FREEDOM BY JONATHAN FRANZEN, FOURTH ESTATE, $32.99.
The hype and the weight of expectation might well have sunk a lesser book, but Franzen delivers with a better, wiser, more dazzling novel even than the one which made his name, The Corrections.
He takes one picture-perfect, liberal, Mid-western family – college sweethearts Patty and Walter Berglund and their two teenage kids – and unravels their lives in wildly unexpected ways, touching lightly as he goes on a swag of issues ranging from the impossibility of parenting to the wages of suburban sprawl and the liabilities of freedom. Yet Franzen never bangs you over the head with his bigger picture, keeping the focus so close and personal that you get to love these wayward Berglunds and finish the book, for all its length, not wanting to let them go. You also realise that what you’ve actually been racing through, turning pages as fast as you can, is a shrewd analysis of both the comedy and tragedy of modern America. A masterclass in the novelist’s art.
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