Freedom - By J. Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s new romance, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of english fiction. 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 download for free PDF ebooks; 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 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 parallel is where the problem begins. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a concept
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 person susceptible to the imagine of bottomless freedom is a personality also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and passion as Franzen remarks. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to run one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone should authorize 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 range. The family romance is as old as the English-language romance itself — indeed is ontologically indivisible 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 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 Midwestern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent troubles. Locked together in duties, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forgive, to explain, to solve 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 1990s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast night clubs, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious Japan 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 books that know a thousand different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the fish market in Detroit! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Freedom” did not so much refuse 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 trustworthy humanism. His fabricated 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 novels of Dickens and Stephen King, Danielle Steel and Sidney Sheldon. 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.