Furthermore, this conflation of suburbia and gentrified urbia suggests two important truths about the changing terrain of American life: first, as Franzen himself ably demonstrates in the novel, many of the upper-middle-class Americans whose lifestyles were once associated with the suburbs have returned to the city second, American literary culture has yet to make sense of this shift, particularly in regard to who lives in the actual suburbs now.

That many reviewers, upon encountering these descriptors, by default associate them with the suburbs indicates how deeply entrenched our cultural assumptions about suburbia are. The repressed housewife, the gossipy neighbors, and the shallowness-and, as Brooks points out, the absence of spiritual significance-are all part of Franzen's gentrified urban landscape. In fact, Walter and Patty Berglund are described as 'young pioneers' of urban gentrification in St. If you judged by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly no fulfilled ones.įrom this commentary and from many other reviews like it, one might conclude that Freedom's protagonists live in the oft-vilified suburbs. This message caught on (it's flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. In a much-commented-upon 20 September 2010 op-ed in The New York Times, David Brooks criticized Jonathan Franzen s new novel, Freedom for remaining trapped in the American literary 'orthodoxy that suburban life is devoid of any meaningful spirituality: Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation.

Holy land by dj waldie