The Freedom Agenda
Jonathan Franzen’s new romance, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of english literature. The two 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 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 gratuitous observations. They come on surprisingly from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a phrase 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 parallel is where the trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a concept
J. Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we blankly collide 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 dream of bottomless freedom is a person 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 embrace it too. They alone have to validate it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most oppressively, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its participant orbit one another at the closest possible rate. The family novel is as old as the English novel 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 now.
The Corrections saturated in the cultural atmosphere of the 20th century, showed the hopeful corrections improvised by the three lost Lambert family members, 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 idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant illnesses. Locked together in obligation, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forgive, to talk, to break the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed mind.
In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked direful. Created a day before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 1990s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast restaurants, 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 romance that might destroy the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James Bond objected at the moment, curiously arrested ebooks that know a thousand different things — the recipe 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 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 authentic 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 books of Gilbert Patten and Tolstoy, Bellow 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 woman being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.