Freedom

Freedom
Author: Jonathan Franzen 562 pp 2010
My rating: 4*
Started November 21 2010, Finished November 26 2010

I don’t feel quite right giving this novel a mere half star more than the far less worthy One Day. But while Freedom is vastly better written, far more ambitious and much funnier, it lacked the emotional wallop of One Day, in fact the characters really did not engage me much, and is diminished but what strikes me as snobbishness. 
On the positive side, the word that comes to mind when assessing Freedom is Updikeian. Page after page of Freedom contains prose worthy of that master with insights akin to those found in the Rabbit quartet: one character's page long diatribe about all the irritations posed by contending with other drivers reminded me of one of my strongest Rabbit memories when in Rabbit At Rest, the aged Rabbit reflects that when he was younger the roads were filled with slowpokes, while now that he is a more patient, if not timid, driver, everyone else seems to be a speed maniac. Freedom also brings to mind the Rabbit books in its attempt to dissect the inner workings of modern American life and its overemphasis on sex as the driving activity of that existence.
Freedom also earns points for readability -- it’s nearly a page turner -- and at least for me, its polemical but not excessively didactic or heavy handed theme of how the American lifestyle is extremely rough on our environment.
Freedom’s primary weakness for me is that all its main characters come from a very thin slice of American society, the white, liberal lower-upper-middle-class. (Note: all the main characters of Franzen’s previous novel, The Corrections, were of the same ilk.) Characters from better off classes are viewed as self-entitled depredators while those from below it are viewed as feral cretins. While in all fairness, I do not necessarily disagree with those stereotypes, it seems an author's duty is to try and provide a “warts and all” portrait, not just a “warts only” one, to rise above his and his reader's prejudices and show all sides of the story.