meets Walter but has a crush on his roommate, Richard Katz, a brooding musician. The love triangle that ensues is quite the soap opera, but then the next section becomes extremely political. Walter gets a job with a conservation group out to save a species of songbird, but the huge corporation funding the operation has sinister motivations. And all the while Walter’s true passion is fighting overpopulation. He enlists the help of Richard, now a bona fide rock star, to try to convince young people that it’s really cool to not reproduce.

The book is overly political—criticizing the Bush years and America’s current drain on the environment, not to mention the war in Iraq, the economic downturn, 9/11, and a number of other events from the last decade and a half. Not to mention Walter’s extreme stance on overpopulation and his belief that people shouldn’t have children at all. And yet, the story is engaging enough to carry it. Amidst the political points, I still found myself caring about what the characters did next and how events would shape them. If Oprah’s endorsement isn’t enough, I, too, would highly recommend this book!