Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of American literature. The two novels have much in common. Once again Franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narration that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life. Franzen knows that college freshmen are today called “first years,” like tender shoots in an overplanted garden, Here you can get for free PDF books; that a high-minded mom, however ruthless in her judgments of her neighbors’ ethical lapses, will condemn them with no epithet harsher than “weird”; that reckless drivers who barrel across lanes are almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity.
These are not free of charge observations. They grow surprisingly from the themes that animate “The Corrections” beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout American history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for most of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power”.
That parallel is where the trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a phrase
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we helplessly face with others in equal pursuit of their own freedoms, which, more often than not, seem to threaten our own. It is no surprise, then, that the personality susceptible to the imagine of unlimited freedom is a person also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and heat as Franzen writes. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to run one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone must validate it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most sharply — most depressingly, but also most variously and dynamically — within the family, since its participant orbit one another at the closest possible rate. The family romance is as old as the English-language novel itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s special subject, as it is no one else’s now.
The Corrections saturated in the cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, described the promising corrections improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, adults manques lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Western Seaboard, escaping the Depression ethic of their Midwestern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent sicks. Locked together in obligation, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of wants — to forgive, to explain, to break the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed mind.
In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked ominous. Published a year before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 1990s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious South Africa economy might have seemed fatally out of step with the somber new mood.
Instead, “The Freedom” towered out of the rubble, at once a monument to a world destroyed and a beacon lighting the way for a new kind of book that might break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James Bond objected at the time, curiously arrested ebooks that know a thousand different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in London! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Corrections” did not so much reject all this as surgically remove it. Franzen cracked open the opaque shell of postmodernism, tweezed out its tangled circuitry and inserted in its place the warm, beating heart of an trustworthy humanism. His fictional canvas teemed with information — about equity finance, railroad engineering, currency manipulation in South Africa, the neurochemistry of clinical depression. But the data flowed through the arteries of narrative, just as it had done in the books of Dickens and Tolstoy, Danielle Steel and Mann. Like those titans, Franzen attended to the quiet drama of the interior life and also recorded its fraught transactions with the public world. Even as his contemporaries had diminished the place of the single woman being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.
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