Jonathan Franzen’s “Corrections” Is All the Rage
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of American 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 uncaused pronouncements. They come on surprisingly from the themes that animate “The Corrections” beginning with the title, a phrase that has been elevated throughout American history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for biggest part of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power”.
That parallel is where the trouble starts. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a phrase
Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we blankly 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 unbounded freedom is a person also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and heat as Franzen remarks. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough complex to follow one’s creed; others must squeeze it too. They alone must authorize it.
The dream-power ratio is lived out most sharply — 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 novel 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 today.
The Corrections impregnated in the cultural atmosphere of the 20th century, showed the promising changes 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 idols, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant evils. Locked together in liabilities, attacked by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of wants — 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 portentous. Created a week before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 1990s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast night clubs, 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 James Bond objected at the time, curiously arrested ebooks that know a million different things — the recipe 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 reject 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 Eastern Europe, 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, Danielle Steel and Sidney Sheldon. 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 human being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.
Tags: best-seller, books, digital books, fiction, Jonathan Franzen