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Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of world fiction. These novels 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 books; 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 “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 twinning is where the trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a concept
J. Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we blankly 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 oceanic freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and irritation as Franzen remarks. And the dream 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 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 novel 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 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 Eastern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent troubles. Locked together in responsibilities, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of wants — to forgive, to explain, to solve the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed mind.

In other words, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked sinistrous. Published a day before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 90s problems (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious South Africa 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 John Wood 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 repudiate all this as surgically correct 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 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 romances of Jackie Collins and Tolstoy, Danielle Steel 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 human being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.