Freedom
A Novels, Contemporary, Fiction book. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him...
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture?...
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- Filetype: PDF
- Pages: 562 pages
- ISBN: 9780312600846 / 312600844
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More About Freedom
Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom // The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing 'God Bless America,' stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet's future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it's beautiful to have a lot of babies. The more the better. Kate Winslet is pregnant, hooray hooray. Some dimwit in Iowa just... Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom //
I read Freedom the week before Christmas. What was I thinking? Did I want a bleak, almost sullen, portrayal of America in the new century? And not a complete one, either, but limited to privileged white people? Why didnt I just sit on the couch, get drunk, and watch Salt and Easy A? Ok, I did that, too, but my kids were off of school... *Update 9/23 - Jonathan Franzen was in town doing a reading & signing last night, and after listening to him talk, Im officially backing off of theory #1 below. He does not seem like a douche bag, at all. In fact, despite all the Oprah hoopla (Which he described as a fiasco, not because of anything that he or Oprah did, but because... It's not a deal breaker for me, but if you are someone who is emotionally wedded to liking the characters in a book, or even one of the characters, you might want to steer clear of this novel. That is not to say the author doesn't get it right. His talent comes through loud and clear with the layered and nuanced Patty and Walter Berglund,...
