Two Great Fiction Choices

Recently I read two great novels, The Confession by John Grisham and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I highly recommend The Confession for anyone looking for a consummate John Grisham story about justice, the legal system and government corruption. The story involves the death penalty and is quite different from The Chamber. With The Confession, Grisham shows in part how the world works.

Freedom is a more ambitious work where the narrative is sprawling and not so action driven. Characters have identities that go beyond what they do for a living because Franzen's emphasis is on them, their lives and inner thoughts rather than their role in an overall plot. They aren't used to move the story along. They are the story.

On reading Franzen, one can tell he likes to experiment with words. He prefers obscure terms I never knew were in the English language. I didn't look most of them up because that would amount to work, but I did write them down to revisit later. It seems to me that some of the words Franzen uses are best applied in literary works like Freedom, because such words have little practical value beyond that. I don't think I could remember all of those words, even after having looked up a few in a dictionary.