Freedom

Jonathan Franzen is the author of three novels, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Strong Motion (1992), and The Corrections (2001); a collection of nonfiction, How to Be Alone (2002); and The Discomfort Zone (2006), a memoir.

'A lavishly entertaining account of a family at war with itself, and a brilliant dissection of the dissatisfactions and disappointments of contemporary American life...Compelling...Freedom, though frequently funny, is ultimately tender: its emotional currency is both the pain and the pleasure that that word implies...A rare pleasure, an irresistible invitation to binge-read...That it also grapples with a fundamental dilemma of modern middle-class America-namely: Is it really still OK to spend your life asserting your unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, when the rest of the world is in such a state?-is what makes it something wonderful. If Freedom doesn't qualify as a Great American Novel for our time, then I don't know what would ...The reason to celebrate him is not that he is doing something new but that he is doing something old, presumed dead-and doing it brilliantly. Freedom bids for a place alongside the great achievements of his predecessors, not his contemporaries; it belongs on the same shelf as John Updike's Rabbit, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, Philip Roth's American Pastoral. It is the first Great American Novel of the post-Obama era.' Benjamin Secher, Daily Telegraph 'The ultimate way-we-live now novel' Lev Grossman, Time 'A literary genius for our time...An extraordinary work...This is simply on a different plane from other contemporary fiction...Demands comparison rather with Saul Bellow's Herzog. A modern classic, Freedom is the novel of the year, and the century.' Jonathan Jones, Guardian 'Forget about 3-D films, this is a 3-D novel. The characters are alive, past, present and future. Lives are truly lived ...The great achievement of Freedom is to be an almost perfectly written novel, yet one which contrives not to be intimidating. It is both a page-turner and a work of art...It is bliss.' Sarah Sands, Evening Standard