Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” finally goes on sale today.

And if you had any personal hopes of finishing it before hearing him speak this coming Friday night at the Decatur Book Festival, you’d better get to a local bookstore today and then take the rest of the week off to read it, because like The Corrections, this is some pretty heady stuff.

How heady?  I’m so glad I asked.

How about tackling “the twinning” of the American concepts of “freedom” and the “secularization of power”?  From the New York Times’ book review…

That twinning is where the trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his “personal liberties” — a phrase Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we helplessly collide with others in equal pursuit of their sacred freedoms, which, more often than not, seem to threaten our own. It is no surprise, then, that “the personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage,” as Franzen remarks. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can validate it.

Or liberal guilt…

[The Burglunds] are “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive every­body so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.”

Or the “liberal paradox”…

…Liberals, no less than conservatives — and for that matter revolutionaries and reactionaries; in other words, all of us — believe some modes of existence are superior to others. But only the liberal, committed to a vision of harmonious communal pluralism, is unsettled by this truth.

Or sex…

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In the New York Times’ cleverly titled article, “A Novel Is All the Rage Even Before It Is Sold“, (“rage” as in both “fad or craze” and “a fit of anger”), journo Julie Bosman relays the array of buzz surrounding the pending release of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom”.

Mary Flad points out this particularly Decatur-centric paragraph…

Next Wednesday, Mr. Franzen will plunge into an 18-city tour. In St. Paul, the primary setting of the book, an event on Sept. 21 featuring Mr. Franzen at the 1,000-seat Fitzgerald Theater sold out quickly. At the Eagle Eye Book Shop in Decatur, Ga., one of the stores that distributed tickets to a Franzen speech at the coming Decatur Book Festival, tickets were snapped up in two days.

“We had people calling from South Carolina and Florida” who were willing to make a trip to see Mr. Franzen, said Bob Munson, a bookseller.

I’m sure Mr. Wang was out mighty early this morning scavenging up every last copy of the New York Times in a 5-mile vicinity.  (I know because I had to chase him off my driveway around daybreak this morning.  Man, he can really move in those red shoes.)

Prior to officially announcing Jonathan Franzen as the Decatur Book Festival’s 2010 keynote, Program Director Tom Bell read a brief excerpt from Franzen’s new novel “Freedom” at the festival’s launch event at Eddie’s Attic yesterday.