http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/books/16book.html?ref=liberal arts
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: August 15, 2010
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Top of Form
Jonathan Franzens galvanic rising novel, Freedom, showcases his impressive literary toolkit â€" every essential storytelling skill, summation plenty of bells and whistles â€" and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean try window on the Statesn middle-class life. With this book, hes not only workd an unforgettable family, hes alike completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this area into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters.
Whereas Mr. Franzens first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, borrowed liberally from the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo to create a dark, splashy picture of a futuristic St.
Louis, his 2001 bestseller, The Corrections, signaled his tendency to write an American sort of Buddenbrooks, to conjure contemporary America â€" not by going for a cartoonish, zeitgeist-y epic moreover by deconstructing a familys history to give us a wide-angled portrait of the country as it rumbled into the materialistic 1990s.
eon The Corrections attested to Mr. Franzens discovery of his own lithesome voice and tamed his penchant for sociological pontification, the novel was something of a hybrid in which the authors satiric instincts and misanthropical view of the world sometimes seemed at odds with his new drive to create fully three-dimensional people. It felt, at times, as if he were self-importantly inflating the symbolic meaning of his characters experiences, even as he condescendingly attributed to them every venal quality from hypocrisy and dressing table to paranoia and Machiavellian conniving.
In the opening pages of Freedom, this dynamic seems even more exaggerated,...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay
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