In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire.

Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz-outr rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival-still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become 'a very different kind of neighbor,' an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes? In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Together with Walter-environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man-she was doing her small part to build a better world. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. Paul-the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation.

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen