How many words in freedom franzen

A very short or very long word count is not going to kill your chances. But it may indeed decrease your odds, especially for a debut. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to word counts, and different sources are going to tell you different things. There are also some sub-genres that have slightly different conventions. As you can see, in general, , words for me is kind of the upper limit for the genres that allow some leeway in length. Need help with your book?

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You should share the standard industry formula for determining word count, because the actual document word count determined by the program, such as Microsoft Word, is misleading, for lack of a better term, and most experienced literary agents and publishing house editors typically want the formulated number, which is averaged based on proper formatting font type and size, line spacing, indents, margins, etc. If my manuscript is coming in at pages it would be acceptable at 70, words using the per page method but the docs count may be as much as 6,, words less and so not hitting the ideal mark.

Which would be best to use in that case? Hi Nancy. Word counts are usually rounded up or down, and we do account for the minor differences some word processing programs might have. Thanks for the comprehensive post! All the fantasy novels I know of are at least twice as long. Animal Farm seemed Sooo much longer when I had to read it in school!

You were also acted the guest editor of the edition of The Best American Essays. Does the research that is carried out for the essays become material for fiction? Until the mids I had a strong commitment to not writing non-fiction. And this was a liberating discovery. It also took a huge amount of pressure off the novels. One of the unbearable things for the novelist nowadays is that cultural change is rapid and novels are slow.

The essays have become a way for me to keep up with culture in the moment. The scope of The Corrections is indeed much more restricted than the one you adopt in your earlier fiction.

Did you set aside the ambition to write sweeping, totalizing novels at that point? JF: Yes. I finally realized what a losing game it was to chase after social reality.

I had a feeling of doing it because I was supposed to do it, because it was what the novels that were critically privileged in the United States in the s and s had done. I had dutifully represented social reality in my first two books, and it was simultaneously the least fun part of the work and the easiest part to do, because all I had to do was read the newspaper and watch TV and regurgitate what I already knew.

And I discovered that there was, after all, a way to represent social reality in a novel: not through its direct depiction but through its miniature reflection in the soul of a character. A recurring subject matter of yours is the American family. It seems to me that you have a special interest in what the form of the family allows for in terms of narrative strategies.

Focusing on the family is arguably a way of bringing together independent yet interconnected stories. Likewise, starting from the small microcosm of the family, you seem to work out points of connection with society at large. Is that a way of considering the bigger picture without giving up on specifics? JF: It does function that way. In The Corrections , I had three adult children to work with, and each of them belonged to a different kind of world: Denise to the restaurant world, Chip to the academic world, Gary to the business world.

This is what happens in families—children specialize in different things, by way of individuating themselves. In most families, the kids try to distinguish themselves from their siblings. It allows me to be a social novelist, in a sense, but not a didactic social novelist, not an instructive social novelist. But to the family question. The original five Lamberts are together in the same room only for about six pages, near the end of the book.

If I take two randomly chosen individuals and try to tell a story about them, I have to invent a plot that brings them together, and it takes a very strong plot to generate the kind of strong feelings between characters that a family generates effortlessly. In a family, everyone has strong feelings about each other. Maybe I should give a specific example? And then there are second-order fields of meaning, because Gary himself knows that he might be like his father.

He may be afraid of this; he may be motivated to demonstrate that he is not like his father. All of this happens almost effortlessly as soon as you posit a family relationship in a book.

Family is a signification-rich structure! Ten years ago, when I started to play the guitar, a guitarist friend of mine instructed me to listen carefully to rock songs and try to figure out what the guitarist was doing.

It spares me a lot of work that I can then put into other aspects of the writing. JP: Well, you might have begun to answer my next question. The overall structure of The Corrections is reminiscent of a series of interlocking novellas. The final chapter of Freedom —where Walter retreats to his Walden-like pond—reads a lot like a short story to me.

Why are you so faithful to the form of the novel? Is it just because it allows for comfortable room for character and plot development? I feel that these constructions bring in another dimension to your work: they allow you to examine the intersections between various versions of a story, and various timelines. Would you agree? Much of the attraction of the novel for me has to do with the development of characters over time—over years or decades.

Both of these limitations give me a kind of claustrophobic feeling when I try to write a story. That said, I have tried to write stories. I wrote about thirty not very good ones when I was starting out as a writer, and I collected hundreds of rejection letters from various magazines.

I'm sadly aware of not having what Trevor and Welty and Chekhov have—a boundless sympathy for ordinary people. Chekhov seemed like he could have kept writing short stories forever and never run out of material, because the world of ordinary people was endlessly interesting to him.

A country doctor mattered to him as much as the Tsar or Anna Karenina. Her particular genius is to make it seem like a new story each time. And it is a big, sweeping book with a big, obvious theme see title. Detractors, though, may have a point when they mention how confused the politics can seem. Walter is a conservationist, but becomes a sorely compromised one. The big theme was mentioned often and explicitly. You can be given enough rope to hang yourself.

This is true for individuals as well as societies, and his examples, either personal or political, were meant to show this. The crux of the biscuit comes in deciding where the line should be drawn.

I also felt that the characters hurt by their own freedom of choice were pretty short-sighted, even borderline stupid at times. Fortunately, some were capable of learning from their mistakes. Discovering who comes around to a new way of thinking is one of the pleasures of the book because most of them needed to.

I suspect the most telling critiques recognize what the literary establishment says is at stake. Is this truly an American classic?

That gets him three and a half equivocating stars, rounded to four — well short of Great American Novel status, but worth the effort to see what all the fuss is about. View all 47 comments. Sep 02, Krok Zero rated it it was ok Shelves: fall I didn't like it. Review coming up faster than you can say "jismic grunting butt-oink" Would you think me a nutjob if I told you that Franzen's Freedom reads less like a novel than like an extremely articulate gossip column? Hear me out.

I admit that it can be difficult for me to appreciate the kind of undiluted realism that Franzen favors, because so much of what I value in art is tied into one form of defamiliarization or another. Simply putting a mirror up to the world can be interest Uh-oh. Simply putting a mirror up to the world can be interesting, even enlightening, but it rarely stirs my blood or makes me feel anything beyond purely intellectual admiration.

It's also true that I have no love for the drama of suburban disaffection and infidelity. That I still kind of admired the book despite this heavily stacked deck is a testament to Franzen's writerly professionalism.

When I say professionalism rather than something like brilliance I don't mean to damn him with faint praise -- well, I do, but the praise is sincere despite its faintness. Based solely on Freedom -- I never finished The Corrections , to my embarrassment -- I think Franzen is more a skilled but overreaching craftsman than the epochal artist he's being sold as, if you'll forgive a tired dichotomy.

See, just about everyone, hagiographer and agnostic alike, has noted that the book is thoroughly readable and absorbing. Franzen's craftsmanship lies in his mastery of the fundamentals -- how to structure a story, introduce a character, craft prose that speeds along with momentum, etc -- that lead to prime readability.

But why is it that, each time I put the book down after being reasonably absorbed, I felt a bad taste in my mouth? Despite his vaunted observational acumen -- which, to be honest, I found kind of blinkered and basic -- Franzen's treatment of his characters is too often tainted by he-said she-said superficiality. This book reads like your smartest friend talking smack about your other friends. Or, perhaps, given Franzen's fixation on familial resentment, a better metaphor might be your cranky uncle kvetching eloquently about your bratty cousins.

Yes, Franzen relishes wading into the muck of his characters' twisted and morally corrupt psyches, but what he finds there seems less like authentically messy human complexity than a prefabricated, prescriptive mechanism of misbehavior. I didn't even realize what the missing ingredient was until Franzen made a belated stab at inserting it.

What's missing is compassion. Without authorial compassion for his troubled characters, those characters' development gets arrested at a half-baked, shallow level, no matter how frantically Franzen limns their consciousnesses. Franzen keeps digging and digging, but he never gets past the surface, because he's using the wrong shovel. When he finally tries a little tenderness at the end, it's like the deathbed conversion of a lifelong atheist: sincere, but untrustworthy.

Where the New York Times sees a genius who uses his "profound moral intelligence" to "illuminate the world we thought we knew," I see a good writer who has crafted a cynical soap opera against a ripped-from-the-headlines Bush-era backdrop ensuring baseless "Great American Novel" hosannas from the press. Melodrama would, I suppose, be a kinder term than soap opera or gossip column , but that genre designation carries certain associations -- blatant artificiality, crying-on-the-outside catharsis, stylistic opulence -- that don't apply here.

And yet the book does, at times, feel like little more than a bad melodrama, a dour monotony representing neither the real world of emotions nor a freshly imagined authorial perspective on same. And you know, if Franzen wanted to explore how Americans abuse their personal and political freedoms, I'm not sure why he chose such a blandly familiar cycle of jerks-hurting-jerks to express this potentially interesting theme.

Mistakes are made; resentment simmers; betrayal explodes; lather, rinse, repeat, pass on to younger generation. Marriage is hard, depression is insidious, infidelity can be a moral gray area, children shape their lives in reaction to their parents' lives, etc. I don't claim to be the world's closest reader, but I just don't see the profundity in that.

Not that profundity is a requirement of good fiction, but apart from the finely crafted prose I'm not sure this book even justifies its existence. Franzen buries his would-be thesis in an aside about somebody's immigrant grandfather: The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage. OK, that has a nice aphoristic ring to it. But who are the personalities susceptible to limitless freedom -- all Americans?

If Franzen is saying that all Americans are prone to misanthropy and rage, I have three responses to that: 1 No shit, Sherlock. What's the causality there? If that's the question you tried to answer with your book, Franzy, I don't think you pulled it off. Frankly, I'm more convinced by that glib David Cross bit about how watching an episode of The Simple Life made him realize that he hated our freedom as much as George W.

Bush said the terrorists did. I don't regret reading this though I do regret buying the hardcover. I've now done my due diligence with Franzen and can safely ignore him from now on. Hell yeah, motherfucker. That's how we roll. View all 19 comments. May 09, Justin rated it it was ok. Freedom started out that way for me, too. The prologue of the novel was probably my favorite part. But when the book took off from their it went into different directions that just fell flat for me.

I challenge anyone who says that to read Herman Koch because he writes really good books about really bad people.

You know what I did? I basically validated my own decision to put the stupid book down. Anyway, a solid start, a fluffy middle, and an ultimately forgetful book. So forgetful, in fact, that I forgot to even review it. But who cares about my review or this book anyway? Pretending to care but not really caring about anything anyway? Anyway, I get to a certain episode where Leslie urges Ann to finish reading Freedom so that she can talk about Patty. Usually, the references used in the show are spot on and have a deeper social commentary attached to them so I decided to start reading the book since Franzen had been on my TBR forever.

I wanted to start with his other famous book first The Corrections but well any start is a start. Let me tell you, the writing is good, the story however.. What do I do when I have opinions? So spot on, intelligent and humorous. It summed up my feelings in the best way possible and it made it redundant for me to write the same thing but in a less coherent and appealing manner.

That being said, if you wanna get a feel as to what this book is about just go read that review. It says it all. View 2 comments. May 08, Adam Floridia rated it did not like it Shelves: 1-star-books. Background : I decided to give in to the hype and read this book by the new American voice of our generation, the first author to grace the cover of Time in more than a decade, Jonathan Franzen only after I heard him speak in Hartford. He seemed like a nice guy, with a kinda dry, almost bashful humor.

Plus, he was friends with David Foster Wallace. So why not give Freedom a read? Based on your definition explain why this story is or is not good literature. Proof : Good literature tends to have both an interesting title and compelling characters. Although Freedom may have been the best choice of title, others would have been far more fitting based on the characters that populate the novel.

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: ebook , contemporary-fiction , 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. In some respects, what has been called Franzenfreude is a symptom rather than the condition itself. He represents a divergence in how people read today. For some, his fiction is both all-inclusive and a brilliant exercise in language, showing us the world not as we would like it but as it is.

For others, his books are morally suspect for their weak female characters or failure to make clear a moral position when characters misbehave. Franzen might consider that to be "overt didacticism" or "moral simplicity", two of the qualities he considers his work to be "an active campaign against," as he put it in his essay On Autobiographical Fiction from Farther Away.

Still others may fall between the positions, reading him as a sort of literary guilty pleasure. But often the criticisms levelled against Franzen are overreach — in the final paragraph of her Vanity Fair piece, Gould acknowledges that Franzen's fiction is "really great" — or just a misunderstanding of the humour of a writer who doesn't use emojis or exclamation marks.

The Key to All Mythologies, for example, is a reference to the unfinished book of the same name by the pompous scholar Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch: it is not an example of literary hubris and self-delusion, but a commentary on it.

It's a joke! And the problem is that the further we get from the books, the more irrelevant our complaints become. What will remain of a writer, when all else is gone, is the work, as Franzen knows, just as he knows how fallible he is.

That is why, he notes in Why Bother? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around? It's hard to make the charges against Franzen stick when he acknowledges his fallibility. He sort-of apologised for rejecting Oprah's book club invitation, and she invited him back for Freedom this time he accepted.

As for Sittenfeld's objection to the treatment of women in his books, he acknowledged the same issue himself in On Autobiographical Fiction, when he noted how his wife "asked me, fairly enough, why my main female characters kept getting killed or severely wounded by gunfire".

How his latest reinforces his reputation And remembering the distinction between the books and the man brings us back to why we're talking about Franzen in the first place: his new novel Crossroads. Is it "really great"? The answer is: pretty much. Like The Corrections, Crossroads is a full-blown family story, this time set around five members of the Hildebrandt family in the early s and the Chicago church of which father Russ is a pastor.

Franzen cycles, with typical panache and aplomb, between the minds of Russ, his wife Marion, and their three eldest children Perry, Becky and Clem.