Freedom - By J. Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of english 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 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 causeless observations. They grow surprisingly from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a word 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 twinning is where the problem starts. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a concept
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 imagine of boundless freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and passion as Franzen remarks. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone have to validate it.
The imagine-power ratio is lived out most sharply — 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 romance itself — indeed is ontologically indivisible from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s exceptional subject, as it is no one else’s now.
The Corrections saturated in the socio-cultural atmosphere of the 90s, described the hopeful corrections improvised by the three lost Lambert family members, 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 idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent diseases. Locked together in obligation, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of wants — to forget, to talk, 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. Published a month before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 90s problems (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West 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 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 London! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Freedom” did not so much reject all this as surgically correct 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, railroad 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 novels of Gilbert Patten and Tolstoy, Bellow 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.