Jonathan Franzen: 'Freedom has been utterly co-opted as a sales word'

In a Guardian book club session on his novel, Freedom, the award-winning novelist explains how the market has corrupted language and why it’s important for authors to write characters they dislike

Just as Jonathan Franzen’s landmark novel, The Corrections, appeared to catch the soul of one period of recent American history – the Clinton years and their attendant economic boom – so did its follow-up, Freedom, which was published in 2010 and surveyed life in the Bush era. With its release and subsequent acclaim, Franzen cemented his place in America’s literary pantheon and achieved that much-coveted artistic goal: the creation of an idiom.

While “Franzenesque” may not quite have entered the lexicon, his touchstones as a writer are laid bare in the novel, which, like its predecessor, follows a white, middle-class, politically liberal American family, in this case the Berglunds, as they respond to the existential challenges posed by their particular historical moment. Theirs is a freedom wracked by compromise and contradiction; where privilege is often accompanied by guilt and freedom itself is being usurped by market-driven “freedom of choice”, with its competing but barely distinguishable options to choose from.

It was a word associated with certain kinds of cell phone pricing plans.

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