Freedom Reread - (Rereadings) by L Gibson (Paperback)

About the Book

In 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.

Book Synopsis

Few writers rankle like Jonathan Franzen. Despite popular acclaim, robust sales, and august literary laurels, Franzen's polarizing persona shares the spotlight with--and sometimes steals it from--his tragicomic novels of Midwestern family life.

In this reconsideration of Freedom (2010), L. Gibson explores the difficulty of coming to terms with Jonathan Franzen. Freedom Reread considers the author's distinctive narrative technique in light of the contradictions for which he is renowned: widely read curmudgeon, tweeted-about luddite, self-proclaimed partisan of fiction who frequently announces the novel's death. Bookended by autofictional forays into the process of--and resistance to--taking a definite stance on Franzen, this book places Freedom in conversation with a playful, idiosyncratic array of interlocutors, including Middlemarch and You've Got Mail, Amitav Ghosh on climate change and Susan Sontag on metaphor, speculative fiction and Succession.

Avowedly ambivalent about Franzen, Gibson offers both a fresh appreciation of the author's work and a searching critical analysis of his pronouncements on the novel's fate. Wide-ranging and stylistically ambitious, Freedom Reread delivers an assured, artful inquiry into Franzen's novelistic technique and public persona.

Review Quotes

A passionate, scholarly attempt to sort out one of American literature's most divisive figures.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Franzen 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 Reread

What 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 Confessions

About the Author

L. Gibson (he/they) is a poet and critic whose publications include the book-length poem Misherit (2019).