Freedom

Beautiful language descriptions of thoughts and feelings and trajectory life

A brilliantly written novel which portrays contemporary american life with great intensity.

Really loved this book, mostly for the characters. They were rich and full and I missed interacting with them when the book was finished. Such an intricate story, very well done.

Language is a slippery, ever-changing thing. Because I'm old enough that shaking my head while uttering "kids these days" is my daily ritual, I often don't care for the slang of newer generations. That is until I myself find use for it, and I have done so now: "Say less," Mr. Franzen. Say less.Though I am naturally snarky, I blame the above paragraph on the hangover Freedom produced. While I still have little in the way of insightful commentary to add to the many reviews and opinions noted by my fellow readers, I do think I have something unique to share. I can't remember if it began with Patty or Walter, but much before the halfway mark of the book, I began "hearing" and reading Patty's voice as that of Laura Linney and Walter's as Jason Bateman's. Of course, the two actors play a married couple on Ozark, but I didn't put that together at first. Initially, it hindered my reading because I wondered if I was channeling the actors or the other characters they play, Wendy and Marty, respectively. Eventually I leaned into it because not only did these "voices" seem beyond my control, but they lent some momentum to my reading; I was able to sit with the book for longer periods of time and therefore get more pages behind me, which was a challenge at times. It didn't stop there. Unsolicited by my conscious mind, I began reading Richard in the voice of Tim Gutterson, a character on Justified played by Jacob Pitts. Here it was clear that it was the character, not the actor who was living in my head. Lastly, Joey's part was filled by Tanner Buchanan's portrayal of Robby on Cobra Kai. None of Freedom's other characters were subsumed in my mind in this way, nor is it a typical experience for me. I have no idea of what to attribute it nor of what it means. Did I like the book? Sometimes. I didn't hate it, but I hated how it would oscillate between being interesting and readable for pages at a time and then morph into a slog. This is why I started out with, say less. I wish an editor had insisted Franzen remove some of the sexual grotesquerie between Joey and himself or Joey and Carol and about 50% of the Cerulean Mountain Trust screed. If Franzen gets paid by the word, Jessica was given short shrift. Her bit might have taken up at least as much space as Patty's friend Eliza.I am on the fence about whether or not I will ever undertake The Corrections, but if so, it won't be any time soon. I've had quite my fill for now.

I mostly enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom," which plows along with the lives and loves of a fairly dysfunctional family. The characters are interesting and deeply flawed people, which helps propel the story along. I felt it wasn't all that different from "The Corrections" though.... Franzen definitely has a very recognizable style of storytelling.

I read my last Franzen book, The Corrections, ten years ago. I remember very little about it except that I liked it. And I really like Freedom. It's chock-full of real characters I care about, whom I feel I know in some way, and yet who are complex enough that they can still act in ways that are surprising. I like Julia Glass for the same reason, for creating characters whose lives intersect in such real and three-dimensional ways that you just keep turning pages to find what they'll do next.

This is a weighty book with a lot of things going on, but not all the themes are easy to categorise: is this a Truffaultesque love triangle, or Chekhovian contamination by estate and wealth? Sibling and generational rivalry, or parallels? Are the lead characters undone by lust, by coolness, or just by disdain for the uncool and unenlightened? The treatment can be wearing at times, perhaps due to the author’s own unflinching disdain: his detachment and lack of affection for his characters distances the reader too. And there’s some Walden-style misanthropy in the rejection of freedom's excesses. Nonetheless, the work is always convincingly and interestingly laid out, with stacked up details and layering and cross-referencing. All is tied to recent history's own convulsions - Iraq , 9/11, the rise and demise of liberal prosperity. To the brooding, open-wound tone, drama is injected occasionally by brutal acts of conclusive violence, or by windfalls and legacies like a Victorian novel denouement.

It speaks to Franzen's ability that I feel poisoned by the misery of these characters. Plenty of other stories present you with awful people leading awful lives, but this is the first time I've actually been brought so low by fiction.

A resounding "meh."

This novel felt bloated and meandering. Dramatic things happened, and that kept me reading, but, with the exception of one searing passage, it reads like a lot of white noise. Franzen hits a couple dingers with the "freedom" concept throughout, playing vaguely with philosophical points about freedom or the lack thereof. When that happened, I grunted with hazy appreciation, but neither his thought nor his story came off as particularly arresting.

*spoler alert*

The one passage that I think I will always remember, that reached through the fogginess of the rest of the book and grabbed me by the shirt collar, occurred in the storyline of Joey, the main characters' son. With the assistance of this passage, Joey was the most fully realized character in the novel, though he didn't get as much page-time as his parents. His main emotional struggle is with his next door neighbor Connie who becomes his high school sweetheart and then, before he finishes college, his wife. His entire adult relationship with her is fraught with his ambiguity about marrying so young, about marrying at all, about Connie herself. Shortly after their wedding, he takes a trip with another woman with the intention of cheating on his new wife. The day before this trip, he accidentally swallows his wedding ring, and the doctor tells him there was only one way to get it out. His watershed moment comes in a bathroom in Argentina, literally sorting through his own shit, while the beautiful woman waits impatiently in the next room. He emerges from the bathroom with a sudden clarity: he was the type of person who would handle his own feces to save his wedding ring. Today, I am a man. Franzen's prose here is snappy and flawless, and I don't know that I will ever again think of poop without wondering if I would hold it for someone I love. Adulthood!

I actively loathed these characters. Actually rooted against them. Rolled my eyes hard, and often. Also, I'm grossed out way too many times. And, as you say, even though I hated the book, which implies some passion, I also was thoroughly bored by it.
The thing that's frustrating about it is that there is no one quality that makes it bad. The characters are unlikeable, but not in a devil-may-care, what-will-they-do-next kind of way. The characters are odious because they are self-absorbed and petty… but more than that, they're insufferably boring. It's not that they don't wander around hurting each other; it's that their sins are largely those of inaction or inertia. Also that they sit around and complain to themselves and moan on about their disappointments, and you find yourself relieved when they actually take action of some kind, no matter what it is. simply because it means something is happening in the book, that you are reading a novel wherein events happen that have significance. And you quickly find that you not only start to wish the characters thorough unhappiness, but further, you actually long for some kind horrible nuclear disaster to clear the slate so that Franzen can just start over with an entirely new cast midway through the novel.
Every single person in this book is an asshole, a narcissist, or both, and after being around them for 500 slow-going pages, I now hate humankind. It's no big secret that Franzen isn't particularly fond of humanity, but if he doesn't care about his characters, why should I?
The whole thing felt directionless. Books don't need to end tied up in a pretty bow, but I would still like to believe that authors sit down to write a book because they have a story to tell.
The whole thing reeked of American Beauty-esque disenfranchised yuppie-ism. Your problems are not that interesting, important or unique.
I can't finish this. Patty is now getting raped in college, and is at first blaming herself, of course. She doesn't even get angry & indignant until the next morning, and then starts comparing her rape to other injustices in other areas of the world to the poor, etc. Then, she wants to just let it be swept under the rug, and so she can carry on with her sports....? Sports just isn't that important.
And Patty's mother keeps suggesting that Patty might not be certain who raped her...? And all the mother can think about is her friendship with the rapist's parents, and their political affiliations...? And then the mother would rather the daughter just get a SINCERE APOLOGY, instead of going to the police.....? The father begins questioning whether the daughter Patty even knew what rape was, and if it was an actual rape...? And then the father tells Patty that the coach is wrong, that they cannot go to the police, because it's bad for the posts-politics. And, Patty would feel WORSE, after the trial. And that her reputation would be RUINED. And that there wouldn't be a trial. She thinks that the rape didn't hurt that badly anyway; she'd had wind-sprints that hurt worse, and she had been used to having other people's hands on her since she was an athlete. The family doctor was more comforting and understanding than her own parents...! She made herself feel better by eating an entire carton of ice cream and watching rerun-comedies on TV.
The boy denies it, of course, and all his friends would stand behind him, & make it sound like it was consensual, and "playful". That it being rape was a lie. And the boy's father was furious for the allegations. The father tells her that because of this, they cannot call the police. Patty should "sweep it under the rug, be more careful next time, and just move on with her life." She would spend her entire senior year being humiliated. "Life's not fair," and that the "coach should spend more time dribbling." Wtf?!?
Another reviewer says that the author intimates that everyone secretly enjoys the smell of their own flatulence. Wow.....seriously?
And don’t even get me started on the fucked up chronology. It wasn’t done in eloquent, mysterious way, it was done in a blabbermouth with ADHD way. It is like my hubby Keith, who tells me a story and in the middle of it he remembers some other story that might or might not be related to the story he is telling me so he tells me that other story, and then some other story that somehow came from the second story, and then maybe he will return to the main story and you end up wondering if the second story actually happened in the middle of the first story or it was just his way of telling a story.
The final moral from this book is that we are all fucked up in our own special way but it will all be alright unless, of course, we become Republicans, in which case there will be no redemption....?
And if this book was written by a woman, it would be deemed chick lit and stuck in a pastel color cover with birds and flowers. No one would even look at it twice because there is so much better chick lit out there. But as Jonathan Franzen is lucky enough to be a man, this, all of a sudden, is the Great American Novel.
If anyone else claims there is no sexism in literary/publishing world, this here is my best demonstrative evidence that there is. Honest to God, who would take this book seriously if it was written by a woman and had something pink on the cover?
I have to bail, not even a quarter of the way through this novel. I'm beyond bored; if I have to go through every single character's back-life story, I'm gonna do some self-harm. Time for some yard work.
One star; sorry Frazen.

It's always hard to review a complete brick of a book (literally speaking), and this one is quite something.

Franzen has almost entirely adhered to the simple point-and-tell way of God informing the reader of what happens throughout the book, interspersed with a few character perspective moments.

Walter and Patty Berglund are a smart, suburban, modern married couple who are in turmoil and seemingly cannot come to terms with this. They avoid each other rather, avoiding their issues apart from when they fight, which is like a cold, staged play, reminiscent of Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm" in some affects.

Franzen's main strengths are the storytelling, the parallel plots and treating the reader like an intelligent person. At the same time, the best bits of this book read way better than a very long episode of "Desperate Housewives", which it often reminded me of. At its worst, the book reminded me of a very long, outstretched and bloated episode of "Desperate Housewives".

Some might say this book pin-points the human condition of relationships in modern-day western civilisation, and I'll say it does to a certain extent. Franzen is very good at writing matter-of-factly when it comes to describing human emotions which I think works to his advantage: the reader is allowed to think for herself/himself and the characters of the book come out a lot differently than if Franzen would have applied sappy adjectives throughout.

All in all, this is a big book, and I think its flaws and brilliance is part of what it's all about: people's inner worlds, as felt inside and projected outside. Highly recommendable, masterfully written despite a few lows, ending up with being one of the best fictional books I've read in a few years.

It ended up being a much larger, more sprawling story than I'd anticipated at the outset. I haven't read The Corrections (yet), so this was my first taste of Franzen. The characterizations are masterful, his wit is biting and often hilarious, and I did feel all the emotional turmoil of each character. I also feel like more of an adult, somehow, having read it. Very few books engross me and, I think, change me the way this one did.

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom follows the lives of middle-class couple Patricia and Walter Berglund, their children and close relatives and friends. Set in the American mid-west at the beginning of the twenty-first century the reader learns about Patricia's and Walter's marriage and their marital problems. The novel illustrates the ups and downs of love and family life in a frighteningly realistic fashion and provides very detailed observations about the characters and their motives. The power dynamic in Patty's and Walter's relationship shifts several times. After they first meet, Patty is everything for Walter while she is more interested in Walter's friend Richard. Although they marry eventually, they never seem overly happy in their relationship. Whenever Walter's friend steps back into their lives Patty is reminded of her feelings for Richard. Growing further apart, Walter loses interest in Patricia and after many events that affect their relationship they finally separate. In the end, Patty becomes active in trying to reconcile with Walter."The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage."I liked the novel most for its observations on relationships and the concept of personal freedom. While the dynamics in relationships are often hard to understand from the outside they are also not always completely comprehensible from the inside. Relationships can be complicated and messy and at the same time they can be the best thing that ever happened to you and the glue that holds your life together. Working out the perfect amount of personal freedom while in a relationship can be very difficult, sometimes even impossible, but it might just be the right amount of personal freedom that makes a relationship work. In that respect, Franzen's novel can provide you with a deeper insight about your own thoughts on personal freedom and your idea of what you want in a good relationship.All in all, Freedom was a very good book that I enjoyed a lot. 4 stars.

There are a number of fault lines throughout the book. An ill bent cold kept me home for two days and I read the majority of the novel in a pair of sweeping bursts. The characters oscillate into focus to push the narrative but feel, all too often, as just that: literary devices.

I am anxious to hear the reports of friends, one of whom, my best friend, suggested this enterprise. I admitted on our site for literary discussions that I encounter a vertigo when reading contemporary american fiction.

A work of vast scope and enormous contrast. Flawed, sometimes heinous characters, and yet every one is sometimes sympathetic; grim and unbearably depressing picture of our times, yet somehow uplifting and hopeful; a literary novel that is yet a work of social realism; dense, complex prose that yet keeps you totally enthralled and turning the pages.

Impossibly good. Genius.

This is a very well written book about family dynamics within the cultural and historical context of late 20th/early 21st century USA. However, for long stretches it is very tough, even grueling, to read, as the characters are often very, very unpleasant to each other. It's skillful and well plotted, even believable in terms of the family members' interactions, but how long to you want to soak in it? Also, many of the characters had, as I experienced them, just a touch of caricature about them, which over 600 pages took its toll on me, as well. Hard to know how to rate this novel, all in all. I think I'm going with 3 1/2 stars.

Very conflicted on this one. Enjoyed and was impressed with the first part and the las part (to a lesser degree) but hated the middle. Hated his depictions (ad nauseum) of sex, masturbation, poop and related excretions, and most of his female characters. Franzen knows how to write, there are beautiful sentences in this book, but I think he must be an insufferable jerk!

this is one of those books I must read twice. Will write more when I do.

Why not tighten up the next book, Mr Franzen.? Too much space, and not quite enough depth. But dead-on accurate: "They fuck you up/ your Mum,Dad & kids,/ They may not mean to/ but they do. THIS one should have been called "The Corrections", as all we do is to try & live our lives in opposition to the previous generation, so as to straighten everything up. Backfires every time

Tolstoy said that every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way. That being so, Jonathan Franzen has taken children from two unhappy families (Walter & Patty), married them and then produced an unhappy family all their own.While The Corrections skewered American society in the 1990's, Freedom applies Franzen's satiric wit to the first decade of the new millennium. Urban restoration, environmental groups, limousine Liberals, rock groups and their groupies all take their turn in the barrel as Franzen shows the absurd side of what tey are trying to accomplish.Mostly this book examines what 'freedom' is. The term is almost a cliche these days as it's applied mostly in the negative "freedom from" ____________ (paying taxes, wearing seat belts, having to buy healthcare - take your pick)Mostly Patty and Walter find that there is no magical formula for freedom & that the way to true freedom is mostly the winding trail you follow through life with your family, however imperfect they may be.

This book received so many rave reviews that I really can't add anything except to say that it did deserve every word of praise.

Ok to read, but nothing special. Can't identify with the world it describes.

This was not a book that kept me turning pages, and I thought it would be. It's a story about people and all their human traits. Some reviewers on various sites have said the characters weren't believable, while others disagree. I do think they were believable, though possibly not relatable to every reader. There are all kinds of people in the world, and here are some fairly regular ones in a story of their lives authored with keen insight into families, individuals, relationships, mistakes and what small things can change the course of a life.

While I admire the author for all these words, the story could have been told in less words, but then, maybe that's like saying an artist could have left out a few brush strokes to please some people.

The story didn't grab me. That's the bottom line for me. Time will tell whether the story is nonetheless memorable after some time passes. Some stories sneak up on readers that way. It's a modern story of our time.

I really hate the star system for these kinds of books.

I'm not sure how to review this book. It's not the great American novel, but I see the potential. Franzen is no slouch but the novel suffered from too much observation (if astute) and not enough edge. It's like Franzen can recognize the issues but is to close to comment on them effectively (usefully?). I recognized myself and my generation but was neither affirmed (not a bad thing) or challenged.

I was fully prepared to dislike this book--I am pretty sure I dislike its author, who should really never give another interview as long as he lives. But it's really good, one of the best books I've read this year. I loved the story and the characters, and Franzen has a lot to say here about marriage and idealism and, you know, freedom. Better than The Corrections by a mile.

This book was difficult to read for the first 7/8 of it. Not in the sense that its prose was heavy or that it fails to take hold of its reader, but that the subject matter becomes increasingly disturbing and depressing; so much so, that I was surrendering to the notion that it also may just end that way. It did not. I actually loved this book and its story of dysfunction; an honest exploration into today's challenges with familial relationships. There is a lot of infidelity and some rather cruel intentions, however, unlike some reviewers, I DID like the main characters in this book...despite their poor life-choices. It's real, believe me, and I loved it.

In this ultimate US saga about families and relationships, Franzen plays with the concept of how, despite the freedom and choices available to us in a western democracy, human frailty still comes to the fore. We don't always use that freedom wisely; spoilt by it, we often choose those most selfish paths which ultimately lead to the demise of our own happiness.Although a fairly long read (a few pages off 600), I loved this novel from the first page to the last, probably even more than I loved The Corrections which was a favourite read from last year. It worked because of its length, not in spite of it; Franzen was able to develop the relationships over periods of years, such that we could see the gradual fraying taking hold, and understand the complexities which led to certain decisions being made.There is a lot of dialogue in this novel, which can be difficult to get right, yet Franzen totally nails it. He allows the reader to see his characters from all sides, intermingling their virtues with their flaws and capturing the essence of what it is to be human.A large part of the novel is relayed to us in the form of a main character's manuscript written at her therapists instigation, and whilst some of the musings and memories couldn't have logically worked if you really thought about it, I loved the story too much to care.5 stars - I have a serious book hangover this morning.

Self-acclaimed literature is nearly impossible to review, due in large part to the nebulous nature of the category. “Literature” is ill-defined, whose boundaries shift for any number of reasons, least among which is whether the first letter is capitalized in normal usage.On what basis can these books be judged? One possible course of action would be to set Freedom in a ring with Great Expectations and Middlesex to let them duke it out among themselves — but that would just leave us with Free Great Sex, and there’s not a public library in the world that’ll be able to stock that title without a load of grief.Jonathan Franzen has it let it be known his book is intended to be interred among the ranks of literary fiction, for the high-minded to fawn over now and the teenagers of the future to be bored by later. Setting the intent of this self-aggrandizement aside, readers and reviewers alike must take care to frame the novel appropriately.To do this, one must look to the title: Freedom. Ultimately, freedom — and, by extension, Freedom — comes down to choices. Difficult choices, no-brainers, impossible choices and choices that are made for you. The title, like with his earlier work (The Corrections) before it, is as much about helping the reader keep the novel’s purpose in mind as much as it is to sell more copies. The meandering, often disjointed story can be reined in by making sure the theme is at the forefront of your thoughts. It’s especially necessary because freedom is, at its core, a completely empty word. Essentially, it’s a stand-in for “limitless choice,” aka “everything.” And while everything is the opposite of nothing, it’s just as amorphous and chaotic a concept.The plot of Freedom, such as it is, centers around the Berglunds, a Minnesota nuclear family going through more than their share of bewildering circumstances they must face up to or ignore, at their pleasure. It’s not really possible to plot the arc of the story, except to say that the main characters seem to be the heads of this particular household, with the husband, Walter, more central to the focus than the wife, Patty. Walter is a man deeply devoted to his wife, who adulates in his attention and loves him in return for it. Their children are quite complicated beings, though Jessica, the oldest, does not appear in the story in any meaningful way until much later.Joey, the younger son, occupies a much more prominent role both in the story and the lives of the two main characters — fiercely independent (he moves out of the family home before his 17th birthday to live with the neighbors, where his girlfriend happens to reside) while at the same time not entirely comfortable cutting off all ties to his parents. There’s infinitely more to the story, but a fear of spoilers and a concern for space prohibit me from even listing all the main characters.The plot, though somewhat easy to follow, is extraordinarily complex. Like Corrections, the book does not track in a strictly chronological order. This does not hamper comprehensibility too much, but it does require a bit of thinking to keep a finger on when and where various events occur, especially when focus shifts from one character to the next.The hallmark of the modern Serious Novel can be found in the tribulations — sometimes more bewildering and unlikely than your average episode of The Young and the Restless — its characters must suffer. It’s tempting to think the author has confused “voluminous” problems for “interesting” ones, but luckily the book’s strength lies more in how the characters react to various outlandish circumstances than the situations themselves.Of course, to take the mantle of literature a work must shoulder the load of society’s burdens, to tackle the big ideas that plague our collective consciousness. 9/11. two wars, disaffected youth, the pretentiousness of disaffected youth, the middle-aged condescension toward the pretentiousness of disaffected youth, the youthful indifference toward the middle-aged condescension … even selling out, which I’m not 100 percent certain exists as a concept even in the abstract anymore.Luckily for him — and for us readers — Franzen doesn’t even attempt to provide answers but rather seeks understanding, exploration in lieu of explanation. Part of the reasoning for this is almost certainly pragmatic, as definitive diagnoses and prescriptions can be disagreed with, countered or even dismissed. But part surely must lie, as with all things in the book, rooted in the central idea of freedom. To proclaim a solution is to inhibit the freedom of the readers to judge and choose, and to provide an answer on our own.The characters are remarkably fleshed-out and one of the best aspects of Franzen’s work. Psychology has replaced metaphor and simile as the literary devices used to drive home a universal truth or compelling point authors want to get across. Where Nathaniel Hawthorne spent an entire chapter crafting a synecdoche about a bush growing next to a prison door, Franzen and other modern writers dig deeply into the motivations, the worries, the fears and the thought processes behind a character’s actions. These insights are especially poignant when the characters themselves seem incognizant of their own reasoning; the specificity actually provides more opportunities to interpret rather than limiting possible explanations, as one might expect.From a prosaic standpoint, there’s a noticeable difference from Corrections. Where before a 100-plus-word, single-sentence metaphor might be thrown in to illustrate how the character has trouble forgetting, Freedom saves the run-on sentences for advancing plot — or, failing that, at least fleshing out the scene further.The writing is not without its flaws, however. A significant portion of the first chunk of the book is a third-person autobiographical portrait of Patty — despite ostensibly being written in her hand, there’s not much difference between it and the authorial lugubriousness exhibited by Franzen. It’s an uneven bit of writing Franzen rather awkwardly backforms by having other characters praise her writing abilities, but this praise occurs only after we’ve completed the manuscript — which none of the other characters have read. It’s a bit like if Transformers 3 suddenly introduces the fact that Sam is actually half-fish, and for the rest of the movie has the other characters note, “Man, he always was a really good swimmer” despite the entire movie taking place deep in the Sahara. Additionally, double negatives pepper the novel to create a slightly more effete tone to the writing, which is not un-annoying.As far as recommendations go, Freedom is not going to be for everyone. It can probably be enjoyed passively, eyes jumping from work to word and sentence to sentence, but it’s going to be a slog. Instead, if you’re looking for a book to engage with and think about, you’ll find a worthy opponent in Freedom. As to its qualifications as literature, no one can speak to it with any — meaningful — authority. But then, even when the American Society of People Who Decide What Literature Is (this is not a euphemism for “Oprah”) comes down on one side or the other, you still have the freedom to ignore them and form your own judgment.

As good as the reviews indicate. Franzen can write women; Patty's character is expertly realized. The book offers a compelling portrait of a couple trying to deal with each other as they ride the currents of contemporary culture, participating equally in its corruptions and its moral imperatives. Themes of ecology and despoiling wind through the pages like a ride through the Midwest in an SUV. The narrative is propelled through the use of a variety of points of view: Walter the husband, Patty the wife, their children, their neighbors, their friends. I particularly enjoyed the culminating scene, where Patty parks her car in front of Walter's lakeside cottage, having driven herself to the end of her road, and remains seated, silent, in the driver's seat. The ultimate question of the book may be, who is in the driver's seat? And how much gas is in the car?

It's true that the author's voice does become a bit obtrusive. Many of the lines are more "Franzen-y" than what the characters could possibly be thinking or saying.

The book's topicality in a "current affairs" sense is actually a weakness. The sections on Iraq, the environment, etc., didn't seem very interesting or original, and I skimmed them.

I went in expecting a David Brooks-style "comic sociology" of the Volvo-driving, NPR-listening class and I actually don't think that's the main strength of the book. The habits, mores, consumption patterns, etc., aren't really the author's main interest.

The best aspect of the book is its very thoughtful, carefully constructed exploration of the title topic. A number of the characters are given the classic choice between two possible romantic partners, or some equivalent -- and these choices are very difficult.

Many moral philosophers mistakenly think the most difficult moral problems is determining which of two very similar but improbable choices is the right one. I disagree. I think almost all moral problems occur when we know in our heart of hearts which is the right choice, but have extremely powerful motivations for not choosing it. This is the situation that Franzen constructs for several of his characters. He clearly demonstrates that the universal and almost irresistible appeal of money, sex, status, and power isn't just a concern of the greedy, lustful, social-climbing or ambitious, but affects high-minded, "Minnesota-nice" tree-hugger types as well.

I was pulled along by the "what will happen to this person" question, presumably a basic requirement of a good novel, but what elevates this novel is that the "what will happen" is not just a matter of the character's material station in life (marriage, career, etc.) but about how they will respond to the moral choices put before them.

Another impressive side of this -- for some reason I'm thinking of Jean Renoir's "Rules of the Game" in comparison -- is the exploration of discrepancies between what the characters consciously want, do, think and feel, and what they think they want, do, think and feel. It shows very concretely what it means for an individual person to be complex, internally divided, opaque to oneself, and imperfect in self-knowledge -- all keywords which are commonly used somewhat abstractly.

Bottom line: "freedom" is not just something for political theory, theology, or philosophy of action, but something deeply important to the lives of everyday people.

PS: "Freedom" is also the name of the most useful application ever: it disconnects you from the Internet for a number of minutes set by you. I strongly urge all GoodReads members to acquire and use a copy. The relevancy to this novel is left as an exercise for the reader.