Freedom - By J. Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of American fiction. These books 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 documents; 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 free of charge observations. They grow surprisingly from the themes that animate “The Corrections” beginning with the title, a phrase 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 trouble starts. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a phrase
Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we helplessly 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 dream of bottomless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage as Franzen writes. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone can validate it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most depressingly, 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 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 cultural atmosphere of the 90s, described 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 keep to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent illnesses. Locked together in duties, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of needs — to forget, 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 grim. Published a day before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 1990s problems (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast night clubs, 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 novel that might destroy the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Bond objected at the moment, curiously arrested documents that know a thousand different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in London! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Freedom” did not so much refuse all this as surgically remove 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 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 romances of Jackie Collins and Stephen King, 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 woman being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.