Freedom's Limits: Jonathan Franzen, the Realist Novel, and the Problem of Growth

Abstract

If you took it from the reviewers, there was something weirdly interruptive about the eco-politics of Jonathan Franzen's 2010 novel Freedom. Sam Anderson began a New York Magazine review by calling Freedom “a work of total genius,” but he emphasized this one qualification: “Franzen the crank,” Anderson wrote, kept stepping in to “overpower Franzen the artist,” forcing the reader to sit through “speeches” in order to get to the “art.” The New Republic's Ruth Franklin agreed that the stretches of Freedom where the character Walter Berglund takes up “population control as his pet cause” were “the most plodding and gratuitous in the novel.” For B. R. Meyers in the Atlantic, Walter was “constantly holding forth on issues he has researched, but not dramatically experienced”: “They are entertaining tirades, but this is not what fiction is for.”1 Such politics, these reviewers implied, taxed the reader, detracted from character, and disrupted the plot.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.