This time, instead of Afghanistan, the setting is closer to home…the former frontier and wilderness of Pennsylvania. The setting is conducive to ruminations on the concept of freedom, and, with muscular prose and vivid, poetic descriptions, Junger both conjures the trek and ponders the nomadic lifestyle, Genghis Khan, Daniel Boone, fugitive slaves, the Seminole Indians, boxers, and the Gini coefficient.
Freedom is an approach to the topic based in reality and, as a result, one which speaks to real life. We need more books like it, because real life is where the struggles we have over freedom take place. And while it is not useless to read Rousseau, books like this offer more immediately relevant guidance as we pursue genuine freedom in our day-to-day lives. It is equally as thought provoking as Tribe and as enjoyable as Fire — his collection of short stories focused on dangerous jobs.
And of course, walking. Lots of walking. Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love. Sign up and get a free ebook! Freedom By Sebastian Junger. Table of Contents Rave and Reviews. About The Book.
About The Author. The question of freedom preoccupies many of our most ambitious thinkers. As the pandemic and climate crisis encourage increased state control, as freedom becomes a buzzword of the right, how can we keep faith with the liberation movements and liberal humanism that shaped us?
Recently Olivia Laing excavated the culture of the past century in search of freedom. Now Maggie Nelson has written a tremendously energising book wrestling with freedom in four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. For centuries, people have grappled with whether freedom from is preferable to freedom to, and whether inner freedom is a mere luxury or a booby prize for the oppressed.
She takes from Michel Foucault the idea that liberation is the achievement of a moment, while freedom is an ongoing practice. She has a gift for bringing on to the page serious intellectual debates that are full of personalities figuring out what to do with their lives.
It forms a companion volume to her book The Art of Cruelty , where freedom emerged as a subtext. Collectively her writing across genres is emerging as a unified project, Lacanian in its commitment to desire, intellectually stringent, faithful to the avant-garde tradition, while also freely diverse in its genres and forms.
The four sections are loosely cumulative. Yet she wants to keep the gains of critical theory, the decentring of the subject, the unmasking of authority. While reading, I often wondered how many alternate titles Franzen rejected before settling on Freedom. Other equally, or perhaps more, appropriate titles should have included the following: Competitiveness , Selfishness , Stagnation.
Other examples include a mother in competition with her would-be daughter in law, a father in competition with his son, and various competitions among neighbors and various siblings. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things, are dying off. This vain, self-absorbed cast is almost as bad as that found on any reality show. While they all suffered various tragedies, I found myself constantly rooting for the fickle forces of nature that would lead to further misery for them.
For this, I wanted them all to die as soon as possible so the book would end. Ironically, there is one ancillary character who is pretty tolerable and has the potential to significantly change one of the main characters, but she is suddenly and randomly killed off, causing me to throw the book and wish that it had been anyone—nay everyone—else in the book! You want to savor it, to have it last as long as possible. To accomplish this, you stupidly dilute it with two cups of water.
Not to waste it, you suffer every last drop of this crummy concoction. Kind of like that, Freedom made me think of a very, very watered down Yates novel. I would say these things alone keep it from being universal and timeless.
Things crowbarred in to such an extent that they are actually jarring: I. If he squeezed the base of it really hard, he could make the head of it huge and hideous and almost black with venous blood. To be a dick…This is a good day to die! This, in addition to all of the other problems, prevents Freedom from being either timeless or universal or a good book at all.
View all 27 comments. Sep 12, Grace Tjan rated it really liked it Shelves: contemporary-fiction , ebook , Have you ever… had a dysfunctional relationship with your parents?
If you answer "yes" to any of the above queries, you would probably be able to recognize a part of your Have you ever… had a dysfunctional relationship with your parents? If you answer "yes" to any of the above queries, you would probably be able to recognize a part of yourself in the characters of this novel the Berglunds, Walter and Patty, Midwestern liberals, and their family and friends. Granted, not many among us enjoy looking at ourselves in the mirror first thing in the morning, with all that pillow-plastered hair, sleep-creased face and rheumy eyes staring back at us.
Likewise, most of us would probably balk at being forced to look at our mirror images during the low points in our lives.
But Franzen provides all these reflections in such a precise, detailed, Technicolor 3-D glory that you just have to look. And Franzen delivers this in spades, from the messy, often contrarian emotions that one feels as a family disintegrates, to the moral confusion that ensues from adultery, compromises and corruption.
But at its heart this book is an inquiry into the nature of freedom, how it is exercised and the consequences thereof. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.
This voice has little to differentiate it from the authorial third person, and rather hard to believe issuing from an ex-jock, stay-at-home mom. As I read it I wondered why Franzen insisted on using it. It only became clear why towards the end of the novel, where it provides extra oomph to the bittersweet, wonderfully poignant ending. So is it War and Peace? But nothing is.
And like many of the great 19th century novels that it resembles it is also didactic: a cautionary tale about the dark side of freedom.
View all 34 comments. There was a lot of media focus on the bird-watching theme, and I once endured an interview with Franzen at a writers festival that seemed to address nothing else.
I have to confess, though, that I spent much of my own childhood fascinated by native birds. I collected hundreds of cards from petrol stations and assembled them in books designed for the purpose.
One of my favourite books was "What Bird is That? I just hiked a lot in the Boy Scout movement. I saw lots of birds on the way.
Our patrols were named after them. I wanted to be able to identify them. I loved their diversity and colour. They were a vital part of the world. They were a vital part of my world.
Equally, I could tell the difference between hundreds of species of trees. I still have a large bowl that contains my spontaneously assembled collection of seeds and nuts much to my wife's puzzlement. Birds came to represent freedom even if they're chained to the sky , while seeds and nuts symbolised fertility.
My engagement present to F. Sushi was a painting of tiny abstract seed-like objects that foretold childbirth and parenthood. Our youngest daughter got her driver's licence this week. So, part of my apprehension was, I didn't want to test my love of birds and trees against a more recent trend that seemed a little more self-conscious and affected dare I say, bourgeois?
Depending on how generous you're feeling on the occasion of a Franzen interview, he can strike you as preppy, pompous, and a little starched collared when he speaks. He pauses frequently, self-consciously and deliberatively, as if to capture the perfect thought or to sever the link between the question and his answer, when often the response that eventually comes is fairly pedestrian, but for the dramatic tension.
As it turns out, the birds are a relatively discrete sub-theme of the novel. They don't really arrive until almost half way in. Then they're more incidental to the human relationships, albeit a symbol of freedom under threat, both natural and social.
In short, I needn't have been so apprehensive. Still, for much of the novel, I resisted its allure. I looked too earnestly for things I didn't like. I catalogued them in my updates, most of which I have elected not to discuss in my review. It was like having new neighbours move in. I was seeking fault in them first, without giving them an opportunity to make a positive impression.
I was approaching them in a combative frame of mind. They were on show, and I had pre-judged them on appearances. Fraternity had taken a back seat. I wasn't being very neighbourly. For a long time, I probably would have rated the novel three stars. However, eventually, I decided to up it to four I'm not a fan of half stars; ultimately, you just have to make up your mind to round up or round down.
The Slow Dazzle of Construction Franzen strikes me as a patient, if painstaking, writer. Neither he nor his characters ever seem particularly hurried or impatient. Nevertheless, I found the novel a very quick and easy read, despite its length. For all the labour on the part of both author and reader, the resulting experience was quite leisurely. Franzen commits words to the page like an artist wielding brush strokes.
Not every word or sentence has to wow the reader. The picture emerges from the gradual accumulation of detail, the slow dazzle of construction, rather than any particular lyricism or fireworks. Indeed, in the whole book, there was really only one lyrical sentence or phrase that really stood out in its own right as opposed to constituting a mere bit part in a larger ensemble : "Connie, stark naked, bloody-red of lip and nipple The Connections Franzen's subject matter is the middle to upper echelons of the American middle class.
While he seems to be pretty firmly ensconced in it himself, he writes of it as "possessive He describes its "liberal disagreeability" when it comes into contact with other classes or sub-classes. Franzen's previous novel concerned the attempts of one generation to "correct" or remedy the perceived faults of its parents' generation.
In this one, he broadens his perspective, while still maintaining a family base. Although "mistakes" continue to abound, the novel could almost have been called "The Connections". It's not just concerned with the relationship between generations, we're shown the internal dynamic of all sorts of relationship or bond: parents, children, siblings, spouses, partners, employees, neighbours, consumers, readers, audiences.
Franzen shows us an entire ecosystem, a natural, social and economic environment. He paints a portrait of the American family, paradoxically, in all its liberalism, all its conservatism, all its "reactionary splendour", as if it were a breeding ground for or a microcosm of capitalist society, with all its internal contradictions.
Then he implicitly asks the question whether it's heading towards a recession, a revolution or even extinction. His answer is optimistic, but it takes a lot of effort for the modern family to survive, let alone thrive, in the face of rampant egotism.
The Soft Parade The problem for the American family is probably the same thing that apparently makes America great. Franzen seems to take de Tocqueville's perceptions a step further in his fiction.
This is a society in which freedom and individualism occupy the driver's seat. The novel is a slow, soft parade of Darwinian self-interest, narcissism, independence, rivalry, jealousy, envy, resentment, refusal, resistance, silence, blame, vileness, hatred, hostility, destruction, survival, separation, and reconciliation. Almost imperceptibly, private domestic concerns cohere into a broader vision of humanity, post-religion, if not yet post-family or post-community, and hence its relevance beyond America and beyond the recent past in which it's set.
Is this the way of the world, Franzen seems to be asking? At least those parts of the world that have become Americanised, if that doesn't exclude anyone. His prose rarely flies like theirs. It doesn't strike or imbue you with wonder.
It's too steeped in the mundane, everyday reality of realism, naturally enough. Ironically, when you finish this big, ostensibly clumsy, haphazard construction, you discover that it did actually get off the ground, that it could fly after all, and you realise that for a few days you sat on its wings and enjoyed the birds-eye view it afforded you. I like your nerve, I like watching you But I don't watch what I'm doing, got better things to do So this is real life you're telling me Now I'm lost in shock, your face fits perfectly.
Mentioned about 21 minutes into the New Yorker interview. But I need someone to egg me on. I always eggspect to dine well at the Deli Franzen, unreservedly well in fact, both eleggantly and sufficiently. My problem is that I have great eggspectations. And they're not being fulfilled. It's starting to eggsasperate me.
I'm sure that, deep down, Chef Franzen is a good egg. I don't know whether the problem is him or me. I don't think I'm asking for anything eggstravagant. I mean they're just flipping eggs. I don't want to have to poach them from someone else, that's all.
I want to dine at the Deli Franzen and enjoy the eggsperience. Without a reservation. I want a five star diner in my neighbourhood. And I only got a three.
View all 49 comments. Jan 20, Fabian rated it liked it. This, for people with peculiar and surely refined tastes to favor. That one had a certain mechanism which let the reader become hooked to it till the bitter end.
Franzen has a confidence that makes me want to—well, gag. It is saved, I will brave up to say, by a truly clever ending, but the bigness of it is, in hindsight, its overall main detractor. There are articulate and smart criticisms of my personal favorite theme: overpopulation. I hated all people in this. Every single one had a fault that lead to my entire uninspired apathy. The husband is blinded by his incredibly-focused dreams of a better world.
He lets the siblings have their freedoms and they, in turn, become rebellious. Obviously the main obstacle here is No Understanding, since everyone is definitely quite selfish. The mother is a woman who married the wrong guy and looks for the missing fulfillment: how did she never notice her mistake? Here, the decade may have been personified to a tee, but I honestly KNOW that there is better fiction out there, one that does away with this new brand of American Coolness: too detailed and too psychotic, altogether tragic, sometimes dull and persistently l-o-o-OOOn-g.
View all 9 comments. May 27, Tom LA rated it really liked it. This is a magnificent book and I enjoyed it a lot. I'd like to focus a bit on the author: let's talk for a second about Ego with a capital E. Don't get me wrong, I don't see Ego as a bad thing per se. It just comes with the package in the very first years of your life, giving you a strong personality, opinions, leadership, and often some basic arrogance, entitlement, and a disproportionate sense of your own imp This is a magnificent book and I enjoyed it a lot.
It just comes with the package in the very first years of your life, giving you a strong personality, opinions, leadership, and often some basic arrogance, entitlement, and a disproportionate sense of your own importance. I've seen and read some interviews with Franzen, and yes, he does come across as an author who believes his books are incredibly important.
Important to America Freedom! Important to the world. It's not difficult to perceive this self-importance in the book itself, either, so I perfectly understand the readers who perhaps pushed over the edge by that astonishingly irritating Times cover, or by the deluge of foam-at-the-mouth praising reviews for this book decided to hate Franzen from the start.
I was one of them, for sure. I was ready to shout: "soap opera! So, in short, I started by really not wanting to like this book. And my mission received a strong help by the first pages, where Franzen presents Patty, one of the most difficult and unpleasant characters of the book, in a sort of autobiographical memoir written by herself. Her cold, selfish attitude is made even uglier by the cynicism and negativity and hopelessness that permeate this first portion of the book.
Just so negative. But then, when I was just moments from condemning Franzen to never-ending hatred, some magic happened. The portion about another character, Katz, started, and I realized that the tone of the first pages was just a partial act. A trick, maybe. Franzen, like a chameleon, propels us forward into the world of Katz, the rock musician, and the register changes completely.
I was very impressed by that, actually. And then again, the narrating voice develops, evolves, and keeps changing depending on the perspective and point of view. A wonderful ear.
He actually did something similar in "The Corrections", where he used the initial part of the novel almost as an obstacle for the reader, to overcome and then slide into the rest of it. But the difficult part was much shorter there. The interview with Katz about the state of music is a little masterwork. Just like his first interaction with Walter and Lalitha. Franzen's writing style is extremely clever, elegant and unsentimental, a little too cold, mental and cerebral for my personal taste, almost chilling in his acute, poignant, accurate, objective, hyper-rational observations and descriptions.
More than once, while reading this book, I thought of that quote by someone : "If we spent our life constantly looking at reality the way it actually is, we would go absolutely mad in a very short time". Missing the heart, the emotions, the human perspective, what really matters. Similarly, there is a limit to "thinking", beyond which it becomes just a painful exercise in analysis and dissolution of reality in smaller and smaller pieces, until you find either sublime madness as above or nothing at all the terrifying emptiness at the very center of the onion.
Franzen's ambition is huge, child-like. He set out to write with a mission, and the mission was to go straight to the heart of America Freedom. Sounds like he wants to be a Great Writer, like Tolstoy or Hugo. And he does undoubtedly have an impact, because his books sell millions of copies, and they are full of intelligence and deeply human characters, however, I'm afraid to say, it is probably a much less "serious" impact than what he might think.
Let me try to explain: people read Franzen because they love to read, or because they just want to be entertained, maybe by something smart with a little bit of thinking too, but not because they want to change anything, the world, or especially! We just move on to the next one.
As important as it might be, it is all, at the end of the day, entertainment. It's not real life. In other words, I would say: Relax!
It's just a book! But of course, that is the whole point of being an extraordinary writer like he is. You Do Not Relax. Finally, I disagree with the comment made by some reviewers that the novel falls quickly into the soap opera realm. This novel deserves more attention. I am a very slow reader, almost "Flowers-for-Algernon-slow", and I think it was a good thing with this book. No soap opera is as complex, intelligent, and ambitious as this novel.
On the other hand, many novels would feel like soap operas if read at the speed of light. Overall - this is an impressive, brilliant, complex, cold, sometimes disturbing, sometimes funny, extremely well-written and structured novel about the life of an American couple. View all 11 comments. Feb 01, Michael rated it really liked it Shelves: dysfunctional-family , sexuality , washington-dc , global-warming , fiction , satire , books , environment , minnesota.
A fulsome and satisfying read. He is old-fashioned in the way he makes the reader feel like an ally of the narrator, or author himself sometimes, from an omniscient perspective, and then slipping in a more modern way into the thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of the characters. Beyond morality tales of the likes of Dickens, he has that modern balance of humor and pathos like in novels of Bellow and Updike. Yes, Frazen has surprises, but his restraint stands out in this age of weird experimental fiction.
This the story of Patty and Walter as they start out in suburbia in St. Paul, he a local from rural Swedish Lutheran stock and she an errant daughter of wealthy academics in Philadelphia. He trained as a lawyer and works for environmental causes, initially with a nature conservancy and at this time with a foundation making a deal with a coal company to create a park for songbird habitat. Patty is a former basketball jock assuming the role of full-time housewife and mother.
Meanwhile, Walter is trying his best to resist the charms of his brainy and gorgeous young assistant, an Indian-American named Lalitha. All these characters are fully drawn and undergo substantial development over the course of the novel that kept my intense interest. The kids have substantial air play too, drawing out the intergenerational aspect of the pervasive dysfunction virus of the American family. His later shenanigans at college are fun to follow in their outrageousness, including a corrupt military procurement scheme and crass manipulations to bed the most wealthy and beautiful woman he can find while keeping his childhood girlfriend on the hook.
The themes of the tale relate to how Walter and Patty use their freedom to make meaning of their lives and do whatever it takes to preserve their marriage or to scrap it for something better. And to the freedom a parent must confer to their children for forging their own life. There is also the struggles the children must undergo to use this freedom wisely.
No doubt inquiring minds can discern more meat in the extended interwoven stories of these characters. Still, there is plenty of satire and parody here, but this humor is targeted at the status of the society and the culture all around the characters, including consumerism, sexism, the military industrial complex, mining exploitation, and hypocrisies within the environmental movement. The world may still be going to hell in a handbasket, but some integrity and resilience in them evolves in their Darwinian threshing, enough for the reader to extrapolate some hope for our society.
View all 4 comments. Mar 10, Mary rated it really liked it Shelves: fiction , There's was no way for me to read Freedom and not compare it to The Corrections.
No chance. I fiercely loved The Corrections and was expecting to love Freedom so much less than I actually did. It was probably a little unfair to go into it with that attitude, I just assumed this was a rebound book and the reviews are so mixed. That's pretty darn good for a odd page book. The similarities between the two books are sp There's was no way for me to read Freedom and not compare it to The Corrections. The similarities between the two books are sparklingly clear.
Unlikeable, uptight, troubled, upper-class ,white characters living unhappy privileged lives. We write what we know, right? I guess this is what Franzen knows and he writes about it really well. Dysfunction, regret, depression, suppression, disillusionment - these are things we all know, unless you're one of the only people alive who didn't have an even remotely troubled parent, sibling, relative, friend or self.
The character of Patty Berglund was, to me, so painfully realistic that I ate up her chapters eagerly. And indeed, her life, her marriage, her mothering all became inevitably soured by her painful childhood and traumatic teenage experience. Admittedly, I'm a sucker for a good angst book. And this character and this book pierced so deeply and beautifully, so authentically, so completely I battled with being unable to put the book down more more more, gimme more and wanting to delay finishing it.
Patty is as despicable as any Franzen character and for that I loved her. Criticisms: 1 Richard Katz made me cringe. He was just a little bit too much of a caricature.
All I could picture was a slightly less tragic and more attractive Bret Michaels. Minus the diabetes and the reality shows. But I recognize what Franzen was trying to do with Richard and with Walter for that matter. Two halves, two extremes, two exaggerations. Beautifully done. Even if Patty's infatuation with Richard was tiresome and predicable. And I almost was.
Even though I agree with Franzen's stance on conservation and admire that he writes about it, I don't enjoy having any author's politics rammed down my throat in such an obvious way. A lil subtlety wouldn't go astray. The character of Walter and his zealousness with environmental issues, while obviously in part existed to fill the gaping hole in his life and marriage and serve as an outlet for his demise, it was just a bit OTT. Franzen has an impeccable way of capturing what it feels like to live in The United States today.
His pop-culture references, his politics, his overall sense of the current climate of life encapsulated in very good, serious, teeth-sinkable, witty fiction. I can see people reading this in 50 years, years, and truly getting what it was like to be a young-middle-aged person right here right now. View all 32 comments.
Sep 14, Eddie Watkins rated it really liked it Shelves: american-fiction. This is the power inherent in his work and also its limitation. There is something profound about his recognition of this predicament, but also something trite. It is as if he can not let his characters, and by extension actual people in the world, have any kind of freedom that he himself is incapable of apprehending. And what a wonderful storyteller he is!
It is richly imagined and efficiently executed. It has best seller written all over it; which, again, is its power and its limitation. I have not been so conflicted by complicated responses to a novel in a long while, and it has made me aware of my own limitations in evaluating such a novel, essentially a familial drama, as I rarely read such books and for all I know there are scores of similar books on the market, some probably much better than Freedom.
But Freedom is the one I read, no doubt due to publicity campaigns and whatnot, so it is the one I will respond to. This book dredged up and forced me to confront many buried ideas and memories, not the least of which was my entire college experience. In fact the book made me think of my college life, rather than my current adult life, more than anything.
But that is exactly what I recoiled from in my own college experience. College for me was an evaporator of social expecations: I entered as a future surgeon as expected due to my abilities and intelligence , and I exited telling everyone I was off to be a beekeeper ie dropout. Which again brings up the prisons that they all inhabit, and are ever trying to escape from. Which again brings up his limitations, at least in Freedom. Franzen himself is in a prison, and from that prison attempted to write a great novel rivalling the great ones of the 19th century: Tolstoy specifically.
And I admire his ambition, so even his failure to do so is in his favor, as even that failure emphasizes the various failures of his characters, making the novel itself as arrogant and fragile as I suspect Franzen himself is.
Sure he has an impressive grasp of how private investments link in to the US War Machine, and how business interests in general inform so many actions and behaviors, and his understanding of family dynamics at least white upper middle class family dynamics is very impressive; but so much of his knowledge, beyond the emotional knowledge culled from his own experience, feels like so much book or newspaper knowledge. Franzen wants very badly to transcend his own limitations, and he tries impressively and mightily, and there is a real compassion for his characters and their predicaments in evidence, but his real power lies in his inabiltiy to transcend them.
If he had actually presented an answer to how to achieve freedom, ie Freedom, his novel would have suffered. View all 70 comments. Nov 14, Justine rated it really liked it. I loved this book. Could not put it down. What made it so compelling for me was Franzen's acute psychological eye, his ability to get inside family dynamics and deconstruct relationships, to create tension and suspense through the ways we get along with each other.
And don't. Patty is a gifted athlete growing up in a family that doesn't value athletics. When she's raped at 17, her mother makes an effort to say the proper things but sells her out to advance her political career. Patty has the wil I loved this book. Patty has the wildly uneven ego of someone who knows she's "a star" but considers herself flawed, boring, and unworthy.
This makes her vulnerable to predatory relationships and a bit of a predator herself her relationship with her son is a vivid and sympathetic depiction of emotional incest. Patty faces the age-old dilemma of the safe, sweet guy her husband vs the sexy bad guy a rock musician. This is further complicated by the fact that husband Walter and rock dude Richard are lifelong best friends, and engaged in a complicated rivalry that finds its ultimate expression through Patty.
Meanwhile Walter tries to save the environment by colluding with the forces that are destroying it, and their son does his best to turn himself into a "heartless capitalist bastard" even though he can't quite break up with his high school girlfriend or kill off his dawning realization that he has a conscience.
All these characters struggle with their effort to be 'good' and their freedom to be otherwise, but ultimately their identities are so bound up with each other that they're perhaps not as free as they realize -- and this, Franzen seems to suggest, might be what saves us.
Sep 17, Brent Legault rated it it was ok. Shamelessly conventional, both in style especially in style and subject. Packed with adverbs. Multitudes of awkward passages. Lacking in musicality. Written as if English were a tool rather than an instrument. Super shrill -- three of the four main characters seem to speak and even think at only the highest volume. There are no conversations, only arguments.
Timid of mystery and everything is explained. Chock full of contemporary zzzzzzzz trivia and contemporary zzzzzzz culture.
At Shamelessly conventional, both in style especially in style and subject. At times, I felt like I was reading a foreigner's attempt -- from someplace where English is native but poorly practiced, say, Hong Kong or Australia -- to write The Great American Novel and that he gleaned all of his "facts" from movies, tv and wikipedia. It's not so much that the "facts" were wrong, it's that they resembled painted props, wheeled into scenes to lend them "authenticity," wielded without finesse, sometimes even falling over on top of unsuspecting characters, characters who didn't have a clue that their phony world was crashing down on them.
The whole novel, in fact, makes a better bludgeon than a book. As a bludgeon, it has heft. As a book, it is as weightless and as relevant as a Cerulean Warbler.
View all 5 comments. It's not a deal breaker for me, but if you are someone who is emotionally wedded to liking the characters in a book, or even one of the characters, you might want to steer clear of this novel. That is not to say the author doesn't get it right. His talent comes through loud and clear with the layered and nuanced Patty and Walter Berglund, kids Joey and Jessica, family friend Richard Katz and others.
Shallow, vain, self-loathing, whining individuals full of personal pathos. Personal liberties ver It's not a deal breaker for me, but if you are someone who is emotionally wedded to liking the characters in a book, or even one of the characters, you might want to steer clear of this novel.
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