on freedom

There's not much additional praise I can heap on to Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. I haven't seen any bad reviews. I'm sure there'll be some kind of backlash at some point. ...I'm about half way through the book and really enjoying it. His prose is so effortlessly spot-on. I wonder, however, if his mastery of language and style perhaps masks a shallowness of thematic content. It's a hard book to put down, but it might be the equivalent of eating Twizzlers or Dorritos. You can't stop once you start, but you still feel empty and a bit out of sorts at the end. I'm not saying this is my final verdict on the book since I still have a lot of it to go. Not all literature has to be heavily thematised and deeply meaningful, but you want someone with Franzen's gifts to do something really ambitious and intellectually compelling. That's my hope for the book anyway. There's no question that he's a very smart and observant cat. But is he thoughtful? Thoughtfulness is admittedly a hard concept to pin down these days. Still, I want so badly for someone to come along in literature and be the voice of my generation... Maybe I'm setting the bar too high. Maybe it's enough that the book is entertaining the shit out of me. Let's see what he does with this thing. I hope he doesn't blow it...