I look forward greatly to reading Jonathan Franzen's new huge novel, "Freedom," his work of the last 9 years, just out this month.  But until that time, here's something about freedom that I love, from David Foster Wallace's own magnum opus, "Infinite Jest", which I'm nearing the end of (well, I still have about 200 pages to go, but on a 1000-page book that's something!). Here, a Quebecois separatist double-agent is speaking to an intelligence agent from the U.S.:

Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout 'Freedom! Freedom!' as if it were obvious what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom from: no one tells your precious individual USA selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress... But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from? Not all compulsion comes from without." (p.320)