Not too many years ago, Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of Ramsey Hill the gentrifiers, the young parents, the avant-garde. Life in her elite, Democratic Westchester hometown had never made much sense to Patty. But she found much to admire at the University of Minnesota, not the least of which was Walter a stable, serious, politically conscious law student from a troubled family. They got married three weeks after her college graduation; their children, Jessica and Joey, followed soon after. Two decades later, we must ask: what happened to the Berglunds? Why has Joey so ruthlessly abandoned his family? Why has Walter taken a job that finds him rationalizing the kind of unethical behavior that the younger Walter would have condemned? And, most of all, what has befallen poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become a very different kind of neighbor? Nearly a decade after The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen returns to fiction with a triumphant, deeply felt new novel. Freedom is Franzen's most accessible and insightful book to date a tragic and hilarious story that captures the rise and fall of a single family and, perhaps, that of an entire generation.