自由 (2010)

Freedom is a 2010 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Freedom received general acclaim from book critics, was ranked one of the best books of 2010 by several publications, and called by some critics the "Great American Novel". In 2022, it was announced that Freedom would be adapted for television.

The novel follows the lives of the Berglund family, particularly the parents Patty and Walter, as their lives develop and their happiness eventually falls apart. Important to their story is a college friend of Walter's and successful rock musician, Richard Katz, who has an affair with Patty. Walter and Patty's son, Joey, also goes through his own coming-of-age challenges.

Franzen began working on the novel in 2001, following his successful novel The Corrections. The title of the novel was an artifact of his book proposal, where he wanted to write a novel that freed him from the constraints of his previous work. The cover of many editions of the novel includes a cerulean warbler, a songbird, for which Walter works to create an environmental preserve.

Plot

Good Neighbors

The novel opens with the Berglund family during their time living in St. Paul, Minnesota, from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. One of the first families to move back into urban St. Paul after years of white flight, the Berglunds are portrayed as an ideal liberal middle-class family. Walter Berglund is a mild-mannered environmentalist lawyer, and his wife Patty is a charming and youthful homemaker who cares for their two children, Jessica and Joey. The precocious Joey’s move to his girlfriend’s Republican family next door increasingly destabilizes Patty and Walter’s marriage. Years later, while the children are at college, the unhappy couple relocates to Washington, D.C.

Mistakes Were Made

The second section of the novel is a story-within-a-story, presented as an autobiography written by Patty at her therapist's suggestion. She recalls her youth as a star basketball player, her alienation from her busy parents and artistic siblings, and being raped at a party. 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.

After detaching herself from Eliza and suffering a career-ending injury, Patty unsuccessfully attempts to woo Richard. When he rejects her advances, she settles down instead with Walter, who has been patiently courting her for a year. They marry and raise their family for many happy years, but begin to suffer marital problems as Joey and Jessica become adolescents. Joey moves out of the house and in with his childhood girlfriend Connie next door, worsening Patty’s spiral into alcoholism and depression. Meanwhile, Richard struggles with fluctuating artistic success and abandons his music career. Twenty years after leaving college, Patty and Richard have a brief affair at the Berglunds' vacation house at an unnamed lake in Minnesota.

2004

The third section of the novel jumps to the early 2000s, and alternates in viewpoint among Richard, Joey, and Walter.

By 2004, a middle-aged Richard has found success as a minor indie rock star with breakthrough album Nameless Lake, secretly inspired by his affair. Walter starts working for an environmental organization in Washington D.C., the Cerulean Mountain Trust, which is supported by the coal industry and aims to strip mine parts of West Virginia, eventually turning the denuded land into a cerulean warbler preserve. Walter attempts to enlist Richard in his anti-human overpopulation pet project, which he is funding with Cerulean Trust money.

Navigating many difficulties in establishing the warbler preserve, at the cost of his anti-Iraq War principles, Walter confesses his growing love for his younger female assistant, Lalitha, but is unable to act on it. Devoting himself to his anti-overpopulation campaign, Free Space, Walter invites Richard to visit. Richard notices that Walter and Lalitha have fallen in love and advises Patty to leave him so they can be happy, but she refuses, showing him the autobiography she wrote as therapy. Richard leaves the manuscript on Walter’s desk, where he reads it and discovers the infidelity. Enraged, he throws Patty out despite her pleas that she still loves him. She moves in with Richard in Jersey City.

Meanwhile, the Berglunds’ estranged son, Joey, attends the University of Virginia. He blames his dissatisfaction there on the recent September 11 attacks and attempts to break away from Connie. At Thanksgiving with his wealthy roommate Jonathan’s family in Northern Virginia, he is dazzled by Jonathan’s beautiful sister, Jenna, and connects with Jonathan’s Zionist, neoconservative father. He secures a well-paid job with Kenny Bartles, an Iraq War-profiteering entrepreneur, and signs a subcontract to procure truck parts for Bartles’s DOD truck contract.

Connie struggles with depression in Joey’s absence, and when reunited they impulsively elope after she gives him her savings to invest in the subcontract. However, he continues to pursue Jenna, and goes on a trip with her, only to unexpectedly suffer impotence. Bartles pressures Joey to ship defective truck parts to the Army to fulfill the contract. Feeling guilty, Joey reconnects with his father and confesses wanting to blow the whistle on the truck contract, but ultimately decides against it, instead donating the profits.

With Patty gone, Walter and Lalitha become lovers. However, still reeling from the separation, Walter loses his temper and rants against capitalism and overpopulation on live TV, making him an icon of radical youth. Fired from the Trust, Walter and Lalitha continue to organize Free Space, but it devolves into a destructive radical echo-chamber. Lalitha goes to West Virginia alone to manage an upcoming Free Space concert, leaving a depressed Walter in Minnesota. On the way, she is killed in a car crash.