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Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of world 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 download for free PDF ebooks; 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 causeless observations. They grow surprisingly from the themes that animate “Freedom” beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout American history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for most of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power”.

That twinning is where the trouble starts. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a phrase
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — 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 personality susceptible to the imagine of oceanic freedom is a person also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and fury 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 authorize it.

The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most depressingly, but also most variously and dynamically — within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible range. The family romance 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 particular theme, as it is no one else’s today.

The Corrections impregnated in the cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, showed 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 Midwestern parents, who keep to loom over their lives, disapproving idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its consequent evils. Locked together in liabilities, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forgive, to talk, to break the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed memory.

In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked sinistrous. Created a day before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West 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 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 James Wood 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 New York! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.

“The Freedom” did not so much decline all this as surgically remove 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, car 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 Jackie Collins and Tolstoy, 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 human being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.