Jonathan Franzen’s “Corrections” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of American literature. The two books are very similar. 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 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 causeless observations. They grow organically from the themes that animate “The Corrections” beginning with the title, a phrase 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 trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a phrase
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — 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 personality susceptible to the dream of boundless 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 follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone must authorize it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most depressingly, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its participant orbit one another at the closest possible range. The family novel is as old as the English-language romance itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s special theme, as it is no one else’s today.
The Corrections saturated in the atmosphere of the 20th century, described the promising changes improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, adults manques lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Eastern Seaboard, escaping the Depression ethic of their Midwestern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant troubles. Locked together in duties, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of wants — to forget, to talk, to break 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 portentous. 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 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 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 drug market in Paris! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.
“The Freedom” did not so much repudiate all this as surgically change 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 fictional canvas teemed with information — about equity finance, railroad engineering, currency manipulation in Eastern Europe, 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 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.
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