The Corrections Agenda
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of American literature. The two books are very similar. 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 download 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 gratuitous observations. They grow surprisingly from the themes that animate “The Corrections” 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 twinning is where the problem starts. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a concept
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — 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 personality susceptible to the dream of unbounded freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and heat 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 should validate it.
The imagine-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most depressingly, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible rate. The family novel 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 theme, as it is no one else’s now.
The Corrections saturated in the atmosphere of the 20th century, showed the hopeful corrections 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 idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant troubles. Locked together in responsibilities, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of wants — to forgive, to talk, to solve the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed mind.
In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked sinistrous. Published a month before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 1990s problems (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast restaurants, 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 romance that might break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Wood 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 fish market in Detroit! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Corrections” did not so much decline 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 authentic humanism. His fictional canvas teemed with information — about equity finance, car 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 Jackie Collins 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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