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Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterpiece 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 get for free PDF books; 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 causeless pronouncements. They come on surprisingly from the themes that animate “The Corrections” beginning with the title, a word 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 problem starts. As each of us seeks to assert his personal liberties — a concept
Jonathan Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — 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 personality susceptible to the dream of unbounded freedom is a person also prone, should the imagine ever sour, to misanthropy and irritation 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 should authorize it.

The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most oppressively, 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 novel itself — indeed is ontologically indivisible from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen’s exceptional theme, as it is no one else’s now.

The Corrections saturated in the atmosphere of the 90s, described the hopeful corrections improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, adults manques lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Eastern 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 consequent sicks. Locked together in responsibilities, 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 memory.

In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked direful. Created 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 South Africa 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 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 thousand different things — the formula for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the fish market in London! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.

“The Freedom” did not so much refuse all this as surgically change 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, car 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 romances of Dickens and Tolstoy, Bellow and Mann. 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 woman being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.