A review by dllh
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2.0

I thought this was soap operatic, terribly telling (vs. showing), over-historic (lots of "his uncle's grandmother's dog had done X, leading via some long-winded and mostly tangential set of circumstances to some outcome that caused Y"), very contrived, and not at all deft. I expected something heavy on style and got something heavy on cumbersome setup of plot connections that frankly weren't all that interesting. It read to me like a middle draft of something in need of much condensing and rewriting for style. There are literary gestures, but I've panned other books (e.g. Joe Meno's The Great Perhaps) that are rough but whose literary gestures are better). This is not what I expected from the guy being billed as the savior of American literature.