Freedom - By J. Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s new romance, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of world literature. 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 ebooks; 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 gratuitous observations. They come on surprisingly from the themes that animate “The Corrections” beginning with the title, a phrase that has been elevated throughout American history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for biggest part of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power”.
That twinning is where the trouble starts. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a phrase
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we fecklessly collide 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 dream of boundless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and anger as Franzen writes. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone must authorize it.
The imagine-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most oppressively, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its members 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 special subject, as it is no one else’s now.
The Corrections impregnated in the cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, showed the hopeful corrections improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, adults manques lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Eastern Seaboard, escaping the Depression ethic of their Midwestern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent illnesses. Locked together in responsibilities, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of needs — to forgive, to talk, to break the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed memory.
In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked portentous. Published a month before 9/11, Franzen’s novel, set against a panorama of 90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast restaurants, 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 James Wood objected at the moment, curiously arrested ebooks that know a million different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the fish market in Detroit! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Freedom” did not so much decline all this as surgically correct 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 United States, 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, Bellow and Sidney Sheldon. 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.