The Return of the Chain Reader?

There is a reason this is called the Chain Reader not the Chain Blogger. I have still been reading  nothing of any merit that requires any mention. I read mostly genre fiction I think and, of that, mostly cozy mysteries. I read Hazel Holt who writes mysteries but also is the biographer of Barbara Pym. I vaguely remember reading some Patricia Moyes, some 40's women authors like Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one!). I read Emma Donoghue's Room which despite it's grim premise I quite enjoyed. And I read Freedom.

Yes he can write. And yes, it was very juicy and engrossing. But it didn't change my life. It reminded me a lot of that Joseph Heller book Something Happened that I read way back in high school. That awkward sense of TMI (Too Much Information!) prevailed.

As a statement of our times I much prefer the slimmer Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan. Freedom had every possible theme crammed into it: Title Nine, violence against woman, politics, the environment, 9/11. If you mention 9/11 in a book does that make it about 9/11? If one of the characters works in a coal company does that make it about the environment? Does all this introduction of weighty themes make the story more than just a book about some interesting characters? In the end maybe I am reacting to the reviews of the book as being about all these big themes and maybe Franzen's pretensions were smaller? I don't know at this point.

All I know is I prefer O'Nan's approach which was simpler--tell the small story about a sad cast of characters in a closing down Red Lobster in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere and it becomes universal. Freedom had so much weighing it down that it never went beyond what it was to me. A big heavy book. But maybe that's all he meant it to be.