Freedom

Walter and Patty Berglund build an outwardly ideal liberal life in a gentrifying St Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood, Walter an environmental lawyer, Patty a former college basketball player turned stay at home mother, and Franzen spends the novel taking that life apart piece by piece. Patty's long buried attraction to Richard Katz, Walter's college roommate and a moderately successful rock musician, finally becomes an affair partway through the marriage, one Patty confesses to Walter only in a long memoir she writes at a therapist's suggestion and that Walter eventually reads. Walter, meanwhile, takes a job with a coal company under the cover of environmental philanthropy, justifying compromises he despises himself for making, and grows close to his much younger assistant, Lalitha, in ways that tip from professional into romantic before Lalitha dies in a car accident. Walter, already estranged from Patty and from his own son Joey, who has drifted into war profiteering as a contractor supplying defective truck parts to the American military in Iraq, retreats alone to the family's Minnesota lake house and becomes locally notorious for an obsessive, increasingly misanthropic campaign against household cats, which he blames for songbird deaths. Years pass before Patty, older and more honest with herself, drives to the lake house, and the two reconcile; the novel ends with the couple settled in New York, near their children and near Richard, the lake house itself turned into a bird sanctuary in Lalitha's memory.

Franzen writes with a deliberately unsparing eye, refusing any of his characters an easy exemption from their own worst instincts, and the novel reads as a dense, discursive family saga whose politics, several critics complained, occasionally crowd out its people.