freedom is my own personal hell

so i just finished reading jonathan franzen's, freedom, and if your expecting me to fawn all over franzen's fourth novel like michiko kakutani did in his new york times review, you're wrong.

some of you might be familiar with 'franzenfreude,' a term that came to fruition after franzen's novel was reviewed and highly praised by several big name literary critics. i haven't been able to find the source, but i read somewhere that one critic described franzen's book as one of the best of this century, which is an absurd idea in itself since we are only a decade in (ETA: it was the guardian who said this). franzenfreude became a popular hashtag on twitter when, best selling author, jodi picoult, criticized the current literary scene for favoring white, male writers, saying that if a woman had written freedom it would not have received the praise it had. not long after, everyone and their dog were debating the merits behind this statement and after reading freedom, i'm going to have to agree with picoult.

freedom is an epic novel about the dysfunctional lives of the berglund family. the epitome of your american suburban family, the berglunds harbor a great deal of unhappiness, discontent and sadness beneath the polished surface of their existence.

before i start on my discontent with this book, let me just say that franzen is a master with words. his writing is beautiful and each word flows effortlessly into the next, making the five-hundred plus pages pretty easy to breeze through.

unfortunately, i found the content of this book so eye-roll inducing i think i sprained my eye balls. everyone of the characters is a spoiled pathetic sad sack. not at any point throughout the novel, did i find myself routing for any of the characters. it was difficult for me to tell if franzen wanted me to like his characters because he kept them in this perpetual prison of self-pity and i know that this proverbial prison is sort of the point (har! har! the book is called freedom, oh the irony!) but when was the last time you wanted to spend any significant time with a person who was all 'oh woe me' all the time? never, right?

my second and probably biggest problem with this novel was franzen's depiction of women. every female character in this story is a whiny, selfish, thoughtless dummy (and if they're not, they are solely there for the male characters to stick their dicks in). the men, on the other hand, they have their flaws, but they are also the only people in Franzen's world that apparently have brains or are capable of rational, calculated thought. seriously, i found this aspect of the novel to be so insulting and condescending - there were several times when i walked away from that book, exasperated with franzen's female characters.

the other aspect that annoyed me about this novel was this idea of the american delusion of freedom. franzen gives his characters everything they need to be happy; most of them are white, middle class,  and college educated. his characters have the ability and the financial means to build successful, meaningful lives, unfortunately, most of them seemed so overwhelmed by the options open to them, they became debilitated hollow shells, unable to make any decisions. i get that this is franzen's commentary on capitalism and choice; how in western culture we believe that the more options you have, the more freedom you have but how in reality we are just building little prisons around ourselves made of pepsi cans and nike high tops. i get that. but i think there are way more pertinent effects of capitalism than how isolating it can be to the people who have access to those options in the first place. i feel like this book would have been more appropriately titled, white people problems.

the only thing that saved this book is franzen's writing style. like i said, it's flawless; he is an amazing word smith. however, i think that if a woman had written it, it would have quickly been banished to the chick lit shelves and probably wouldn't have ended up on several top books of 2010 lists (this is a really great article on this theory). in either case, it did not make my top books of 2010 list. so there.

so, who else has read it? what did you think?