Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

"So rich and so evocative and so authentic." —Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation "John Crowley is a virtuoso of metaphor, a peerless recreator of living moments, of small daily sublimities.” — New York Times Book Review  From the critically acclaimed author of Lord Byron’s Novel and The Translator comes a novel set in World War II America that follows the stories of a group of aircraft factory workers—in particular, the enigmatic figure of draftsman Prosper Olander. Named one of the Best Books of 2009 by the Washington Post, Four Freedoms is a beautifully crafted story of liberation and redemption from an author who has been compared to Robertson Davies, Thomas Mann, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II, American, Literary Fiction, 21st Century, Book Club

400 pages, Hardcover

First published May 26, 2009

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.
In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”
In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation.

Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)

Reviews

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 3 out of 5]

You know that thing bookworms do, where they harass their loved ones to read their favorite books until they just do it to shut them up? So I am definitely guilty of having done that to my husband, and I feel occasionally obliged to return the favor, even if we have very different taste in books. He absolutely loves John Crowley, and my experience reading Crowley is extremely uneven, but what the Hell, I’m always happy to give it a shot. Jason recently finished “Four Freedoms”; I got interested in this one because I don’t often find books about the home front, and I am always curious about the more intimate and domestic WWII stories, so I slipped it in my bag before heading out to the office.

My experience of this one was more or less what I have come to expect from John Crowley: I liked it. The prose is beautiful, the characters interesting and quite unique. But nothing much really happens, and while I kept reading it at a good pace, I was never excited to pick it up.

“Four Freedoms” is about a young man named Prosper Olander, how he lives with his disability and how it leads to him working in a large aircraft factory during WWII. His story connects with those of fellow plant workers, and Crowley spends time exploring how people got to be involved in this kind of work – which paints a fascinating an unusual portrait of America during the War.

A lot of work clearly went into describing and capturing the essence of war work on the home front, something I knew very little about. The bureaucracy, the black market, the rationing… I feel like most books about that era have a strong focus on battles and spies, and it was strangely refreshing to see the mundane and domestic aspect of life during those strange and difficult years. While the title refers to Roosevelt’s speech about human freedom, the story explores that concept in subtle and unexpected ways. We often think of this word in a sentence that sounds like “the freedom to”, but in this book, the characters often really strive for “the freedom from”. Freedom from want and from fear, certainly, but also the freedom from judgment, the freedom from limitations (that may or may not be arbitrary). War work gave opportunities to people who had never had them before, and Prosper and those he becomes close to would have had very different lives in other circumstances. I was especially invested in Connie’s storyline: I had both very high hopes for her, and a great anger at the circumstances that poor woman had to deal with. It frustrates me to know end knowing that women like Connie, Vi and Diane suddenly had access to the opportunities they did because of the war, and that this is how drastic the paradigm shift must have been for women to be find those new doors open for them.

If you are new to Crowley’s work, this is a good place to start, as the subject matter is somewhat familiar and nowhere near as esoteric and convoluted as some of his more famous work. I still prefer “The Translator” and “Little, Big”, but I am still curious to read his early sci-fi work.

[Marta Mellinger]

This is a photograph of my DAD on the cover...he found this novel in the Newton Public Library and was astonished to see himself on the cover....a photo taken of him when he was just 16 - he built the airplane he's holding and was launching it at a Wichita, Kansas model airplane competition that he and his friend drove down to compete in....

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just for the record, I like sex. I think it's a valuable, essential part of human existence. I even like reading about it. But for me to enjoy reading a sex scene, there has to be some emotional content: some tenderness, some awkwardness, some love or hate or other passion. And, except for a few rare flashes, that's absent here. Instead, there's indifference, idle curiosity, and an almost clinical focus on the mechanics.

The result is tedious. And sex can be many things, but it should never, ever be tedious.

The tedium carries over onto other aspects of the book as well. It's chock full of details on 1940s life, but they never quite coalesce into a living, breathing milieu. The book skips from character to character--different classes, different races, different parts of the country--but it comes across more as vacation slideshow than film; there's no sense of how those different lives connect, of the ties that bind them into a nation.

Instead, Four Freedoms relies on Prosper as the single connecting thread: what brings these women together is not in the end the war, but simply the fact that they all slept with the same man. And here I think I might have enjoyed the book more if I hadn't felt so mislead by its marketing:

Laborers—some men, but mostly women, many of whom have never operated a rivet gun or held a screwdriver—flock to [the Van Damme airplane factory], eager to earn, to grow, to do their part. Many are away from home for the very first time, enticed by the opportunity to be something more than wife and homemaker. In the middle of nowhere they will live, work, and earn their own money, fearing for the safety of their absent fighting men as the world around them changes forever.

From that jacket copy, I was expecting a book about women, a book centered on them. But instead, the book centers on Prosper in a way that seems unfair to both him (stuck in the role of Inspirational Cripple to the women swirling through his life) and them. If I'd understood that going in, I might have been resigned to it. As it was, I felt bitter irritation every time Yet Another Woman learned that Disabled People Like Sex Too--because those were pages, valuable pages, that could have been spent on almost anything else except more tedious sex scenes.

Like, for example, airplanes, a putative focus of the book that gets far too few pages. If you replaced every sex scene in this book with another scene discussing aeronautical design, I'm pretty sure I'd give it an extra star. Maybe even two.

(Read because I'd heard good things about Little, Big and because I really like airplanes. Boy was I disappointed.)

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Crowley’s Four Freedom’s takes its title from FDR’s speech to Congress in January 1941 in which he says, “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms:
• “The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
• “The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way....
• “The third is freedom from want....
• “The fourth is freedom from fear….”
Crowley’s use of the term, however, doesn’t focus on a world made secure after winning the world war, but on specific segments of the US population for whom the war—and specifically the need to mobilize all available workers—brought access to freedoms they’d never known before: to women, to the handicapped, to minorities and to other marginalized citizens.

The nameless narrator begins the story with his childhood memory of playing in a derelict airplane near the Ponca City, Oklahoma, airport. (That got my attention because I played in a deteriorating WWII plane while my father was taking his flying lessons. It was parked at our small town airport, and the instructor’s son, who had made it his playhouse, wasn’t above inviting a girl to join in.) The narrator, who never really intrudes into the story, seems to be a Ponca City native “documenting” his city’s role in the war effort. He infuses the story with a certain enthusiasm and love of place that’s attractive.

Crowley creates a fictional aircraft plant—Van Damme Aero—building a fictional plane—the B30 Pax—outside Ponca City. The Van Damme brothers were early flying enthusiasts and Henry in particular had visions of building a “city of the hill” out of his factory, a self-sufficient town which came to be called Henryville where the workers who flocked to Ponca City for “war work” could live and work and be entertained. Everything was organized and ritualized, but Henry was no “big brother”, no profiteer bent on profiting from the government’s needs, but rather an aircraft enthusiast, interested in involving his employees in the great task entrusted to them.

Crowley obviously researched the WWII homefront—particularly “war work”—in great detail, and yet the novel doesn’t read like an historical novel pieced together out of tidbits of history. That’s largely because of the compelling characters who march through the novel, with the focus falling on several characters in different situations, rather than focusing exclusively on one set of characters. It starts out with the Van Dammes but the bulk of the novel focuses on Al and Sal Maas who are midgets, on Vi Harbison, who left a deteriorating ranch and had her moment of fame at Van Damme Aero using her softball skills, on Pancho Notzring, an idealist always planning the perfection of human society, on Bunce, who left his wife up North to get “war work” that would keep him out of the war but then found another woman to keep him company in Henryville, and on Connie his wife, who felt her way to independence and competence—first getting a job in a plant at home and then when that firm folded, following Bunce to Ponca City where she finds her way on her own skills.

If there is a “main character”, it’s Prosper Olander, whose spinal fusion operation as a kid left him completely unable to walk without braces and crutches. (The similarity of his disability—though not caused by polio—was extraordinarily like the President’s, though Crowley, rightly so, doesn’t push that.) Prosper’s father left when he was a child, partly because he couldn’t cope with a handicapped child, and his mother died while he was in the hospital. He’d been living a very restricted life with two aunts when the war brought possibilities for self sufficiency he’d never dreamed of. And possibilities for love (and sex) most people assumed he was incapable of. Damaged himself, he’s a healer for others, never sentimentalized though.

Speaking of which, the real danger of a novel like this would be falling into sentimentality, but it never does. Crowley’s characters have individuality and dignity where a less skillful writer might have created “typical examples” out of tidbits of history. In the end they’re all out of jobs, but not out of life or love or loyalty.

Finally, Crowley is an enormously talented writer, whose prose is dense and evocative with concrete details as well as ideas and concepts that widen the focus of even minor incidents and characters. Here’s one example that takes the reader right into the room with the big band:

That amazing rolling thunder a big band could make when it started a song with the thudding of the bass drum all alone, like a fast train suddenly coming around a bend and into your ear: a kind of awed moan would take over the crowd when they did that, and then all the growling brass would stand and come in, like the same train picking up speed and rushing closer, and the couples would pour onto the floor, the drumming of their feet audible in the more bon ton nightclub downstairs, where the crooner raised his eyes to the trembling chandelier in delight or dismay.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preface:
A few years ago I introduced Crowley's work to my father, by way of Little, Big, which has since become his favorite book... it's likely mine as well. Since my dad still lives in Northampton, MA and I'm quite a few leagues west, when Mr. Crowley announced he'd be doing a reading from his "new novel" at a bookstore in Amherst last week, my dad, great dad that he is, made sure to attend on behalf of both of us. Yesterday I received a mystery box from the good ol' brown truck... inside, a copy of Four Freedoms, signed by John Crowley with the dedication: "For Aaron, From Dad -- And the Author..." This being the first gift of its kind ever to fall into my hands, you'll have to forgive me if the forthcoming review is just a hair biased.

Review:
Easily Crowley's most accessible book, without question. This time around the 'magic', which is usually one of the most recognizable qualities in Crowley's writing, isn't literal... it's the sense of discovering a fully realized world that seems at once familiar, but wholly new. He taps into a particular nostalgia we can all relate to from watching movies from the time period, and from the photographs, mementos, stories, and lives of our grandparents (or parents, i suppose, if you're older than me). Whatever it is -- and it is clearly a fiction in Crowley's hands -- it rings true. Beyond even the feat of nailing a forgotten time period, the characters are the true heart of the story. They resonate, possessing a life outside the page, tickling the inside of your head with indescribable subtleties... It's a little hard to explain. The story itself isn't so much a progression from point A to Act II to climax and beyond; it's more of an organic composition. The linearity of time isn't necessary, as we shift forwards and back, fleshing out histories, or quickly illuminating how a peripheral character might die decades later. Its a technique Crowley used quite often in the Aegypt sequence, though it appears in much more refined form here (rarely clunky, never frustrating as the John Dee / Giordano Bruno chapters were at times). The structure does throw our well-trained sensibilities for a loop at times, particularly with the way we constantly seem to be introduced to new characters and histories, rather than elaborating on these characters' forward progress, but simply shedding some of our baggage of preconceived notions goes a long way toward enjoyment. Lose yourself in the language, the emotion, and the forgotten time, and you may not want to find your way back.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting, but not captivating, read about a wartime factory during the 40s which is "manned" mostly by women. Strangely, the plot revolves around a disabled fellow, following his life from childhood up until the factory closes post V-E Day. Why he was central is a mystery as it seems like there was a much deeper story waiting to be fleshed out about the women making their way in a world formerly run by men while their men were at war. Our central character meets a handful of these women, allowing us to know them for a bit, but only as an aside to his story. The plot moved really slowly for about the first 100 pages, was fairly interesting for several chapters, then just faded away.

[Daniel Polansky]

I read this book.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book from the publisher. When I started it I though it was going to be about WWII and flying, which was interesting to me because I had two uncles who piloted planes during the war. As the story progressed, it became a character study of a man who worked in plants building planes, during the war. The characters were interesting, "little people" who went into the insides of the wings to finished things off, women who had never had jobs before doing all kinds of assembly, and the main character, who is a kind and caring man, but a lothario, who has sex with many of the workers. It was interesting to read about the process of producing planes for the war and was pretty well written.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that takes all of the romance out of the idea of the home front. In this novel several people meet at an airplane factory in Oklahoma. Most of the novel, though, goes back into the lives of several characters telling how they came to be at the factory, and what they were escaping from back home. The freedoms of the title are related not so much to Roosevelt's four freedoms, but to the freedom each character gains in the upheaval of war. Good characterizations, but not a book for people who like a clear resolution to their novels.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

not one thing written in all the books of philosophy or morals in the last 3000 years has made one damn bit of difference to human beings, or added one jot to human happiness. They ssy what should be, not what is. p50

Happiness means meeting the desires of a person has, not surpressing them. p9

What was important then, in that time, was not so much what you got but what you escaped. Escaping the worst...was joy. p312

An easy indicator of an authors skill is when the reader is pulled in in spite of a lack of interest in the topic. As much as I have loved Crowley's other books that I have been able to get my hands on, I was not too enthusiastic when I found out that this one revolves around the build up of American patriotism leading up to the second world war, and the war effort; much of it takes place in the huge hangers where the warplanes were assembled.

So, not your target reader me. And yet, on the way back to the library I idly started reading and quickly realized that this book was going to contain gems, and I could skip the tech and marvel at the masterful way JC weaves his points and crafts his characters.

I love it that, with a nod to the reality of management issues, the focus is on the workers, a majority of whom who are immigrants, people of colour and otherwise challenged folk who may have no experience: women and people with disabilities.

The only way you could lose was if you stopped wanting to win. p258

You're just making it up. There isn't any game at all, just rules. p111

John Crowley should be more well known and distributed.
4.5 for GR
6/7

[Kelly McCubbin · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Crowley is a national treasure and I will stamp my feet while standing on Nicholson Baker's coffee table and explain it to him while the vacuum is on!
While the oft made comparison of Crowley to Robertson Davies is apt, this book resembles, in my mind at least, something more akin to Saroyan than Davies; though to be fair there is simply no way to pigeonhole the man's work this easily. Nevertheless, this book describes a striking, funny, sort of Americana that you always knew was there, but only in the back of your mind. How astonishing it is to have it draped across your ballustrade as if it's been there since the last Fourth of July!
The story follows Prosper Olander, almost entirely crippled from the waist down, Connie Wrobleski, abused and terrified wife and mother and a Thimble Theater-full of not-soldiers who would not have ever been given the opportunity to flourish in communities, to hold down difficult, exacting, jobs, to excel at life, but World War II allows them to walk onto the playing pitch that was previously roped off to them. They move in to a pre-fabricated town and begin building bombers for the war effort. They become society.
At this exact point in time, in this exact place a miracle happens, and the miracle speaks to the oft-dismissed grandness of normal life... Well, mostly normal.

The book is a delight.

[Sammcnair · Rating 2 out of 5]

The war stuff was interesting & the treatment of people with disabilities. I didn’t care for the narrative voice, though, nor see the pertinence of the explicit sex (seemed to be a technique to sell the book).

[Jeanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

It could have been an interesting read about people working in an airplane manufacturing plant during WWII. Unfortunately there was too much blathering on about things that weren't really germane to the story. That made me lose interest in the story.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

2nd Crowley book I've read. I enjoy his wit and the way he tells a story.

[R. Ware · Rating 4 out of 5]

Historical fiction.
Takes place before and during World War II.

[Rebecca Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Different from what I usually read but I injoy it very much
Great book

[William Leight · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Crowley began as writer of highly literary fantasy and science fiction, with a pronounced tendency towards the fairytale and dreamlike, rather than the epic: "Little, Big" is likely the preeminent example of this period and may still be his best-known work, at least among SF and fantasy fans (as well as being my favorite of his books). But though these early works were undoubtedly fantasy or science fiction, magic and advanced technology played a fairly minor role in them, and so his subsequent turn away from those genres is perhaps not quite as surprising as it seems at first glance. Since 2000 he has written only one fantasy novel, the final volume of his AEgypt tetralogy. His other works since then are "Lord Byron's Novel", half an imaginary novel by Lord Byron and half an email-epistolary novel about the discoverer of it; "The Translator", a historical fiction set at an imaginary American college during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and "Four Freedoms", also a historical fiction but this time set at an imaginary aircraft plant during World War II.

"Four Freedoms" centers around Prosper Olander, whose lower legs were accidentally paralyzed during surgery to correct for childhood spinal lordosis. Not only that, Prosper's father left his family when he was 7 and his mother died when he was twelve; furthermore, his disability largely excluded him from formal schooling. Despite all this, he is unflaggingly good-natured and kind-hearted, blaming nobody for his troubles and tolerating all sorts of slights and jokes without anger or bitterness (the only thing that he really dislikes are stairs). His consolation appears to come from having sex, which he does a lot, including with the other three main characters in the book, Vi, Connie, and Diane. They, like him, are workers at the giant Van Damme Aerospace plant in Ponca City, OK (an imaginary amalgamation of a number of similar plants), pressed into service because of the shortage of (non-disabled) men. Vi is from the Plains somewhere, Connie from Chicago, and Diane from L.A.: we are given each of their backstories, which consist of a failed family farm, a cheating husband, and a rushed marriage to a pilot, respectively, but none of them are particularly interesting.

The first big problem with the book is that Prosper isn't either. He's basically a saint who doesn't believe in celibacy, which makes it hard to identify with him. Presumably Crowley's goal was to establish that disabled people aren't necessarily bitter or angry, aren't consumed their disability (with the exception, in Prosper's case, of stairs), and can have normal relationships, but he takes it too far. It's just hard to believe that someone with Prosper's background would be completely free of any sort of angst or trauma as an adult, and the steady parade of women falling into his bed is also not entirely plausible, disabled or not (though the war helps him there, I suppose). Interestingly, the book also contains a minor character, Al, who is a midget and is bitter and angry about it; Crowley doesn't investigate this contrast, though.

The novel's other problem is that it is a slice of life, rather than a story. Characters drift in and out as they come to and leave the plant: the backgrounds of all the main characters are explored, but once they leave the plant they are seen no more. Insofar as the book is anything, it's Prosper's story, but there's no real narrative arc: Prosper doesn't really grow or change, and his one outburst, near the novel's end, is isolated and mostly meaningless. Of the women, Connie is probably the most interesting: for her war work means increasing independence and the discovery of her capabilities, and although she is unable to rise above her sexist lout of a husband, Crowley solves that problem for her by having him killed in action. But even her story feels incomplete: we want to know what happens to her afterwards, how she gets on in the post-war world, but the novel doesn't go there. In fact, to a certain extent the novel reads as a setup for other, probably more interesting books: Connie's struggle to assert herself in a postwar world that wants nothing more than for her to go back to the kitchen; Vi's attempt to revive her father's farm; Diane trying to make a life with a husband she barely knows, while dealing with the guilt of having told him that the baby she pretended was his is actually Prosper's; and a satirical picaresque in which Prosper, his friend Pancho (a bestopianist, not a utopianist), the midget Sal (Al's wife, or rather widow at this point), and Larry, the former plant union representative, drift their way west, heading to the founding UN meeting so Pancho can explain how the world should be run.

Luckily, Crowley is a good writer, so the book is still fairly readable, even if the plot doesn't quite work and the characters don't always hold your attention, but this is definitely my least favorite of the books by him I've read.

[María Jesús · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esta ha sido una lectura muy entretenida y creo que una buena descripción de la vida en EEUU durante los años de la segunda guerra mundial, tan distinta a la vida en Europa en ese periodo. Sólo por eso resulta ya interesante su lectura.
Hay aspectos de esta novela que son también temas muy importantes. Así todo lo que tiene que ver con el descomunal momento de cambio de roles para la mujer cuando, con la mayor parte de los hombres jóvenes enrolados en el ejército, fueron las mujeres las que tuvieron que ocuparse de multitud de tareas de producción de las que antes estaban absolutamente excluidas. Esto está tratado de una manera interesante, pues se nos cuentan las vicisitudes de varias mujeres que, por distintos motivos y caminos, ingresan en este nuevo sector social. Podemos contemplar todas las paradojas que este cambio conlleva y la lenta evolución de la conciencia general a este respecto.

Todo lo anterior junto con la descripción del mundo y el papel de la aviación y la construcción de aviones, son los aspectos "históricos" de la trama. Sin embargo el énfasis de la novela no está aquí sino en la vida y carácter de un personaje central que es el que reúne en torno a sí al resto, Prosper Olander. Un hombre discapacitado por una lesión de espalda, al que conocemos desde la infancia y seguimos en su peripecia vital por su abandono infantil, su atroz experiencia hospitalaria, su juventud a cargo de dos bondadosas parientes y su etapa como hombre joven en una planta de construcción de aviones. La personalidad de Prosper es tan atractiva como inverosímil, su serenidad y ausencia de cualquier tipo de rencor, considerando las sucesivas "traiciones" de que es objeto, es difícil de creer. Por otra parte, también es difícil de creer el desapego (no sé si llamarlo cinismo) y la utilización que de él hacen una serie de mujeres, cuyo proceder no me parece verosímil. Involucrarse en una relación sexual con un hombre con las dificultades de Prosper, en mi opinión, no es algo que ocurra tan a la ligera.
En cuanto al final, bueno... inesperado, ocurrente, optimista pero también inopinado. En definitiva, un popurrí curioso y, sin duda, bien escrito.

[NC Weil · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Crowley explores mind, body, spirit and human society through intriguing individuals. He's unafraid of coincidence, magic, or mystery, every person enmeshed in a life that constricts in some ways but exalts in others.

His 2009 novel Four Freedoms is about World War II America.
"We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world."
--President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Message to Congress, January 6, 1941

Roosevelt's optimistic assertion is not enough to transform the status quo, but in combination with America's shift to a wartime economy and the removal of white men, drafted and sent overseas, from their accustomed dominance, it adds impetus to a sea-change. Marginalized people - cripples, minorities and women - are suddenly wanted, and paid, to step into the vacancies - and so they flower, and thrive, and find fulfillment far outside their accustomed niches.

We follow Prosper Olander, a young man with a twisted spine and useless legs, who journeys from Chicago to an airplane factory in Oklahoma. This factory, the creation of a pair of brothers long fascinated by flight, is a self-contained village: houses and streets, clinics, child care, a newspaper, cafeterias and entertainment - an ideal community dedicated to war materiel. Its round-the-clock workforce have come from all over the country to earn top wages. Most are women, many married to servicemen but others single, excelling at work they've never before been allowed to do.

Crowley's story flows from one character to another, into their lives and thoughts. We learn important moments in their histories, we see how love and loss have blunted them, and we watch as they form alliances then break them. Prosper, though crippled, attracts certain women, and proves a simpatico and able lover, a catalyst who makes them consider a more open future.

This book is primarily about women: Prosper's father left when he was small, his struggling mother fell ill, he grew up with a pair of maiden aunts. Meanwhile, the women he meets are on their own in ways unthinkable just a few years before, their resourcefulness surprising not just to them but to society at large. One is a standout softball pitcher, another a young mother who becomes a highly competent inspector in the factory.

Crowley fully evokes wartime: the way ramped-up military manufacturing ended the Depression; the rationing of food, gasoline, and other resources; the sounds, smells and habits of an era. Changing circumstances shook society into motion: new places, new roles, new confidence. The weakening of the family gave rise to individual success, and like-mindedness trumped blood ties as people sought personal freedom within relationships. By ending the story after V-E Day but before the servicemen come home, he leaves us with a hopeful vision of America's future - along with the realization that in every era greatness is squandered, and we permit or maybe even welcome the fetters of the past.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

If only we had Franklin Roosevelt with us now. This story is much different from The Translator, my first exposure to Crowley. Much is made up in the novel--a family industrial dynasty, a Utopian city on the plains where the world's biggest war plane is under construction, and wonderful characters all deeply involved in America's progress in the war and in civil society.

I had to look up Roosevelt's Four Freedoms since I pulled only two from within the narrative. They are contained in a speech of that title which he delivered to Congress January 6, 1941. The speech is brave and inspiring. You can find it at http://www.smericnrhetoric.com/speech... He even makes an eloquent case for higher taxes according to people's ability to pay. But here are the four which Roosevelt maintained are essential freedoms for the world, not just the United States:

1. Freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.
2. Freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
3. Freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants --everywhere in the world.
4. Freedom from fear......such that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.

But I'm a bit sidetracked. This is a story of how those left behind in war--women, the handicapped, the old, minorities-- all did their part for the war effort. At the same time, through their work, they prepared the ground for the great social reforms which came about in the decades after world war II.

Prosper, the main character, was crippled for life in a botched surgery that was meant to help him. He serves as the sounding board for the rest of the novel's characters and often as a sympathetic lover.

[E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I met John Crowley in June while attending the Yale Writers' Conference and enjoyed my almost daily conversations with him over breakfast.

This novel is set during the Second World War primarily in Ponca City, Oklahoma at an imagined bomber plant. I knew the novel would be authentic when on the first page John pointed out that for the local Bois D'Arc Creek is pronounced (Bodark). When I told him that he said it was one of the last details to be added to the book, because he didn't travel to Ponca City until he was almost done with the novel.

The novel is about the workers in the plant and their stories, primarily Prosper's. Prosper was crippled in childhood when a surgery was botched, but is the type of person who thrived during the war being able to find employment and socialization that didn't last once the country demobilized. Similarly women, and there are many female characters in this novel, had a new found freedom during the war, which largely ended after. Also we see some other groups who gained employment such as little people and older folks. The bomber plant and its community resonate with the socialist vision of one of the older guys.

Another theme is how the war drive is connected with the sex drive. All of these currently unattached people (some of the husbands are overseas serving of course) are thrown together during exciting and troubling times, so sex would surely be a part of it.

The book primarily focuses on two of the four freedoms--from want and from fear. In doing so, it makes us wonder why we don't talk about FDR's Four Freedoms anymore, why those don't remain articulated national goals.

And by giving a picture of the Home Front, the book reminded me what was possible for us to accomplish when we do put our minds to it. Sadly, we have not mustered the common effort to deal with the great issues of our time.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four Freedoms was one of the first books I purchased when I was given my first e-reader, erm, 2 1/2 years ago. I looked at it and contemplated reading it several times and each time found something slightly more appealing on my towering TBR.

It was only when I participated in a themed read-a-thon last month and one of the challenges was to read a book that has been on your TBR the longest, it was the perfect opportunity to read it - after all, historical fiction has long been one of my favourite genres.

Four Freedoms is the story of one man, Prosper Olander. Disabled from birth he has an easy personality and through his disability is considered more of a friend than a potential lover to the women he encounters whilst working at the Van Damme airplane factory through the course of WWII. As the story progresses, Prospers at times sad, at times uplifting childhood and adolescence is revealed and gives an insight into what made him the man he became.

The female characters are strong in their own ways, either through words or actions, and their own stories are told in a series of flashbacks to the 1920's and 1930's.

Although the start was a little slow and dry, once I was in the flow I really enjoyed this book. The writing is lyrical and descriptive without being cloying and the characters seem like real people, with strong emotions, sad stories and an entrancing dialogue.

Four Freedoms is an intriguing, character-driven book that tells a unique story from the perspective of the 'home front' in WWII.

Read more of my reviews at The Aussie Zombie

[Jim Lane · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Crowley could probably describe a garbage dump and I would enjoy reading it. He brings nuanced insights to light so gently, and illustrates his characters so subtly.

Besides the pleasure of reading his graceful prose, the most enjoyable aspect of this book was the vivid picture of life in the U.S. during the Second World War through the very real feeling lives of the characters. I enjoy musing about Crowley's suggestion of specific historical periods as being fundamentally transforming to the human universe, and he brings this out completely tacitly with almost no reference to great events; the characters just live through the time and their world and the way they perceive it is transformed.

My biggest argument is all the sex, very bluntly treated, though not crudely. That aspect was certainly part of The Solitudes characters, but a bit more subtly addressed and it was the '70s, and it seemed very relevant. I wondered if Crowley was trying communicate the idea that there was this unacknowledged degree of promiscuity then, at least at that level of society.

When I first discovered The Solitudes I was rapt, I had to get the next book, and couldn't wait for publication of the one after that. If there was a sequel to this, I would read it, but probably not with the same anticipation.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crowley's newest book is a departure from the undercurrent of gentle mystery, paranormal phenomena, myth and literary fantasy that pervade his previous novels like Little Big and the four books that make up the Aegypt Cycle. Four Freedoms is a character study set in the transitional period in America just before and during World War II. The changes that swept the nation during that time, the vast industrial sweep of the war effort across the land and its effects on the women and men working on the home-front are represented through the lives of a handful of interesting and complex characters. The central character, forced to use crutches and unwieldy braces on his lifeless legs due to an experimental childhood surgery, meets and develops relationships with a series of women as he evolves into a young man and makes his way across the country to live and work in a fledgling community in the American West, formed to house thousands of workers building bombers for the war.

If you are looking for action packed plot or mystery this isn't the book for you. But if you enjoy dropping into an evocative world from the past, populated with rich characters and compelling interaction, then Crowley is your man. I really enjoyed Four Freedoms.

[Margaret Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have long thought that John Crowley is one of the overlooked writers in our American lists and among American and other readers. I just finished Four Freedoms, which I bought a few years ago. I'm not sure why it took me time to fully dive in, but I'm glad I did, as ever when I read Crowley's writing. My timing happened to coincide with PBS's Ken Burns (+) special on The Roosevelts, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Listening to the speech in which Roosevelt pronounced "the four freedoms" gave me another associated spark with Crowley's book. Four Freedoms paints a portrait of war-time which is like, in the best ways, a "paint-by-number" portrait of masses, yet masterfully crafted in its minutiae so that the characters slowly and fully come to life, just as the full war-time environment, atmosphere and all of particularly American life comes alive as a whole - male, female, family, factory, town, city, country; workers of all makes and sizes with all manner of needs and wants. I highly recommend Four Freedoms.

[Vincent DiGirolamo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A superb exploration of the American home front from the perspective of a disabled youth during World War II. It's plotted like an Altman movie in that it follows the intersecting lives of a large cast of flawed, uprooted characters who are thrown together in an airplane factory in an overnight boom city in Oklahoma. The novel captures the great geographic mobility of the period and the exciting sense of possibility for women and other ordinary folk trying to find or reinvent themselves. Many poignant, astutely observed scenes conveying life's many cruelties (including stairs to a man on crutches) and kindnesses (especially lovemaking). There's no great "will he or won't he?" drama pulling one toward the conclusion. The story ends with the war's end and the city's return to prairie, but for a time it all came alive -- the work, the carousing, the engineering, the secrets kept and shared, and the freedoms gained.

[Catherine Siemann · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems like all my favorite genre writers are turning to literary fiction this spring; at least, China Mieville's The City and the City is set in our world, sort of (though I'd term it Kafkaesque/Bruno Schulzian magic realism). John Crowley's The Four Freedoms is his most straightforwardly realistic novel yet (even The Translator, which seems to be realism throughout has a sudden, transcendant twist at the end). While the story of people working in an aircraft factory during World War II wouldn't necessarily strike me as the most engaging subject, Crowley's beautiful writing made it just that. The story of Prosper Olander, a disabled man attempting to navigate an unaccomodating world, and four women whose lives he touches, as well as the makeshift community that grows up around an Oklahoma factory, Four Freedoms is a rewarding read.

[The Library Lady · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I bought a paperback copy of Crowley's Little, Big back in college and have read it many, many times since. It's that beautiful and compelling to me.

I have not been a fan of his "Aegypt" series or most of what he has written since. And while this one held me, kept me reading, it did not move me. It seems disjointed and a lot of it seems gratuitous--I didn't find Prosper or most of the other characters as interesting as the Van Damme brothers who begin this book.

I wish he had made them the center of his story. That would have been something I'd have really enjoyed reading.

[Brent · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book examines the WWII practice of using women, minorities, and the disabled to provide manual labor during the war effort. While this concept is integral to Crowley's novel, it functions more as a frame narrative for a series of deep character studies told through extensive flashbacks. Well written and populated with interesting characters, Four Freedoms nevertheless struggled to hold my attention. I think this is because the book never quite matched my expectations and only intermittently touched on the aspects that initially hooked me.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful story of men and women working at an airplane factory during WWII, and the tales of how they got there. I'm entranced by the ending, which by an invocation of some typical movie endings of the era (the car driving away) put me in mind of a more modern ending, where we could imagine a wide shot of a factory town fading into the fields that remain where it once stood. Crowley does not drill deeply into his characters' inner lives, but he deftly and surely provides glimpses that reassure us that the depth and breadth are present