for jonathan franzen, according to charles baxter, freedom’s just another word for everything lost.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.
What has happened, I think, is that the public sphere is regarded here as a total loss, so that all the big problems are imagined as unsolvable, The result is a particular kind of despair, the sort that arises from rage with no outlet, the core emotion of a large proportion of educated readers during the George W. Bush administration. Corrupted by ruinous quantities of money and the cynical application of power, the public world depicted here seems incapable of saving anything of value. At every point when a citizen tries to enter that world, he encounters active lying and the operations of expedient logic, and, in the novel’s view, he becomes a collaborator. Franzen is not a conservative, but he is a conservationist, and his novel watches, helplessly, ragingly, as cherished habitats, cherished beings, begin to disappear.