J. Franzen’s “Freedom” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork 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 download 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 surprisingly from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a phrase 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 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 collide 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 personality susceptible to the dream of unbounded freedom is a personality also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and passion as Franzen remarks. 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 validate it.
The imagine-power ratio is lived out most sharply — most depressingly, but also most diversely 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-language novel itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s special subject, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections impregnated in the atmosphere of the 20th century, showed the promising corrections improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, adults manques lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Western 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 attendant sicks. Locked together in obligation, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of wants — 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 sinistrous. Published a year before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 1990s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious Japan economy might have seemed fatally out of step with the somber new mood.
Instead, “The Freedom” 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 John Bond objected at the time, curiously arrested books that know a thousand different things — the formula 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 Freedom” did not so much decline all this as surgically remove 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 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 books of Jackie Collins and Tolstoy, Bellow 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 human being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.