The Freedom Agenda
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of American fiction. The two books are very similar. 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 download for free PDF documents; 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 uncaused observations. They grow 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 parallel is where the problem begins. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a concept
Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we fecklessly 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 dream of unbounded freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and passion as Franzen writes. And the dream 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 members orbit one another at the closest possible range. The family novel is as old as the English-language novel itself — indeed is ontologically indivisible from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s particular theme, as it is no one else’s now.
The Corrections saturated in the cultural atmosphere of the 20th century, described the hopeful changes 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 ills. Locked together in businesses, attacked 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 mind.
In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked grim. Created a month before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 1990s problems (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 book that might break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James 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 fish market in New York! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Corrections” did not so much refuse all this as surgically change it. Franzen cracked open the opaque shell of postmodernism, tweezed out its tangled circuitry and added 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 novels of Dickens and Tolstoy, Danielle Steel and Sidney Sheldon. 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.