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Jonathan Franzen’s new romance, Freedom like his previous one, “The Corrections” is a masterwork of english fiction. The two 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 books; 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 free of charge observations. They grow 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 personal liberties — a concept
Franzen uses with full command of its ideological meanings — we blankly 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 imagine of unlimited freedom is a personality 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 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 acutely — most oppressively, but also most variously 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 romance itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable 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 1990s, showed the hopeful corrections 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 sicks. Locked together in duties, 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 memory.

In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliche. Also the timing looked ominous. Created a year before 9/11, Franzen’s book, set against a panorama of 1990s problems (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of the rambunctious Europe 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 book that might break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James Wood objected at the moment, curiously arrested ebooks that know a thousand 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 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 authentic 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 Gilbert Patten and Stephen King, Danielle Steel 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 human being Franzen, miraculously, had enlarged it.