Freedom

Freedom
Jonathan Franzen

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul – the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbour who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter – environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, family man – she was doing her small part to build a better world.But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz – outré rocker and Walter's old college friend and rival – still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbour," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of too much liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

JONATHAN FRANZEN

FREEDOM

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2010

First published in US by Farrar Straus and Giroux

Copyright © Jonathan Franzen 2010.

Cover images © Danita Delimont / Getty Images (bird); Mr Sky High / Shutterstock (feathers)

The right of Jonathan Franzen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007269761

Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007419715

Version: 2017-03-09

Praise

‘Franzen pulls off the extraordinary feat of making the lives of his characters more real to you than your own’

DAVID HARE, Guardian, Books of the Year

‘By the end of Freedom you may feel you understand its protagonists better than you know anyone in the world around you’

NICHOLAS HYTNER, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

‘No question about it: Freedom swept everything before it in intricately observed, humane, unprejudiced armfuls’

PHILIP HENSHER, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

‘Head and shoulders above any other book this year’

SAM MENDES, Observer, Books of the Year

‘A masterpiece. Like all great novels, Freedom does 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, New York Times

‘Without question Freedom is a book that grabs hold of you. When I was in the middle I thought of its characters even while I wasn’t reading about them. Franzen’s skills as a writer are on giddy and unapologetic display: his superb facility for writing dialogue; his willingness to be shockingly, entertainingly dirty on matters of sex; and his terrific and terrifying sense of humour. I was completely absorbed’

CURTIS SITTENFELD, Observer

‘In this stupendous, magnificent, unforgettable novel, family has never seemed a more urgent and gripping subject. Witty and rich … bold and sage and moving’

PHILIP HENSHER, Spectator

‘Franzen is an extremely sharp, witty and exciting writer, with a sense of ambition that harks back to the golden age, a time before good novels weren’t popular, and popular novels weren’t good’

CRAIG BROWN, Daily Mail

‘Enormously readable and totally convincing’

PHILIP ZIEGLER, Spectator, Books of the Year

‘A great novel about America. Rarely has the land of the free been scrutinised with such a sharp but loving eye’

ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

‘A cat’s cradle of family life, and if the measure of a good book is its afterburn, Freedom is a great book’

KIRSTY WARK, Observer, Books of the Year

‘A portrait of a world poised on the brink of combustion, and a nation losing its superpowers, shot through the viewfinder of one long, difficult (are there any other sort?) marriage’

RACHEL JOHNSON, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

‘It had me absolutely hooked’

MARK WATSON, Observer, Books of the Year

‘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, New York Times