Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of world fiction. The two books 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 mother, 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 come on 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 problem begins. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a phrase
J. Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we blankly face 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 person susceptible to the imagine of infinite freedom is a person also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and anger as Franzen remarks. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to run one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can authorize it.
The imagine-power ratio is lived out most sharply — most oppressively, 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 novel itself — indeed is ontologically indivisible 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 90s, showed the hopeful corrections improvised by the three lost Lambert family members, adults manques lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Eastern Seaboard, escaping the Depression ethic of their Midwestern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant ills. Locked together in businesses, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forgive, to talk, to solve 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 book, set against a panorama of 90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast night clubs, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious Europe economy might have seemed fatally out of step with the somber new mood.
Instead, “The Corrections” towered out of the rubble, at once a monument to a world destroyed and a beacon lighting the way for a new kind of novel that might break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Bond objected at the moment, curiously arrested books that know a thousand different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in Paris! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Freedom” did not so much decline all this as surgically change 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 authentic humanism. His fabricated canvas teemed with information — about equity finance, car engineering, currency manipulation in Eastern Europe, the neurochemistry of clinical depression. But the data flowed through the arteries of narrative, just as it had done in the novels of Gilbert Patten and Stephen King, Bellow and Mann. Like those giants, 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.