J. Franzen’s “Corrections” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of english literature. 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 documents; 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 uncaused observations. They grow surprisingly 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 most of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power”.
That parallel is where the problem begins. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a concept
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we fecklessly 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 personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and heat as Franzen remarks. And the desire will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can validate it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most oppressively, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible rate. The family novel is as old as the English romance itself — indeed is ontologically indivisible from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s special subject, as it is no one else’s now.
The Corrections saturated in the socio-cultural atmosphere of the 90s, described the hopeful changes 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 Midwestern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant ills. Locked together in businesses, 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 other words, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked ominous. 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 restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious American 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 novel that might destroy the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James Wood objected at the moment, curiously arrested books that know a million different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the fish market in New York! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Corrections” did not so much decline 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 trustworthy humanism. His fabricated canvas teemed with information — about equity finance, car 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 romances of Gilbert Patten and Tolstoy, 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.
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