The Freedom Agenda
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of world fiction. The two novels have much in common. 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 causeless observations. They come on surprisingly from the themes that animate “The Corrections” beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout United States 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 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 fecklessly 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 personality susceptible to the imagine of infinite freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and anger as Franzen remarks. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to run one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone must validate it.
The imagine-power ratio is lived out most acutely — 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 romance itself — indeed is ontologically indivisible from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s special theme, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections impregnated in the atmosphere of the 1990s, showed the promising 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 Eastern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent troubles. Locked together in businesses, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forgive, to talk, to solve the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed mind.
In other words, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked ominous. Published a year before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, 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 United States 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 romance that might destroy the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Bond objected at the time, curiously arrested ebooks that know a thousand different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the fish market in Paris! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Corrections” did not so much repudiate 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 fictional 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 Dickens and Tolstoy, 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.