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Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of world literature. These novels 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 gratuitous pronouncements. They come on surprisingly from the themes that animate “The Corrections” beginning with the title, a word 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 twinning is where the problem starts. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a phrase
Jonathan 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 imagine of infinite freedom is a personality also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and heat as Franzen writes. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to run 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 variously 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 particular subject, as it is no one else’s now.

The Corrections impregnated in the socio-cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, 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 idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent sicks. Locked together in responsibilities, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of wants — 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 year before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 1990s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious South Africa 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 romance that might break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James Wood objected at the time, curiously arrested books that know a million different things — the recipe 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 Freedom” did not so much repudiate all this as surgically remove 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 South Africa, the neurochemistry of clinical depression. But the data flowed through the arteries of narrative, just as it had done in the romances of Dickens and Stephen King, Danielle Steel and Sidney Sheldon. 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 woman being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.