Peace and War (Published 2010)

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom,” like his previous one, “The Corrections,” is a masterpiece of American fiction. The two 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; 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 observations. They grow organically from the themes that animate “Freedom,” beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout American 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 trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his “personal liberties” — a phrase Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we helplessly 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 limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage,” as Franzen remarks. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can validate 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-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 today.

“The Corrections,” saturated in the ­socio-cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, described the hopeful “corrections” improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, adults manqués lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Eastern Seaboard, escaping the Depression ethic of their Midwestern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant ills. Locked together in obligation and duty, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forgive, to explain, to solve the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed memory.

In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliché. Also the timing looked ominous. Published a week before 9/11, Franzen’s novel, set against a panorama of ’90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of “the rambunctious American economy,” might have seemed fatally out of step with the somber new mood.