There's the half-read book that lies on the bedside table and there's the unfinished book review on Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.
For the unfinished book you have to return to locate and name the characters, visualize them in the narrative flow. You go back a page or two, reread and retread the text to get back into the author's spirit and cadence. For the unfinished book review you check your memory of the book, the sharpness of images retained and the vividness of emotional imprint.
What's coming back to me (and I've had other books in my life since this one) is the spidery architecture of the story--a construct with delineated characters: not wholly convincing in their thoughts, actions and motives. Not faithful to their own story.
This is in fact a spidery review because I don't have the book with me and if I did, I wouldn't delve back in to analyze. I love The Corrections with its flesh-and-blood people and I plead with Franzen to write a another book that's truly impassioned and yes, free! Filled with the birds he loves and original characters who are real because he knows them, believes in them to the end.
People and birds who fly.
