Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus assigned himself to review the new Jonathan Franzen book, Freedom, and it’s a monster of a review. Like Michiko Kakutani, he’s a fan. It’s a “masterpiece,” he wrote. Mr. Tanenhaus goes bananas over Franzen, and here are some choice sentences to give you a taste of Mr. Tanenhaus’ 2,973 word review. You don’t really need context–not sure that would help:
“The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely – most oppressively, but also most variously and dynamically – within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible range.”
“These heckling strophes drip with spite, but spite is often the vehicle of premonitory truth.”
“There are numberless such moments in ‘Freedom,’ crystalline instances of precise notation shaped by imaginative sympathy.”
Dig in and pick out your favorite! One friend IMed me while reading the review, and basically summed it up pretty well: “what does inhere mean?”
