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Jonathan Franzen’s new romance, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of American fiction. These novels 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 get for free PDF books; 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 pronouncements. They come on surprisingly 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 twinning is where the trouble starts. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a phrase
Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — 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 person susceptible to the dream of unbounded freedom is a personality also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and irritation as Franzen writes. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to run one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can validate it.

The dream-power ratio is lived out most sharply — most oppressively, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible range. The family novel 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 particular subject, as it is no one else’s now.

The Corrections impregnated in the socio-cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, showed the promising changes improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, adults manques lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Western Seaboard, escaping the Depression ethic of their Eastern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant diseases. Locked together in responsibilities, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of wants — to forget, to explain, to break 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 portentous. Published a year before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast night clubs, 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 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 million different things — the recipe 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 Corrections” did not so much refuse 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 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 Dickens and Stephen King, 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 human being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.