Hey what's up eznark. Too bad about the Crew. Anyway, I just read Freedom because I really enjoyed The Corrections, and also because it's been getting raves.
I thought it was pretty poor.
Here's the review I wrote up on Amazon.
Franzen is a talented writer, and by giving this novel three stars I am by no means making an attack upon him. In fact, it is my opinion that The Corrections is a sublime piece of literature. Franzen wrote that novel with a perfect combination of humor and pathos, straddling the line between farce and melodrama while only occasionally going astray.
Chip was a character for the ages. Funny, flawed, and deeply interesting. Who can forget the scene in which Chip shoplifts $78.40 worth of Wild Norwegian Salmon? Chip screws up again and again throughout the novel, but he screws up in ways that the reader can understand. He is a believable and consistent character, rather than being a slave to the novel's narrative/thematic arc.
There are no characters in Freedom that come close to matching Chip's quality. I'm sitting here a mere four hours after finishing the novel, and I can't recall any scenes that particularly stand out to me. Make no mistake, when I complain about the characters in Freedom, I do not complain about them being unlikable - although they are indeed unlikable - rather, I complain about them being uninteresting.
Patty hates her family growing up. She is good at basketball, is therefore a good competitor, therefore enjoys to win. She is raped at a party in high school. She has an attraction to the musician Richard. She marries Walter instead. She loves Walter but she doesn't.
This is all that we ever learn about Patty, and it's simply not enough. Not enough to make her into a fleshed out character, let alone to make her into a character deserving of empathy. And all the other characters are just the same way. There is no consistency to them, no meat.
The problem is that the characters function only to serve the theme. And lord, what a clunky theme it is. There is such a thing as subtly exploring an idea and then there is the other thing - using a sledgehammer. Franzen has his sledgehammer out for this novel, and he's going crazy with it. The first half of the novel is not so bad in this regard, but at some point around the halfway mark, the word freedom shows up. From that point on, freedom is mentioned almost twice or thrice a page, often times in the form of a rather simple, child-like rumination by one of the characters. Franzen's use of the thematic sledgehammer really slogs down this portion of the book. As does his penchant for inserting similarly unsubtle - and unoriginal - political rants.
Do I really care what Franzen thinks about freedom or politics? I have yet to see a particularly nuanced argument coming from him on these subjects. What I have seen - in The Corrections - is his immense ability to tell a story.
And that's what it comes down to here. He hasn't told his story well. The characters are boring. There's very little humor. There's not much suspense. It's all themes, themes, themes. Blah, blah blah.
lol ).
