The Corrections Agenda
Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of english literature. These books are very similar. 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 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 free of charge pronouncements. They grow 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 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 personal liberties — a concept
J. Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we helplessly 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 personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and irritation as Franzen writes. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone must validate 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 rate. The family romance 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 exceptional subject, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections saturated in the cultural atmosphere of the 20th century, described the hopeful corrections 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 continue to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant sicks. Locked together in obligation, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of needs — to forgive, to explain, 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 novel, 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 break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Bond objected at the time, curiously arrested documents that know a thousand different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in Paris! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Corrections” 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 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 novels of Jackie Collins and Stephen King, Bellow 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.
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