J. Franzen’s “Freedom” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of english fiction. The two novels are very similar. Once again Franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative 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 gratuitous observations. They grow organically from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout United States history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for most of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power”.
That twinning is where the problem begins. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a phrase
Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we blankly 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 person susceptible to the dream of unbounded freedom is a personality also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and fury as Franzen remarks. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to follow one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone have to authorize it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most sharply — most oppressively, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its participant orbit one another at the closest possible rate. The family novel 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 particular subject, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections saturated in the cultural atmosphere of the 20th century, described the promising corrections improvised by the three lost Lambert family members, adults manques lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Western Seaboard, escaping the Depression ethic of their Eastern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant troubles. Locked together in businesses, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forget, to talk, to break the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed memory.
In other words, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked sinistrous. Created a month before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 90s problems (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 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 romance that might destroy 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 million different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the fish market in New York! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Corrections” did not so much repudiate 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, car 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 romances of Dickens and Stephen King, Danielle Steel 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 human being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.
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