Recommendations
Books Like Freedom
What to read after Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010) is one of the defining American novels of the 2000s — Walter and Patty Berglund's marriage unraveling across three decades, the Iraq War in the background, the question of what freedom means when you have everything you wanted. If you were drawn to its emotional scale and its social ambition, these novels will find you in the same place.
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The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's earlier masterwork — the Lambert family, Alfred with Parkinson's, one last Christmas; if you read Freedom first, The Corrections is the natural next step and is generally considered the richer of the two; either can be read first and each illuminates the other
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White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Jack Gladney in a midwestern college town — the defining American novel of postmodern anxiety that Freedom is in direct conversation with; DeLillo's generation created the conditions for Franzen's novels, and reading White Noise shows the tradition Freedom belongs to
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Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Frank and April Wheeler in 1950s Connecticut — the midcentury ancestor of what Franzen is doing in Freedom; the gap between the promise of American suburban life and its reality, examined in a marriage that cannot survive the recognition of that gap
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The Interestings
by Meg Wolitzer
Six friends from an arts summer camp across forty years — the other defining American literary novel about the baby-boom generation and what happens to idealism over time; Wolitzer is asking the same questions about freedom, success, and what we owe each other that Franzen is asking, from a specifically female and Jewish-American perspective
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A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Four friends from a Massachusetts college across decades — the most emotionally demanding American literary novel since Freedom; different in subject (trauma and friendship rather than marriage and politics) but the same commitment to taking characters seriously across time and the same willingness to be formally ambitious
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Normal People
by Sally Rooney
Connell and Marianne in Ireland, from high school to college — Rooney is the closest contemporary equivalent to Franzen in her interest in how class, intelligence, and desire interact; Normal People does in under 300 pages what Freedom does in 600, focused on a younger generation with less investment in the American ideological project
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Beautiful Ruins
by Jess Walter
A love story that begins in 1960s Italy and resolves fifty years later in Hollywood — the most widely read literary novel about the baby-boom generation's relationship to idealism and its costs; lighter in tone than Freedom but asking the same questions about what we do with our one life
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The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Three college seniors at Brown in 1982 and the years after — Eugenides is writing about the generation immediately before Freedom's characters and asking the same questions: what does it mean to be intelligent and serious in late-capitalist America, and how do you choose a life when all choices feel compromised?
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