When it comes to family dynamics, Franzen says that, though he has no children of his own, his childhood offered all the instruction in the world.

All play their own roles in the tempestuous Berglund family dynamic. Those would be Walter, his friend Richard Katz, and Walter's son, Joey.

'I wanted to leave some room for the narrator to identify with the three main male characters.' Patty's third-person narration was a way to get the book out of his own hands. Writing from a female perspective, therefore, 'came to be second nature and not in a good way,' he says. From the time he was a child, he says, he over-identified with women - his mother, and later his wife - to the point where it became difficult to write about himself as a man in a direct way. 'It seemed important to get her right up front so that one might have some sympathy for why she was so angry and why she was so lost.'įranzen says his own exercise of writing in a woman's voice was itself a bit of an exorcism. 'Like a lot of somewhat depressive people sitting on a lot of dark stuff, Patty doesn't behave very well,' he says. Franzen says the device was a key to unlock early sympathy for Patty, who struggles for redemption in later pages. Much of the early part of the book is written by Patty in the third-person - a journaling exercise recommended by her therapist. His wife, Patty, is not without her problems. 'Walter becomes this over-the-top angry person - that's part of the arc of his character in the book.' 'Walter is a portrait in the displacement of unspeakable rage about what's going on in his family through speakable rage about what's going on in his country,' Franzen says.Īs he took stock of the way we live in the first decade of the new millennium, Franzen was struck by how angry everybody is. By then, he says, 'we could see the decade in some pretty clear perspective.'įreedom begins with the story of Patty and Walter Berglund, a couple living in St Paul, Minn. 'In some respects it was good fortune for me that I wasn't trying to wrestle with 9/11 as it was being so over-wrestled with in the media.'įreedom was written mostly in 2009, Franzen says, after the election of Barack Obama. 'I need significant chunks of time to pass before I seem to be able to get a novel going,' Franzen tells NPR's Guy Raz. The book has been hailed as a masterpiece of modern, post-Sept. Freedom is set against the backdrop of the Bush era. It's taken Franzen nine years to write a follow-up. 1, 2001.Ī few weeks after that, American life was no longer the thing he'd captured so vividly in his book. Jonathan Franzen's last novel, The Corrections, was published on Sept. It's taken Jonathan Franzen nine years to write a follow-up to The Corrections.

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