freedom and the corrections by jonathan franzen

Everyone’s a mess, and everyone’s miserable, despite having all of the privileges and benefits in the world.īased on just those two novels, it seems like that’s Franzen’s worldview – money and prosperity won’t make you happy in fact, they might make you less so. Joey hooks up with the girl next door and has a hard time getting out of the relationship … I could go on, but you get the idea. Walter’s job, creating a nature preserve for the cerulean warbler by giving away land rights to a company that intends to engage in mountaintop removal mining, a highly destructive practice that conflicts with Walter’s longheld environmentalist principles.

Patty has left behind her New York family, including her politician mother, but lost much of her identity as a stay-at-home mom whose mind has atrophied and who finds herself disdained by one child and used by the other. Walter’s former roommate, Richard, is an aging ex-punk rocker who has had a second 15 minutes of fame thanks to a new indie band and our culture’s habit of making everything old cool again his story intersects multiple times with both Walter’s and Patty’s. The couple’s marriage is hanging by a thread, the kids are moving out and moving away from their parents, and Walter’s job is short-circuiting his brain by causing cognitive dissonance. Paul and whose family is gradually unraveling. The family at the center of this novel is the Berglunds, Patty and Walter and their two kids, Jessica and Joey, who live in suburban St. Esquire called it the Great American Novel (or at least a Great American Novel), two New York Times writers wrote glowing reviews, and the Guardian called it “the novel of the century.” It is well-written and intricately plotted, but it’s also far too long and, like The Corrections, a terribly depressing take on American suburban life – white suburban life, specifically. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was his first novel in nine years, since his acclaimed 2001 novel The Corrections, and was greeted with even greater praise.

Freedom and the corrections by jonathan franzen