Freedom

Jonathan Franzen follows Patty and Walter Berglund, a seemingly ideal Midwestern couple, across decades as their marriage, their children, and their ideals come under strain. Around them the novel takes in environmental politics, ambition, and the contradictions of American life in the early 2000s. Franzen writes with close attention to how ordinary people wound one another, using one family to ask what people actually do with the freedom they prize.