Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of english 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 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 free of charge observations. They come on organically from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout American 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 begins. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a concept
J. 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 personality susceptible to the dream of bottomless freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage as Franzen writes. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can validate it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most oppressively, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible rate. The family romance 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 theme, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections saturated in the socio-cultural atmosphere of the 20th century, described the hopeful changes 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 Midwestern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent illnesses. Locked together in duties, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of needs — to forget, to explain, to solve 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 week before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, 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 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 book that might destroy the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James Wood objected at the time, curiously arrested documents that know a million 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 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 trustworthy humanism. His fictional canvas teemed with information — about equity finance, railroad engineering, currency manipulation in United States, the neurochemistry of clinical depression. But the data flowed through the arteries of narrative, just as it had done in the romances of Dickens and Tolstoy, 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.