Everybody loves freedom. Everybody also loves “Freedom,” the novel by Jonathan Franzen that did to the literary world this year what Angelina Jolie or George Clooney must do to a party: make you forget that anybody else is even in the room.
Seldom has a novel been so instantly and extravagantly praised in so many quarters, and so swiftly declared a masterpiece.
I am that rare creature: neither a “Freedom” fanatic nor a “Freedom” basher. I’m neither nuts about the novel nor ready to declare it a superficial, overrated fraud.
I enjoyed Franzen’s perceptive tale of the Berglunds, a well-meaning but divinely discontented Midwestern family, yet I found myself wishing that the author had run low on paper during the composition process, forcing him to excise great hunks of prose.
Long, sarcastic riffs by the narrator are no substitute for genuine character development. And a little bit of most of these characters — especially the Berglunds’ son — goes a long, long way.
Franken is often compared to Charles Dickens, but a better comparison is to William Makepeace Thackeray. “Freedom” often reminded me of “Vanity Fair” (1848), Thackeray’s sly wink of a novel about a hotbed of hypocrites acutely conscious of economic class and social expectation.
Dickens’ sense of humor is broad and sweet; Franzen’s, like Thackeray’s, is ironic. And ornery.
“Freedom” was not the best book of 2010 — but then again, the competition was especially keen, because this was a remarkable year for fiction. Fiction, in fact, left nonfiction in the dust; of the 10 best books published this year, only two were nonfiction. Here, in order of my preference, is the cream of the 2010 crop:
1. “How to Read the Air” (Riverhead) by Dinaw Mengestu.
The writer, born in Ethiopia and educated in the United States, wrote the best novel of 2010. This is a lyrical, harrowing story of a young man who, in the wake of his disintegrating marriage, recalls the journeys of his immigrant parents. Mengestu manages to make a familiar story shatteringly new. His sentences are both poetic and tough: “He had learned early in his life that before any violent gesture there is a moment when the act is born, not as something that can be seen or felt, but by the change it precipitates in the air.”
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2. “William Trevor: Selected Stories” (Viking).
Each of these 48 exquisite, understated stories is the proverbial stone tossed in the pond — and the concentric rings on the surface simply never cease.
3. “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (Knopf) by Jennifer Egan.
The writer’s cool intellect and narrative inventiveness have carried her far, but in this novel about a music producer and his troubled progeny, Egan shows that she possesses a marvelous heart as well.
4. “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” (W.W. Norton) by Nicholas Carr.
An elegant and provocative plea to our technology-besotted culture to stop and contemplate just where all those wires actually might lead. “In Google’s world, which is the world we enter when we go online,” Carr writes, “there’s little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation.”
5. “I’d Know You Anywhere” (William Morrow) by Laura Lippman.
A woman is contacted by the man who kidnapped and raped her when she was 15 — a crime for which he is soon to be executed — in this enthralling thriller that also serves as a meditation on the death penalty.
6. “Freedom” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Jonathan Franzen.
7. “Agents of Treachery” (Vintage), edited by Otto Penzler.
Fourteen top-flight stories by contemporary thriller writers such as Lee Child and Charles McCarry enliven this dynamic anthology, the first of its kind.
8. “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake” (Doubleday) by Aimee Bender.
The writing is as soft as a dollop of whipped cream on a cupcake, but there’s nothing lightweight about this sadly beautiful story of family loss and heartbreak.
9. “Bury Your Dead” (St. Martin’s/Minotaur) by Louise Penny.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache retreats to Quebec City to recover from a stunning personal loss in the latest book in the acclaimed series; naturally, he finds a murder to solve in this burnished elegy disguised as a mystery.
10. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (Crown) by Rebecca Skloot.
Winner of the Tribune’s Heartland Prize for nonfiction, this is a riveting account of a writer’s search for the family of a woman whose cells — harvested without her permission — were pivotal to medical research.