Freedom - By J. Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of world literature. These 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 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 uncaused pronouncements. They grow surprisingly from the themes that animate “Freedom” 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 trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a phrase
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we helplessly 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 bottomless freedom is a person also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and anger 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 have to authorize it.
The dream-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 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 particular theme, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections impregnated in the socio-cultural atmosphere of the 90s, showed 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 Eastern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent diseases. Locked together in obligation, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forget, to explain, 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 direful. Created a week before 9/11, Franzen’s novel, set against a panorama of 90s 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 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 break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Wood objected at the time, curiously arrested documents that know a million different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the fish market in London! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Corrections” 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 added in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic 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 Gilbert Patten and Stephen King, 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 human being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.