The Freedom Agenda
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of world literature. These books are very similar. 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 pronouncements. They come on 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 problem starts. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a phrase
J. Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we blankly 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 person susceptible to the imagine of unlimited freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and irritation as Franzen writes. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex 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 oppressively, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible range. The family romance is as old as the English-language romance 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 90s, 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 Midwestern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant ills. Locked together in businesses, 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 sinistrous. Created a year before 9/11, Franzen’s book, 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 American 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 time, curiously arrested documents that know a million different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the fish market in New York! 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 inserted 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 South Africa, 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 Stephen King, 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.