Praise for "Freedom"“Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, "Freedom," like his previous one, "The Corrections," is a masterpiece of American fiction . . . "Freedom" is a still richer and deeper work—less glittering on its surface but more confident in its method . . . 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, "The New York Times Book Review" (cover review) “Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges. He proves himself as adept at adolescent comedy as he is at grown-up tragedy; as skilled at holding a mirror t
Praise for "Freedom""Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom," like his previous one, "The Corrections," is a masterpiece of American fiction . . . "Freedom" is a still richer and deeper work--less glittering on its surface but more confident in its method . . . 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, "The New York Times Book Review" (cover review) "Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges. He proves himself as adept at adolescent comedy as he is at grown-up tragedy; as skilled at holding a mirror to the world his people inhabit day by dreary day as he is at limning their messy inner lives . . . Mr. Franzen has written 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, "The New York Times" "["Freedom "is] a work of total genius: a reminder both of why everyone got so excited about Franzen in the first place and of the undeniable magic--even today, in our digital end-times--of the old-timey literary novel . . . Few modern novelists rival Franzen in that primal skill of creating life, of tricking us into believing that a text-generated set of neural patterns, a purely abstract mind-event, is in fact a tangible human being that we can love, pity, hate, admire, and possibly even run into someday at the grocery store. His characters are so densely rendered--their mental lives sketched right down to the smallest cognitive micrograins--that they manage to bust through the art-reality threshold: They hit us i