"From the start of his career with “The Twenty-Seventh City”, Mr. Franzen has been ambitious, striving to write a Big American Novel that might capture a national mind-set, and this novel is no exception. Its title, “Freedom”, announces a theme that runs like a riptide beneath the narrative — lots of talk about what liberty means in terms of being free of familial responsibilities and ideological beliefs, and the rootlessness and dislocation that often follow in its wake.
Rather, it is Mr. Franzen’s characters and his David Foster Wallace-esque ability to capture the absurdities of contemporary life — where the planet is “heating up like a toaster oven” and people use credit cards to buy a pack of gum or a single hot dog (“I mean cash is so yesterday”), where rage among liberals and conservatives alike is scorching the country in the George W. Bush years, and intemperate blog entries and Howard Beale-like outbursts are cheered as expressions of a collective distemper". Source: www.nytimes.com
"The Great American Novel has likely gone the way of the Great American Radio Drama. But I hope not. I hope that books like Freedom will still play a role in the culture, still engage us in a serious conversation about the anachronistic things that matter most — our families, our lovers, our country, our planet. Freedom reminds us just how much these things matter, reminds us that they matter more than Scotch and jeans and Jake Gyllenhaal. It lets us know that these things are worth thinking and fighting and maybe even reading about". Source: www.esquire.com
Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal - Scan of "Love and other drugs" in Entertainment WeeklyWhy not try to get freedom, scotch and Jake Gyllenhaal (preferably all together in the same session), it's not as if they are incompatible...
