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Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of American literature. The two books have much in common. 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 causeless pronouncements. They grow organically from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a word 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 problem starts. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a phrase
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we helplessly face 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 personality susceptible to the dream of infinite freedom is a personality also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and fury as Franzen writes. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone have to validate it.

The imagine-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most depressingly, but also most variously and dynamically — within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible rate. 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 special subject, as it is no one else’s now.

The Corrections impregnated 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 Midwestern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant sicks. Locked together in obligation, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of wants — to forget, to talk, to solve 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 direful. Created a year before 9/11, Franzen’s novel, set against a panorama of 90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast night clubs, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious United States 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 James Bond objected at the time, curiously arrested books that know a million 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 decline 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, railroad engineering, currency manipulation in Eastern Europe, the neurochemistry of clinical depression. But the data flowed through the arteries of narrative, just as it had done in the novels of Jackie Collins 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 woman being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.