I’ve read several essays from How to Be Alone, all of The Corrections, and several times false-started The Twenty-Seventh City. Until two days ago, I considered Franzen a capable and somewhat dull writer.
Freedom is for me a life-changing novel. I’m responding to it in a way different from but akin to how I responded to Madame Bovary, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Infinite Jest, Crime and Punishment, and Middlemarch.
I am grateful and relieved an American novel of this caliber has been published this century. This novel changes everything.