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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 ebooks; 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 grow organically 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 most of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power”.

That twinning is where the trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a concept
Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we fecklessly 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 imagine of bottomless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and anger 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 authorize it.

The dream-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 novel itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s special theme, as it is no one else’s today.

The Corrections saturated in the atmosphere of the 1990s, described the hopeful changes improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, 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 gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent evils. Locked together in businesses, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forget, to talk, to break 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 grim. Created a year before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West 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 Corrections” 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 break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James Wood objected at the moment, curiously arrested documents that know a million different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in Detroit! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.

“The Freedom” did not so much repudiate 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 authentic humanism. His fictional canvas teemed with information — about equity finance, car 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 Dickens and Tolstoy, Bellow 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.