I've got quite the backlog of posts to write!
I finished this book way after the Rumpus Book Club One-Off Franzen Group had it's chat with Franzen but I'm happy that I attended the chat anyway and that I took my time with the book. One, it's ginormous and, two, it's genius and deserves the time spent on it.
Franzen may well be the "Great American Author" of our time; chick lit authors be damned. Sorry, you can hate him all you like but the man is an incredible author from the most basic word choice and sentence structure to the larger picture of character development and plot to the much larger grasp of American society. I've not read a contemporary female author who does the same. Give me one and I'll read her because Franzen is one of the best authors to read and I wish there were more like him.
Freedom takes a look at politics, ecological concerns, the war, 9/11, family life, depression, rock music, drug use, racism, marriage, the arts, money, and on and on and on. But it's not an "issues" book. Franzen doesn't give an answer to any of these problems. He doesn't preach and he doesn't make examining these concerns easy. None of the characters are people you'd want to have over to dinner (unless you're a glutton for punishment) and you certainly don't want to be friends with any of them. But Franzen makes these characters real and relatable and incredibly readable.
This is one of those books where I breathed a sigh of relief that it was over but I immediately missed being in the throes of reading it.
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