I’ve been wrestling for a while with this post. I had about two paragraphs written but realized they were nothing but plot recaps and scrapped the whole thing.  A gentleman who reads this blog visited the store yesterday. His only question was what did I think of Freedom? After all, I did finish it a while ago.

Like Franzen himself, Freedom is polarizing. Great American novelist or overrated hack? Great American novel, or seriously grating
characterization?

I’m usually a cynic about that kind of praise, but I think Franzen
isn’t overrated, or at least not by much. Freedom is truly great.
Saying I loved it doesn’t really express how I felt about it, though.
It’s a little more complicated than that.

I certainly didn’t love all of the characters–Walter with his grating niceness, self absorbed Patty, their son Joey who I mainly wanted to punch, and the whiny daughter who isn’t as important to the story for some reason. Yet grew affectionate about them and was happy in the end with the lives Franzen created for them. With Franzen you always spend a lot of time frustrated with his characters, but it pays off.

Freedom is a great book. I’m betting that it will become a classic, at least I hope it does. Ignore all the stuff being said about the author. Just read the book for what it is, a novel about the absurdities of modern American life. Hopefully you like it as much as I did.

If you only read one book on attempting to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence this year, make it this one! I found myself reading bits of it aloud to Mr. Bookdwarf. Dyer’s play with language and genre subvert the standard literary criticism tomes. How he even got this book in print is beyond me. The phrase “herding cats” comes to mind when I think about Dyer’s writing process.

But it’s so much fun to read! In this wonderful book, I discovered some of my favorite sentences: “To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.” Mind you, he’s talking about not being interested in theater. If you’re interested in literature — that is, feel anxiety about its health, its trends, its quality — then Dyer’s work should reassure you that it’s alive and well.

[Ed. note: I just realized that I didn’t hit publish on this post last week! So the weekend I’m referencing is in fact not this past one, but the one previous. This weekend I was in fact melting down in Georgia and Alabama.]

With such hot weather making anything but reading a sweat-inducing chore, I manged to get to a few books in the past days.

Last week, I started Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw. Love him or hate him, the man’s got an opinion on just about everything, something I respect. Medium Raw collects his musings on everything from fatherhood to controversial folks in the food industry. You’ve got to like a guy who gets so passionate about everything. It delivered exactly what I wanted, musings on food with occasional rants.

Another book I’ve been hearing booksellers rave about is Lily King’s Father of the Rain. They were right to rave! It’s an amazing exploration of the relationship between a daughter and her alcoholic father. Set in an upper middle class (read WASP) town outside of Boston, eleven-year-old Daley Amory watches her parents’ marriage falling apart. King really gets what it’s like to realize that your parents aren’t perfect and that they’re own troubles get in the way of being a parent. Even the mother has her own issues. It’s heart wrenching without being saccharine.

I love John Banville and I love Benjamin Black. They’re so different but so much the same. How interesting that they’re the same person! I read Elegy for April, Banville’s third crime novel set in 1950s Dublin in one clip. Quirke is fresh out of rehab and trying to forge a relationship with his daughter Phoebe. When she comes to him worried about a friend gone missing–the April of the title–he takes it upon himself to investigate. As the story unfolds, secrets come unburied and relationships change, as they do in Black’s series. Particularly appealing are the descriptions of Quirke learning to drive.

And finally I finished reading The Three Weissmans of Westport by Cathleen Schine. It’s been sitting on my shelf, with only 10 pages read, for months. I’ll admit when I first read the description, I thought “not my cup of tea”, but I was pleasantly surprised. Ignore all of the modern day Jewish Jane Austen stuff and just read it for what it is, a novel about a mother and her daughters going through a rough patch. Their decision to move in together is not one I would choose, but it’s a clever way to make the story more interesting. Schine excels with the descriptions of the various characters’ inner lives.