The new Jonathan Franzen novel “Freedom” has been so extravagantly praised for so many weeks now that the actual appearance of the book in stores on Tuesday felt slightly anti-climactic.
Not since Pauline Kael started raving about Robert Altman’s “Nashville” way in advance of its 1975 release date has there been so much negative backlash against a piece of popular culture before the populace had a chance to sample it.
Kael was attacked by other critics who weren’t invited to a private rough cut screening by Altman and some of the reviews that appeared a few months later took a what’s-so-great-about-that stance in relation to The New Yorker critic’s hysterically positive piece.
“Freedom” wasn’t leaked to one or two favored critics. An Advance Readers Edition landed on my desk a few months ago and a finished copy arrived a few weeks back.
What has stirred all of the discussion was the decision by a few journals to go public with positive pieces well in advance of the official publication date.
The strong pieces in turn generated an outpouring of negativity from other novelists jealous of the attention Franzen received with no apparent effort on his part.
I wrote in this space last week about other authors — such as bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult — who have been complaining about the two positive 
reviews (prior to publication) in The New York Times, the Time magazine cover story on Franzen a few weeks ago, and Sam Anderson’s New York magazine rave even before that.
Now that the book is available to be read I hope some of the craziness will subside because you only have to get 40 or 50 pages into “Freedom” to see why magazines and newspapers decided to jump the gun — this is one of those fabulous zeitgeist-defining novels that is both enormous fun to read and illuminating about life in our country over the past few decades.
By studying one American family closely from the 1980s through 2004, Franzen has exposed and examined our culture in a big, entertaining book in the vein of “Bonfire of the Vanities” and the same writer’s 2001 novel, “The Corrections.”
There’s even a bit of James Michener — believe it or not — in the way that changing geography and wildlife play a central role in the story (hence the rather strange cover that doesn’t mean much until you are deep into “Freedom”).
The tone of many of the other writers’ complaints about the advance praise was that once again a “literary” novel was being held up as a superior object in a culture dominated by pop romances and mysteries.
But there is nothing pretentious about “Freedom” — it’s a smart page turner that keeps shifting narrators so that we get the feeling of being taken inside the life of a family and being able to examine it from almost every perspective.
Patty and Walter Berglund — and their two children — live as flesh-and-blood individuals on every page, but they also serve as amusing and poignant stand-ins for a whole swath of American society that has been in permanent upheaval for the last 20 years and was given an extra couple of jolts by 9/11 and the subsequent financial collapse.
Certainly, there are ideas and behavior in the novel that can be debated, but the first thing readers need to do is get “Freedom” and experience the great pleasure Franzen affords us in delivering such a sheerly entertaining epic.
