Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

Free­dom will be remem­bered as a sto­ry that cap­tures a very strange chap­ter in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. It’s hard to put a fin­ger on it, but the mood of the last decade is some­thing Franzen nails. His char­ac­ters rep­re­sent the amoral fugue state we drift­ed off into col­lec­tive­ly after 2003. I’m not even sure his hol­lowed out char­ac­ters could real­is­ti­cal­ly course cor­rect, yet they do, and for that rea­son I was some­what dis­ap­point­ed in the novel.

Equal­ly ter­ri­fy­ing, alt-coun­try act Wal­nut Sur­prise rep­re­sent­ed one of the worst musi­cal move­ments of the decade. We have only our­selves to blame.