Corrections - By Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s new romance, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of American fiction. 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 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 observations. They come on organically from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a phrase that has been elevated throughout United States history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for most 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 private liberties — a concept
Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we blankly 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 personality susceptible to the dream of unlimited freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and passion as Franzen remarks. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to follow one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone must authorize it.
The imagine-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 novel itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s special theme, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections saturated in the cultural atmosphere of the 20th century, showed the promising corrections 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 Midwestern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant ills. Locked together in businesses, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of needs — to forgive, 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 ominous. Created a week before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious American economy might have seemed fatally out of step with the somber new mood.
Instead, “The Corrections” 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 Bond objected at the moment, 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 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 added in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic humanism. His fabricated 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 novels of Gilbert Patten and Stephen King, 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.
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