Goddammit, I'm choosing
Freedom.
Oh, how I wish I could be talking about some other book! A book that’s weirder or fringier or cooler. A book that didn’t get on the cover of the
New York Times Book Review, or if it did get on the cover, it wasn’t also chosen by
Oprah. Maybe even, for Christ’s sake, a book that’s not by a dude.
But as much as I loved the books I read this year by
Jennifer Egan and
Belle Boggs and
Tim Hensley and
David Mitchell and
Vanessa Davis and
Ian Frazier and
Paul Murray and
John Waters and
Daniel Clowes and
Natasha Vargas-Cooper and
Moto Hagio and
Matthew Gallaway and
Dyna Moe, I loved
Freedom more. Believe me: I’m not proud of myself. I feel like a real douche.
But I loved
Freedom in May, when I was so wrapped up in the novel on a family trip to Carolina Beach that I shamefully abandoned my family to hide in a locked bedroom and read it in half-hour chunks, only emerging when the screams of my bored children made it impossible to continue. I loved it when I finished it and didn’t know anyone else who had read it and I wanted to talk about it so much. I loved it when I sent it to a friend in film who really wanted the summer’s status galley. I loved it when I got a first unexpected glimpse of
Tanenhaus’s review. I loved it when debate broke out about whether it was worth all the attention paid to it, and I loved when wealthy female pop-fiction writers
whined about the attention they didn’t get from the
Times, and I loved when
Meghan O'Rourke reminded us of the real gender gap in literary fiction. I loved defending
Freedom in comment threads from people who hadn’t read it yet. I loved it when
B.R. Myers wrote that review, and when
Garth Hallberg took the occasion
to rip B.R. Myers a new one. I loved it when friends tweeted their rage about Patty’s behavior, or their wicked delight with Joey’s shit-sifting, or their mockery of Jonathan Franzen’s hilarious notions of how viral videos work. I loved talking about it for most of a coffee date in which we were ostensibly supposed to be talking about business. I loved it when Oprah shouted, “FrrrrrrrrrrrEEEDooooooooommmmmmm!!!!!!!!!!!!!” And I loved it when my wife read it in September and started mysteriously disappearing into the basement for half an hour at a time.
I loved
Freedom. But I also loved that everyone else loved (or hated, or poo-poohed, or was enraged by)
Freedom. So I guess I’m glad that this overhyped, overwritten, overrated, too-popular doorstop by yet another old white guy with glasses was my favorite book of the year.
More from a Year in Reading 2010
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2009,
2008,
2007,
2006,
2005
The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews
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I suppose I could be accused of a conflict of interest, since my employer is the American publisher of Dance, but Powell's novel has been my favorite book since long before I worked there, and I'm always excited to see it finding new readers.
Unforgettable characters, real insight into people, and humor manages to be both subtle and laugh-out-loud hilarious. What more can a reader ask for? I have to actively prevent myself from rereading it every winter.
I'm not familiar with Powell, but I disagree that Proust is not funny. There is real mordant wit in the way he captures – and skewers – many of his characters.
I agree with Lee. I haven't read Powell (though you've certainly made me want to), but Proust can be laugh-out-loud funny — I've been reading him to my wife in the evenings, and that was one of our big surprises. We expected psychological insight, but not yuks.
I have to agree with those who say Proust is funny. I recently was discussing with a friend how the scene at the end of The Guermantes Way where Swann reveals his impending death almost made me cry when I reread it recently; what's more amazing is that it also made me laugh. Now that's an achivement.
I too have always admired those Powell spines!