Book Review: Jonathan Franzen: Freedom

Books....yes... books are supposed to be good. People used to read them. Fiction (for those of you who do not know "fiction" is a term where people make up a story and it is not necessarily a self help book, or a tell all, or anything based in the real world. people used to read fiction. Books like "Old Man And The Sea" and "The Great Gatsby" and "To Kill A Mockingbird" were formerly taught in our schools and were considered... I don't know required reading for intelligent conversations. That was a long time ago. "One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest" and other books were debated. they were not Korans yet people felt the need to discuss burning them for their..."ideas".

Fortunately, those days are gone. Every "successful" man I have known for the last 20 years has proudly told me "I don't have time to read fiction." They have dug in and read books about management, marketing, time useage, economics, motivation.... and on and on. It is all claptrap. It can all be found in the Bible but the Bible is too hard to read so they get fed bits of the truth that they can digest, implement...and disregard.

Fiction on the other hand forces you to pay attention. Look for nuances. try and think about what you read and perhaps what they are trying to show you... has nothing to do with making money or acquiring material goods. Then we have Jonathan Franzen. He wrote book 9 years ago called "The Corrections" about a mid American family. The book was awesome. Ophra loved it and then disdained it and took it off her book list. It was a really good book and got as lot of acclaim as it walked you through a midwestern family. It lost the National Book Award to Richard Russo and although I love Richard Russo... Franzen should have gotten it for "The Corrections". It was an awesome book. There were so many times, and situations where you wer reading and said... "thats me". A lot of aha moments and it said so much about vacuous consumerism, self involvement and ultimately the complexity and beauty of families and the human situation.

Nine years later he wrote the same book with a different family. Again... it is awesome. It is the same book and it is awesome all over again. Every nine years we need another book about a complex, extraordinary, unhappy family. This time the themes are slightly different. Greed, environmentalism, Alterna-Country music, the Bush administration and ultimately over population. It gets really heavy into over population at the end. He takes us through a nice couple in St. Paul Minnesota who gentrifies a neighborhood with him working and her being super mom and house wife.... and everything goes south for the next 25 years.

It is a really good book and a great read. Sure, he wrote it before and updated it but damn... this boy can writer. Buy it, read it, own it... or borrow it from me.

Franzen's writing tips:

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
Never use the word "then" as a conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than " The Metamorphosis ".
You see more sitting still than chasing after.
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction (the TIME magazine cover story detailed how Franzen physically disables the Net portal on his writing laptop).
Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
You have to love before you can be relentless.