The Corrections Agenda
Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of english literature. The two novels have much in common. 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 download 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 causeless observations. They come on organically from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout United States history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for biggest part 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
J. Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we blankly collide 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 bottomless freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and anger as Franzen writes. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to run one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone should validate it.
The imagine-power ratio is lived out most sharply — most depressingly, but also most variously and dynamically — within the family, since its participant 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 exceptional theme, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections impregnated in the atmosphere of the 20th century, described the hopeful 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 Eastern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent illnesses. Locked together in businesses, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of wants — to forget, to talk, to break the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed mind.
In other words, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked direful. Published a year before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 90s problems (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast night clubs, 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 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 destroy the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Wood objected at the time, curiously arrested books 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 Corrections” did not so much reject all this as surgically change 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 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, Bellow and Sidney Sheldon. 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.