Post
by polymath » September 30th, 2010, 2:26 pm
Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is a must-not-read for anyone with the slightest closed-mindedness or sensitive hot buttons. The novel takes a poke at everything on the public radar and much that isn't and much that's on private radars in some quarters. The novel's clashing cacaphony of character's giving voice to personal agendas drives toward a central message: The world is far more messed up than the public consciousness realizes or cares to notice.
It's a novel of player haters hating on dissenting player haters, lotharios and wannabe lotharios, clashing ideologies, and best good intentions gone awry. Fundamentally, It's a novel of freedom's harsh complications. It's written in contemporary voices, a historical documentary of life in WASP middle class U.S. America, preserving for the near future when things do finally reach a tipping-point threshold what caused it.
Freedom doesn't preach so much as paint visions of unpleasant realities and transcends both its preaching and visionary surface with mystically ironic subext. We're doomed, but we might as well have a good time until reality bites. Or it's someone else's job to save us from ourselves. Or I'm doing my part, but I'm just saving a drop in the ocean of ongoing waste-laying of our one habitable nest; why should I bother when no one else does? Or I just don't care about tomorrow.
Don't read Freedom if;
You like cats.
You hate cats.
You like literary fiction.
You hate literary fiction.
You like or hate conservatives.
You like or hate liberals.
You like or hate radicals.
You like or hate capitalists.
You like or hate environmentalists.
You like or hate rogues.
You like or hate traditionalists.
You favor population growth.
You toe any special interest group agenda's platform line.
You value your complacent apathy toward political, social, financial, and environmental issues.
You have any preconcieved notions vulnerable to change.
Spread the love of written word.