... Freedom for the reader ...

... the reader made short work of last year's hot bestseller and suspects, in the imaginative way the mind operates when the clever-cortex is activated, that if Jonathan Franzen had been born say, a beaver, his talents would have led him to build a dam colossal enough to re-route the Potomac ...

... environmentalists would make pilgrimages for academic observation and satellites would transmit infra-red imagery for news-channel telestrators ... Jonny Beaver would trigger an eco-event and media sensation simultaneously, cause celebre for The Nature of Things ... instead, God gave Franzen a pen, and judging by the protracted detailing in this latest novel Freedom, more than one replacement ink cartridge was bestowed on him too ...

... of course, the reader concedes, in this iPad and keyboard era it's nigh unto impossible to find ink cartridges if you need to replace them, but he'll keep the pen and ink metaphor to sub for laptop and RAM ... suffice it to say, the result is a comprehensive work of modern fiction, prolific with vivid characters who are all fascinating in their ordinariness and riveting in their familiarity ... an exercise in guiltless literary voyeurism, difficult to put down or look away from ...

... it proves less difficult to remove the cottage-country slip cover to proclaim FREEDOM in bold silver letters from the book spine ... "when is Martin Luther King Day?", comes the overheard whisper from somewhere over there as the hefty, black hardcover holds steady at optimum distance from the reader's bespectacled face ... a slight torque on the little word "is" implying something more than the question ordinarily might convey ...

... in fact, there's no call to mention MLK ... the reader's expectation of a civil rights angle, given the connotative associations of the title with themes of struggle, proves way off the mark ... but, there is civic passion in the prose and redemptive realism to the relevant narrative, held aloft by contemporary dialogue, believable character development and honest airing-out of other peoples personal struggles ...

... Walter and Patty Berglund and Richard Katz are not perfect people, in the same way the reader is not, nor you, or you ... or Bono or Princess Di, or Jonathan Franzen ... but the yin and the yang of each fictional life is laid out here across the long chapters, illuminating individual and intertwined storylines to support the contemplative hypothesis that no-one is all good or all bad except Bernie Madoff (who, in fairness, isn't mentioned either) ...

... Franzen completes the pastiche by tracing both male and female psychologies across generational lines - what a concept! - to follow relationships between adults and their offspring, evolutions within friendships and marriages and to see how the dance of life can wheel and turn from waltz to rhumba to tap to freestyle and back, over time, without missing a beat ...

... in the 1972 Jamaican film The Harder They Come there's an aha moment for Jimmy Cliff's character, Ivan, wherein he casually coos "revolutionary to raass" when he recognizes the potency of his exploits ... and, while "revolutionary" is the kind of broad stroke Franzen eschews in his writing, and avoids in his self-promotion, this is exactly how I imagine he's feeling these days as a Katzian figure on the cover of Rolling Stone! ... well okay, it's a TIME magazine cover, but that gives him rockstar balls to dangle like Stephen King or Norman Mailer ... or Richard Katz ...

... "aw shit", the reader mumbles, noticing the reference to his own thoughts in a too-long sentence in the preceding paragraph, effectively outing himself as this writer ... then again, like some twists-of-fortune in the novel, this is forgivably predictable ... "so sue me," but don't judge me for bitin' the guy's style, it's intended to flatter, and I'll take the largesse just in case the Freedom Road to Oprah's attention is (no torque applied) paved with Middle American philosophy, soft sell and third-person syntax ...