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Jonathan Franzen’s new romance, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece of American fiction. These 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 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 gratuitous pronouncements. They come on 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 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 implications — we fecklessly 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 unbounded freedom is a person also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and fury as Franzen writes. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to run one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone can authorize it.

The imagine-power ratio is lived out most sharply — most depressingly, but also most diversely 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 inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s particular subject, as it is no one else’s now.

The Corrections saturated in the atmosphere of the 1990s, showed the hopeful 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 Eastern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant sicks. Locked together in obligation, 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. Published a month before 9/11, Franzen’s romance, set against a panorama of 1990s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East 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 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 Wood objected at the time, curiously arrested documents that know a million different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in London! 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 inserted 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 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 Gilbert Patten and Tolstoy, 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 woman being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.