J. Franzen’s “Corrections” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of American fiction. These books 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 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 observations. They come on organically 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 biggest part of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power”.
That parallel is where the trouble begins. 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 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 boundless freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage as Franzen writes. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to run one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone have to validate it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most sharply — most depressingly, but also most variously and dynamically — within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible rate. 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 20th century, described the promising 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 idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant illnesses. Locked together in businesses, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — 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 direful. Published a month before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East 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 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 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 million different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in London! 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 added in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic 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, Bellow 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 woman being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.