This book is probably the most hyped and talked about book of 2010, and that's not Franzen's fault. He's a good writer, and takes several years to finish a novel. So, expectations are high whenever he publishes a book. Unfortunately, "Freedom" fails to deliver at any level of enjoyable reading experience, at least for me.
This book is primarily about a woman, who marries a man she cares about, but is not in love with, and she also happens to be secretly in love with her husband's best friend, an indifferent musician, who struggles to be successful. She has a son, who turns out to be kind of a jerk, and the family just wallows in their lives, and their bad choices, depressed and confused about how things have turned out.
The title of this book should have been "Freedom for people to make bad choices and be miserable". It's a depressing book. I really wanted to like it, but even after reading the first 150 pages I had a sense the book wasn't going anywhere, but I trudged on anyway, page after page, until the end, waiting for a good experience, anything interesting, especially since I had enjoyed Franzen's last book The Corrections. And I'm not looking for novels to deliver a "feel good" experience either, nor do I need to "love" every character. But these characters are all miserable, depressed, and regretful. And there is nothing interesting about the plot, or setting, to balance out the miserable characters. Don't get me wrong, Franzen is a good writer, and he may deliver better books in the future, but I expected more from a writer of Franzen's caliber.
