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Jonathan Franzen’s new romance, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of American literature. The two books 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 get for free PDF documents; 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 uncaused observations. They come on organically from the themes that animate “The Corrections” 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 twinning is where the problem starts. As each of us seeks to assert his private liberties — a phrase
J. Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we fecklessly 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 personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and heat as Franzen remarks. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone have to authorize it.

The imagine-power ratio is lived out most sharply — most oppressively, but also most diversely and dynamically — within the family, since its participant orbit one another at the closest possible range. The family romance 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 exceptional subject, as it is no one else’s now.

The Corrections impregnated in the atmosphere of the 90s, described the promising corrections 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 keep to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant diseases. Locked together in businesses, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the round of needs — to forget, to talk, to solve the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed mind.

In other words, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked sinistrous. Created a week before 9/11, Franzen’s novel, set against a panorama of 1990s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy West Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious Japan 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 book that might break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James 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 fish market in Detroit! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.

“The Corrections” did not so much reject 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 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 Dickens and Stephen King, Danielle Steel 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.