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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2010
On Sale: August 31, 2010
576 pages ISBN: 0374158460 EAN: 9780374158460 Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
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
neighbor, 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, total 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 college best friend and
rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has
happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street
become “a very different kind of neighbor,” 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 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 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.
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