Freedom is the best American story I have read in many years, and the most foreboding and useful, for me and my generation, full stop. It is good because it is funny, and sexy, and its references are fresh without ever cloying to be hip, and because it shows characters carrying out lives very much like our own and yet gutted of buoyancy and devoid of rightness. And moreso because their lives are so close to being very buoyant, and very right.

Each character begins life very reasonable and very gradually, becomes more and more of a douchebag in the reader's eyes, without ever really losing sympathy. But they are not cartoons, as David Brooks suggested in the New York Times, merely remarkable examples of their kind. Walter, in one of his fervid ideological spurts, as he pleads with his neighbors to keep their cats indoors, seems quite dotty; but who has not had a neighbor knock on the door to ask something dotty on many occassions?

In sliding more and more from their principles, their own social "character" as they have made it, they may feel sympathetic to the reader, sliding ever downward from his own set ideals—or conversely, by obsessing more and more over those principles, to the point of hurting the cause, they seem again like ourselves losing our way in mania. Mr. Brooks is very wrong to say it is easy to "feel superior to the characters"—or else he is a very grand man indeed. The novel is just so gently satirical that we are able to realize the characters' absurdity without ever ceasing to inhabit them—a masterstroke.

And the book is not without visions of goodness. Walter and Patty inhabiting their St. Paul house at the beginning of their marriage, for example, "the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the heart of St Paul had fallen on hard times … They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it. … Pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow." I love this vision of urban commitment (which later fades). And Patty's commitment to her team and her sport, which Brooks somehow denies, is an inspiring tribute to the life of athleticism. (I was shocked to see how involved our bookish Franzen got in her adolescent sportsmanship.) And Walter's dedication to wildlife preservation, although sadly corrupted, is still a fine vision of how a life could be good—no less so because the character loses his way.

If the book feels pathetically tragic and directionless, it's because it describes a moment in our culture of little direction, only weak magnetic fields for us to align to. We are outside the heady days of the nascent internet, the fall of the Soviet Union, the urgency of the Vietnam War, the space race, and the war against Nazism. There is no strong time-spirit at this moment. And so Walter's dedication to songbird habitat seems, to me, an audible call toward some noble cause which is meaningful in secular, zeitgeistless America now.