An Excerpt of 'Freedom' Read by the Author

 
Jonathan Franzen, reading from his new novel, "Freedom".
Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129747555

Walter and Patty Berglund were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill, the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier.

They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for 10 years renovating it. Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt.

Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweat clothes and said: Hey, you guys, you know what?

Patty frightened nobody, but she'd been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller.

Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands. Ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint. And then "Goodnight Moon," then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.

In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture and how to encourage feral cats to defecate in somebody else's children's sandbox and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.

There were also more contemporary questions like, what about those cloth diapers - worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts okay politically? Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries? How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood? Was it true that the glaze of old Fiestaware contained dangerous amounts of lead? How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be? Did your 240 sometimes not go into overdrive when you pushed the overdrive button?

Was it better to offer panhandlers food or nothing? Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy, brilliant kids while working full-time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning?

Had anybody in the history of St. Paul ever had a positive experience with a roofer? What about a good Volvo mechanic? Did your 240 have that problem with the sticky parking-brake cable? And that enigmatically labeled dashboard switch that made such a satisfying Swedish click but seemed not to be connected to anything: what was that?