Reviews
Praise forFreedom "Jonathan Franzen's new novel,Freedom, like his previous one,The Corrections, is a masterpiece of American fiction . . .Freedomis a still richer and deeper work-less glittering on its surface but more confident in its method . . . Like all great novels,Freedomdoes not just tell an engrossing story. It illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew."-Sam Tanenhaus,The New York Times Book Review(cover review) "Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges. He proves himself as adept at adolescent comedy as he is at grown-up tragedy; as skilled at holding a mirror to the world his people inhabit day by dreary day as he is at limning their messy inner lives . . . Mr. Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet-a novel that turns out to be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times." -Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times "[Freedomis] a work of total genius: a reminder both of why everyone got so excited about Franzen in the first place and of the undeniable magic-even today, in our digital end-times-of the old-timey literary novel . . . Few modern novelists rival Franzen in that primal skill of creating life, of tricking us into believing that a text-generated set of neural patterns, a purely abstract mind-event, is in fact a tangible human being that we can love, pity, hate, admire, and possibly even run into someday at the grocery store. His characters are so densely rendered-their mental lives sketched right down to the smallest cognitive micrograins-that they manage to bust through the art-reality threshold: They hit us in the same place that our friends and neighbors and classmates and lovers do. This is what makes Franzen's books such special event." -Sam Anderson,New YorkMagazine"The Great American Novel." -Esquire"Epic." -Vanity Fair"Exhilarating . . . Gripping . . . Moving . . . On a level withThe Great Gatsby[and]Gone With the Wind." -Craig Seligman, Bloomberg "A page turner that engages the mind." -Dan Cryer,Newsday "Consuming and extraordinarily moving." -David L. Ulin,Los AngelesTimes"It's refreshing to see a novelist who wants to engage the questions of our time in the tradition of 20th-century greats like John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis . . . [This] is a book you'll still be thinking about long after you've finished reading it." -Patrick Condon, Associated Press"Deeply moving and superbly crafted . . . It's such a full novel, rich in description, broad in its reach and full of wry observations." -Bob Hoover,PittsburgPost-Gazette"Freedom, his new book, andThe Corrections, its predecessor, are at the same time engrossing sagas and scathing satires, and both books are funny, sad, cranky, revelatory, hugely ambitious, deeply human and, at times, truly disturbing. Together, they provide a striking and quite possibly enduring portrait of America in the years on either sid
