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Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of American literature. The two 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 documents; 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 uncaused pronouncements. They grow 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 biggest part of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power”.

That parallel is where the trouble starts. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a phrase
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we helplessly face 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 boundless freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and fury as Franzen remarks. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to run one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can validate it.

The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most oppressively, but also most variously and dynamically — within the family, since its participant orbit one another at the closest possible range. The family romance is as old as the English romance itself — indeed is ontologically indivisible 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 impregnated in the atmosphere of the 20th century, showed the promising changes improvised by the three lost Lambert family members, adults manques lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Western Seaboard, escaping the Depression ethic of their Eastern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent diseases. Locked together in obligation, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of wants — to forget, to explain, to break 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 grim. Created a day before 9/11, Franzen’s novel, set against a panorama of 1990s 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 destroy the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Wood objected at the time, curiously arrested books that know a thousand different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in New York! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.

“The Freedom” did not so much repudiate 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 trustworthy humanism. His fabricated 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 romances of Gilbert Patten and Stephen King, Danielle Steel 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 woman being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.