Patty Berglund and her husband Walter live in a renovated mansion at Ramsey Hill neighbourhood in St Paul, Minnesota. But they are depressed, and ridiculous, at times. Their daughter is not affected by it; but their son Joey, a budding entrepreneur, reacts: he moves in with a trashy neighbour next door. These then are the main players in Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom. The Berglunds are rich. To their neighbours, however, the Berglunds are “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive every­body so their own good fortune could be forgiven”.

There is also a story of triangular love as Walter’s college room mate Richard Katz, a rocker, drifts in the novel time and again. Besides, there are references to the events during the Bush presidency: Iraq War and the the greed for money. It is through all of them that Franzen has narrated a social history of modern America where freedom and liberalism are considered superior modes of existence. But it’s also where lots of couple lead messed-up lives. On the whole, Freedom is a readable tragicomedy.

Freedom

By: Jonathan Franzen

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pages: 562

Right about wrong?

We all make mistakes. But do we readily go through the shame in public? Journalist Kathryn Schulz dwells on this in the book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. As a subject it is interesting, more so when the author deals with many instances of well-known wrongs like former president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki’s denial that Aids is caused by HIV and can be controlled by the anti-retrovirals.

For Schulz, wrongs in our lives are helpful in a way: they make us better human beings. That’s a valid point. But what is someone knows he’s wrong and purposefully denies that? That’s wicked, if we may refer to what Aristotle wrote in the Ethics.  Schulz, however, looks at the wrongs as adventures. She’s not asking us to commit errors. Instead, she is saying that in our wrongs we should be optimistic. “Countless studies have shown that people who suffer from depression have more accurate world views than non-depressed people...” she writes.  To what extent Schulz’s bright view of wrongs is right, is debatable. But that we all commit wrongs is what makes us human.

Being Wrong

By: Kathryn Schulz

Publisher: Simon & SchusterPages: 320