Freedomland (1998) by Richard Price

Freedomland (1998) by Richard Price: A critical and commercial hit in 1998, Freedomland has lost none of its sting in the intervening decades. 

Maybe it's more relevant now in The Age of Trump than ever, dealing as it does with America's deep-seated racial divisions and unequal treatment at the hands of the law, media simplification of tragic events, knee-jerk bigotry, the politics of policing, and so many other 'Hot-button' topics.

A white woman stumbles into a hospital in New Jersey claiming to have been carjacked by an African-American man at the very border between the 'white' and 'black' sections of the New Jersey city. And her 4-year-old son was in the car.

What follows is more than 700 pages of tense, mournful, and sardonic prose. It's a thriller that takes its time drawing its characters and situations, its places and racial strife. That 700 pages covers just about 4 days of events.

It's all rendered in third-person narration that alternates its focus between Housing Project police officer Lorenzo Council and ambitious reporter Jesse Haus. The mother, Brenda Martin, is a major character as well -- really THE major character -- but she's observed entirely from without by Council and Haus.

This is the sort of big, ambitious, intimately epic popular novel that often out-survives and out-performs far more self-consciously 'literary' works. It's heart-rending though sometimes hopeful. Price, a screenwriter as well as a novelist, is a great writer of dialogue and of pungent, slyly metaphorical description. 

Freedomland is, quite simply, a Great American Novel, one that entertains and instructs in the way only the best Art does. Highly recommended.