Description
Book SynopsisIn this reconsideration of Freedom (2010), L. Gibson explores the difficulty of coming to terms with Jonathan Franzen. Wide-ranging and stylistically ambitious, Freedom Reread delivers an assured, artful inquiry into Franzen's novelistic technique and public persona.
Trade ReviewWhat can reading Franzen tell us about fiction and what we want from it, and don't, and how that changes? Gibson pushes past both eyerolling dismissals of Franzen and the uncritical accolades of Oprah and
Time magazine and takes the novels seriously as complex, if flawed, works of fiction that inspire and reward immersive and close reading. -- Briallen Hopper, author of
Hard to Love: Essays and ConfessionsFranzen fanatics of the world, rejoice! L. Gibson gifts us not only an excellent study of Franzen’s
Freedom—but also a brilliantly ambivalent autofictional self-portrait that teaches us what it feels like to be trapped inside the event horizon of the literary singularity known as Jonathan Franzen. -- Lee Konstantinou, author of
The Last Samurai RereadA passionate, scholarly attempt to sort out one of American literature’s most divisive figures. * Kirkus Reviews *
Table of Contents1. Coming Down on Franzen
2. “Ah, but Underneath”
3. Agnostic Omniscience
4. “Everyone’s a Moralist”
5. Exiled in Guyville
6. The More He Fought About It, the Angrier He Got
7. Coming Down on Franzen (2)
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
