Jonathan Franzen Novels Reading Order

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010) was the novel that returned serious literary fiction to the center of American cultural conversation — a sprawling, realist account of the Berglund family of St. Paul, Minnesota, across three decades, tracing the ways in which freedom — personal, political, ecological — becomes something Americans don't know how to use. Patty Berglund, a former basketball star and devoted housewife, Walter Berglund, an earnest environmentalist in the Obama era, and their son Joey provide the novel's three points of view; their friend Richard Katz, the irresistible rock musician, provides the tension that destroys the family twice. Franzen was a Dickensian realist who wanted to make the nineteenth-century social novel viable again for contemporary American life, and Freedom — which appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the headline 'Great American Novelist' — proved him largely right. It is best read alongside The Corrections (2001), his previous novel, which established the mode Freedom perfects.