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Jonathan Franzen’s new romance, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of world fiction. These 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 uncaused observations. They grow organically 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 problem begins. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a phrase
J. Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we fecklessly 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 dream of infinite freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and anger as Franzen remarks. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to run one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone must 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 rate. The family romance is as old as the English-language novel itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s special subject, as it is no one else’s now.

The Corrections impregnated in the cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, described 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 Midwestern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant troubles. Locked together in obligation, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of wants — to forgive, to explain, to break the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed memory.

In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked direful. Created a week before 9/11, Franzen’s novel, 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 John Bond objected at the time, curiously arrested ebooks that know a thousand different things — the formula 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 remove 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 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 novels of Dickens and Stephen King, Bellow and Sidney Sheldon. 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.