“To exhilarate in so much matter and to find it all leading to nowhere—the language is as crowded and compulsive as Walter’s mind. This is Franzen’s deep intelligence as a novelist, which has less to do with the stuff he knows or how much he researches than with the way he infuses his descriptions with his characters’ internal manias. Each inanimate object in view pulses with the obsessions and passions of the person looking at it, taking on a slightly psychotic shimmer. Everyone knows so much about what they see and so little about what they want. They haven’t “figured out yet how to live,” the neighbors cluck.”
— ”Heartache and the thousand natural shocks.” Christine Smallwood’s review of Freedom. Early in the review, Smallwood isolates one of my favorite lines from the book too: “This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.”
