Walter Berglund is a mild-mannered environmentalist lawyer, his wife Patty is a charming and youthful homemaker who cares for their two children, Jessica and Joey.
After receiving a varsity scholarship to the University of Minnesota, her disturbed friend, Eliza, draws her into contact with the attractive Macalester rocker Richard Katz and his kind-hearted, nerdy roommate, Walter Berglund.
Twenty years after leaving college, Patty has a brief affair with Richard at the Berglunds' vacation house at an unnamed lake in Minnesota.
By 2004, a middle-aged Richard has finally found success as a minor indie rock star, with his breakthrough album Nameless Lake having been secretly inspired by his affair.
After navigating many difficulties in establishing the warbler preserve, at the cost of his anti-Iraq War principles, the teetotaling Walter shares his first drink with Lalitha.
Joey also becomes increasingly connected with Jonathan’s Zionist, neoconservative father, eventually getting a well-paid job with Kenny Bartles, an Iraq War-profiteering entrepreneur.
While on a trip to South America with Jenna, he has the opportunity to sleep with her, but he unexpectedly suffers impotence, realizing that Connie is his true love.
However, increasingly depressive after his separation from Patty, Walter loses his temper and rants against capitalism and overpopulation on live TV at the inauguration of the West Virginian body armor plant orchestrated by the Trust, making him an icon of the radical youth.
After Lalitha’s death, the severely depressed Walter retreats to his family’s lakeside house, where he turns into a misanthropic recluse, directing his anger especially at the inhabitants and bird-killing cats of Canterbridge Estates, a development that has sprouted on the other side of the lake.
When asked during an October 30, 2002, interview on Charlie Rose how far he was into writing the new novel, Franzen replied: I'm about a year of frustration and confusion into it ... Y'know, I'm kind of down at the bottom of the submerged iceberg peering up for the surface of the water ...
[7] On October 16, 2009, Franzen made an appearance alongside David Bezmozgis at the New Yorker Festival held in the Cedar Lake Theatre to read a portion of his forthcoming novel.
[8][9] Sam Allard, writing for North By Northwestern website covering the event, said that the "material from his new (reportedly massive) novel "was as buoyant and compelling as ever" and "marked by his familiar undercurrent of tragedy".
[11]Franzen has stated the writing of Freedom was deeply impacted by the death of his close friend and fellow novelist David Foster Wallace.
[20] Sam Tanenhaus of The New York Times and Benjamin Alsup of Esquire believed it measured up to Franzen's previous novel, The Corrections.
Tanenhaus called it a "masterpiece of American fiction", writing that it "[told] an engrossing story" and "[illuminated], through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew.
"[22] An editor for Publishers Weekly wrote that it stood apart from most modern fiction because "Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at—incredibly—genuine hope.
"[23] Benjamin Secher of The Telegraph called Franzen one of America's best living novelists, and Freedom the first great American novel of the "post-Obama era".
[24] In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones called him "a literary genius" and wrote that Freedom stood on "a different plane from other contemporary fiction".
[25] Michiko Kakutani called the book "galvanic" and wrote that it showcased Franzen's talent as a storyteller and "his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life."
Kakutani also praised the novel's characterization, going on to call it a "compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times.
Charles praised Franzen's prose and called him "an extraordinary stylist", but questioned how many readers would settle for good writing as "sufficient compensation for what is sometimes a misanthropic slog.
"[30] Alexander Nazaryan criticized its familiarity in the New York Daily News remarking that the author "can write about a gentrifying family in St. Paul.
"[31] Alan Cheuse of National Public Radio found the novel "[brilliant]" but not enjoyable, suggesting that "every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain.
Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didn't want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to.