J. Franzen’s “Corrections” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of American fiction. The two books are very similar. 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 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 uncaused pronouncements. They come on surprisingly from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a word 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 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 personality susceptible to the imagine of oceanic freedom is a personality also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and anger as Franzen writes. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to run one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone should 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 range. The family romance is as old as the English romance itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s exceptional subject, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections saturated in the socio-cultural atmosphere of the 20th century, showed the hopeful changes 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 Eastern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant diseases. Locked together in obligation, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of needs — to forgive, to explain, 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 portentous. Published a day before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 90s problems (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East 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 break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Wood objected at the moment, curiously arrested ebooks that know a million different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the fish market in London! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Corrections” did not so much refuse all this as surgically change 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 South Africa, 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 Stephen King, Bellow 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.
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