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Here's the thing about this book: I was really expecting to enjoy it. I say that for two reasons. The first is The Corrections. Not the book itself, which is still quietly residing on my shelf, waiting for its day in the sun… Nay, I speak of the buzz. You see, I know people. And a lot of those people read things. And some of those things were their own copies of The Corrections. And the buzz was, as far as I could tell, that the people that I know liked The Corrections. In fact, their only compl...
*Update 9/23 - Jonathan Franzen was in town doing a reading & signing last night, and after listening to him talk, I’m 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 the whole thing got blown out of proportion.) and the backlash after the early raves for Freedom, Franzen came across as remarkably down-to-earth and funny. He seems...
After reading Wuthering Heights, I had this idea: I should make a bookshelf called "Assholes and Asshats," a little place that could serve as a warning to people who immediately disregard books containing characters they have trouble relating to and sympathizing with. You know, jerks, dickwads, the stoney cold and self-involved, the pompously mean and rich or bitterly poor and junk-addled characters loitering about within the pages of many harder-to-swallow books. Personally, I have both experie...
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 didn’t 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 and apparently believe they should get to watch television as well, so I went upstairs and read away a few afternoons. Stupid Freedom. Mr. Franzen, you’re good. Mo...
Okay, so earlier this summer I was waiting to see The National play Prospect Park ("Of course you were, Jessica...." -- but bear with me, that's my point), and I sent a text message to the guy who'd given me the tickets, thanking him again and observing that "White People don't LIKE seeing The National play Prospect Park; White People LOVE seeing The National play Prospect Park." This was a reference, of course, to the oft-quoted blog that holds a very high place on the seemingly endless list it...
Background: I decided to give in to the hype and read this book by the new American voice of our generation, the first author to grace the cover of Time in more than a decade, Jonathan Franzen only after I heard him speak in Hartford. He seemed like a nice guy, with a kinda dry, almost bashful humor. Plus, he was friends with David Foster Wallace. So why not give Freedom a read? It seemed fairly reasonable to expect this to be “good literature.”Explanatory Digression: The state of CT uses the CA...
Mrs. Flick has been wholeheartedly pushing this book on Liana & I. &... finally I got my paws on it, and the verdict is this: medium-well. If this were a cut of meat, it would be messy, ugly, but tasteful: there would be much blackness on the outside (Franzen is quite the oxymoron: he’s incredibly vivid in his very opaqueness: there are four members of the Berglund family and only three get to have their stories unfold: the elusive daughter is not worthy, apparently, of a narrative space) and th...
2015 REVIEW:Free Birds NowI dreaded reading this novel for many years. There was a lot of media focus on the bird-watching theme, and I once endured an interview with Franzen at a writers festival that seemed to address nothing else. I have to confess, though, that I spent much of my own childhood fascinated by native birds. I collected hundreds of cards from petrol stations and assembled them in books designed for the purpose. One of my favourite books was "What Bird is That?" I wasn't so much
UPDATED.To keep in style of the book this review will be just a lot of rambling. I mean, it was mostly a soap opera. And I just don’t do soap operas. I can just about manage about 10 minutes every 5th episode, but that’s about it. And Franzen submitted me to 570 bloody pages of a soap opera which I had to digest in a few sittings. Like in all soap operas, everything ends well and love conquers all, of course some characters might have to be killed off along the way, but it seems like a small pri...
Times I hear, “You either love him or hate him,” I often both love him and hate him. In feeling lukewarm, there’s a distinction to be made in how you got there. To find every aspect average is not the same as combining extreme likes and dislikes that tally to the same net amount. I’d rather feel strongly both ways. So here’s my highly variable assessment of Franzen and his latest.On the “like” side of the ledger, I have to give him his due for being one helluva good writer. His sentences flow, h...
4.5 Stars So far I’ve loved two of his books, but ye gods, turds, penises, sex and farts. That’s all I’m saying. Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾
Uh-oh. I didn't like it. Review coming up faster than you can say "jismic grunting butt-oink"... Would you think me a nutjob if I told you that Franzen's Freedom reads less like a novel than like an extremely articulate gossip column?Hear me out.I admit that it can be difficult for me to appreciate the kind of undiluted realism that Franzen favors, because so much of what I value in art is tied into one form of defamiliarization or another. Simply putting a mirror up to the world can be interest...
I’ll review it tomorrow. In other news, I’m done with Franzen.———Update - it isn’t tomorrow. It’s almost three weeks later, and here I am... finally reviewing this giant, heavy brick of a book. I’ll start by telling you I really enjoyed The Corrections. It wasn’t always easy to want to pick it up and read it, but when I finally finished it I was glad I did. Freedom started out that way for me, too. The prologue of the novel was probably my favorite part. Maybe it’s because I live in the suburbs,...
I was watching Parks and Recreation for the 3rd time, cause that’s what I do when I don’t feeling like doing anything.. Anyway, I get to a certain episode where Leslie urges Ann to finish reading Freedom so that she can talk about Patty. Usually, the references used in the show are spot on and have a deeper social commentary attached to them so I decided to start reading the book since Franzen had been on my TBR forever. I wanted to start with his other famous book first (The Corrections) but we...
Have you ever…had a dysfunctional relationship with your parents?had a college best friend that turned out to be toxic?started up as an idealist but then compromised into working for the dark side?cheated on your nice guy husband with his cool best friend?had a teenage son who ran away from home to shack up with the neighbor’s underage daughter?been corrupted by the military-industrial complex?If you answer "yes" to any of the above queries, you would probably be able to recognize a part of your...
This is a magnificent book and I enjoyed it a lot. I'd like to focus a bit on the author: let's talk for a second about Ego with a capital E. Mr Franzen's Ego can only be compared to something like Mt Everest, or maybe Jupiter. Don't get me wrong, I don't see Ego as a bad thing per se. It just comes with the package in the very first years of your life, giving you a strong personality, opinions, leadership, and often some basic arrogance, entitlement, and a disproportionate sense of your own imp...