Freedom (Jonathan Franzen novel)
First edition cover
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| Author | Jonathan Franzen |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
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Publication date
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August 31, 2010 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 576 |
| ISBN | |
| 813.54 | |
| LC Class | PS3556.R352 |
| Preceded by | The Corrections |
| Followed by | Purity |
Freedom is a 2010 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Freedom received general acclaim from book critics, and was ranked one of the best books of 2010 by several publications, and has been described as a "Great American Novel".
The novel follows the lives of the Berglund family, particularly the parents Patty and Walter, as their lives develop and then their happiness falls apart. Important to their story is a college friend of Walters's and successful rock musician, Richard Katz, who has a love affair with Patty. Walter and Patty's son, Joey, also goes through his own coming of age challenges.
Franzen began working on the novel in 2001, following his successful The Corrections. The title of the novel was an artefact of his book proposal, where he wanted to write a novel that freed him from the constraints of his previous work. The cover of many editions of the novel includes a cerulean warbler, a songbird, for which Walter works to create an environmental preserve.
Freedom follows several members of an American family, the Berglunds, and their close friends and lovers, from the last decades of the twentieth century up until the early years of the Obama administration.
Freedom opens with a short history of the Berglund family during their time living in St. Paul, Minnesota, from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. The Berglunds are portrayed as an ideal liberal and middle-class family, and they are among the first families to move into urban St. Paul after years of white flight to the suburbs. Patty Berglund is a charming and youthful homemaker with a self-deprecating sense of humor; her husband Walter is a mild-mannered but principled lawyer with environmentalist advocacies.
They have one daughter, Jessica, and one son, Joey, the latter exhibiting a precocious independence and talent for making money. Joey becomes sexually involved with a neighborhood teen named Connie Monaghan and begins to rebel against his mother, going so far as to move in with Connie and her family, making Patty and Walter increasingly unstable. After many unhappy years, and after both Joey and Jessica have gone off to college, Patty and Walter relocate to Washington, D.C., abandoning the neighborhood and house they have worked so hard to improve.
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