Patty and Walter Berglund were hands-on parents at the avant-garde of the whole foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with a Republican familyr? Why is Walter working with Big Coal? And why has Patty become 'a very different kind of neighbour?'

The awful thing about life is this: says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. Everyone has his reasons. That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it's very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues--among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock'n'roll--and in some ways can't be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them. --Tom Nissley