It took me 500 pages to feel like Freedom was a GREAT novel. Reading it wasn’t as hard as I expected - it was fun and entertaining and intelligent - really intelligent - but, because the title seemed to get explained so early on and because I never went through any deeply punishing sections, as I feel like you often do with the real knock-out books, I stupidly assumed that that meant it couldn’t be all Oprah cracked it up to be. Then, with only 70-some pages to go, all the strands seemed to shake into place, at least for me, and it got all BIG and IMPORTANT. And now I can’t stop thinking about it. 

That isn’t to say I didn’t get irritated a handful of times by a few puke-inducing moments of smugness. Say, when one of Franzen’s characters refers to the excellent writing skills of another character, a large chunk of whose writing you’ve just spent a large chunk of tiem reading. Frazen is basically saying, sick writing, Franzen! Cool move, I guess. But really, VOMIT.