Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers,
the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the
ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how
to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother
and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer,
commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better
world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their
teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has
Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outre
rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture?
Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street
become a very different kind of neighbor, an implacable Fury coming unhinged before
the street's attentive eyes?

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic
of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the
temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken
compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire.
In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters as they
struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced
an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

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