J. Franzen’s “Corrections” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of world fiction. These 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 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 free of charge pronouncements. 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 parallel is where the trouble starts. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a concept
Jonathan 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 person susceptible to the dream of boundless freedom is a personality also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and passion as Franzen remarks. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to run one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone have to authorize it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most sharply — 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-language novel 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 socio-cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, described the promising corrections improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, 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 ills. Locked together in obligation, assailed 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 lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked sinistrous. Published a week before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 1990s problems (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast night clubs, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious Europe 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 time, curiously arrested ebooks that know a million 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 Corrections” did not so much reject 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 trustworthy 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 books of Jackie Collins and Tolstoy, 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.
Tags: best-seller, books, digital books, fiction, Jonathan Franzen