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Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of world fiction. These novels have much in common. 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 ebooks; 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 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 phrase
Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — 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 boundless freedom is a person also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and rage as Franzen writes. And the desire 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 oppressively, but also most variously 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 novel 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 cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, described the hopeful changes 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 attendant troubles. Locked together in responsibilities, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of wants — 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 sinistrous. Published a month before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 90s problems (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious United States 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 novel that might destroy the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as John Bond objected at the time, curiously arrested ebooks 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 Corrections” did not so much decline 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 trustworthy humanism. His fabricated 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 books of Gilbert Patten 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 man being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.