Nine years have passed since Jonathan Franzen published "The Corrections," which is the collective favorite novel of my band. The book is so excellent because Franzen captures the turn of the 21st century in stupendously dizzying yet accurate fashion. Wealth, social decorum, affairs, post-Soviet disintegration, pharmaceuticals -- it's all there in one long sweep written so fluidly that the pages turn without thinking. Since then, he published a collection of essays and a memoir (both of which I own, one of which I've read), but it just isn't the same.
Then, last year, a short story appeared in the New Yorker. In the May 31 issue there was another one, which I read last night, featuring the same characters, indicating they're novel excerpts, and on the Contributors page, news that Franzen "will publish his fourth novel, 'Freedom,' in September"! The excerpt has the same trademark sweep that makes his work so great. Such as:
"Patty's mother was a professional Democrat. She later became a state assemblywoman, the Honorable Joyce Emerson, known for her advocacy of open space, poor children and the Arts. Paradise for Joyce was an open space where poor children could go and do Arts at state expense. She was born Joyce Markowitz in Brooklyn in 1934, but apparently disliked being Jewish from the earliest dawn of consciousness...Joyce got a scholarship to study liberal Arts in the woods of Maine, where she met Patty's exceedingly Gentile dad, whom she married at All Souls Unitarian Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan."
Franzen somehow combines the irritating, pathetic, winning and lovely personality traits everyone has into his characters so that they veer towards stereotypes but always land in the territory of natural emblems of 21st-century life. No one else does that these days.
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