Book Review: Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Review

Freedom, by Jonathan Frazen, is a whimsical satire of contemporary American life. I usually don’t like long novels about family constructions, but this one was entertaining. We start our journey with the character Patty Berglund, from her childhood to adulthood. We get to know the psychological development of the characters throughout the flux of Patty’s life, and it’s bewildering to see how they interact in a very prosaic way, but creating a profound emotional web of feelings and associations that haunt them for the rest of their lives.
The book also has good passages about war, politics (mocking Democrats and Republicans) and makes use of scatological scenes. The self-absorbed, sometimes even selfish thoughts of the characters, made me feel angry and annoyed, but when I think about the contemporary world, I can’t stop feeling that Frazen had a good point on picturing our collective consciousness stream that way.

Key Takeaways

• Self-absorbed people tend to react to the world passively, being controlled by their emotions, and not being in charge of them;
• Life is a beautiful phenomenon, and we can get caught in a web of complex relationships and emotions that trace back to our young years;
• Our fantasies can disrupt and destabilize our lives, if not channeled correctly.

Quotes

To Seth Paulsen, who talked about Patty a little too often for his wife’s taste, the Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.

The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.

Do you think George Bush actually hates gay people? Do you think he personally gives a shit about abortion? Do you think Dick Cheney really believes Saddam Hussein engineered 9/11? Sheryl Crow is a chewing-gum manufacturer, and I say that as a longtime chewing-gum manufacturer myself. The person who cares what Sheryl Crow thinks about the war in Iraq is the same person who’s going to buy an obscenely overpriced MP3 player because Bono Vox is shilling for it.

All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.