‘Freedom’, Jonathan Franzens big follow up novel, arriving some ten years after his widely acclaimed ‘Corrections, is trumpeted as a great American novel for our time, and worthy of a Tolstoy. This may be pushing things a bit far, but like Corrections, there is plenty to enthuse about this latest offering. Set against the backdrop of some very contemporary American preoccupations, Franzen delivers a web of moral dilemmas that do serve to challenge some of our more routine assumptions about ourselves. The characters and plot may be a little contrived in places, and our own Zadie Smith seems rather superior in this department, but that doesn’t overly detract from us enjoying all those moral conundrums that Franzen conjures up, conundrums that we all create for ourselves in our daily neurotic lives.

And underlying the usual family dramas complete with their guilt’s, resentments and absurd expectations and ambitions, lay the ever present existential void. Try as we might to fill that void with family, religion, politics and projects of every conceivable description, that void keeps on gnawing away- keeps on beckoning. Rich or poor, young or old, no one is totally immune. Franzen seems to grasp this as well as any modern novelist. It is this unsettling sense of an all pervading absurdity lurching behind our lives, more than all the busy comings and goings of his main protagonists, which makes this an intriguing book as well as a damn good read.

The story is contemporary in that it deals with the arrival of the global financial crisis and the looming ecological crisis, as well as historically specific events like 9/11, the Iraq war and the Obama presidency. To get a flavour of this contemporary backdrop to the novel consider the following passages between two characters, Jonathan and Joey, with Jonathan taking an anti-war stance and Joey being the pro-war advocate: Meanwhile the country was at war, but it was an odd sort of war in which, within a rounding error, the only casualties were on the other side. Jonathan was sourer than ever. He was fixated, for example, on Iraqi antiquities that had been stolen by looters from the National Museum. ‘That was one little mistake,’ Joey said. ‘Shit happens, right? You just don’t want to admit that things are going well.’ ‘I’ll admit it when they find the plutonium and missiles tipped with smallpox,’ Jonathan said. ‘Which they won’t, because it was all bullshit, all trumped-up bullshit, because the people who started this thing are incompetent clowns.’ P339

A few pages earlier we had learnt of Joey’s direct complicity in Iraqi war profiteering. Joey’s summer position at the think tank had been one of five directly funded by LBI, and his job, though ostensibly advisory to government entities, had consisted entirely of researching ways in which LBI might commercially exploit an American invasion and takeover of Iraq, and then writing up these commercial possibilities as arguments for invading.’ P388

It is not difficult to ascertain from these two passages just where Franzen’s political allegiances lay. If the immorality of the war is unambiguously laid bare by Franzen, the moral dilemmas of the main characters are anything but straightforward. Franzen has this to say of Joey: And Joey, whose own interest in the war was primarily financial, but who’d taken moral refuge in the thought that wiser minds than his had better motives, began to feel that he’d been suckered. It didn’t make him any less eager to cash in, but it did make him feel dirtier about it.’ P400

If the Iraq war and the associated profiteering is one central thread running through the novel, dire ecological disaster is another. Walter, Joey’s estranged father, was heavily into saving the planet but he is continually compromised by his strategy of working hand in glove with some big mining companies and other unsavoury corporations including the war contractor, LBI. Walter finally confronts his moral dilemma head on in a speech that was originally intended to reconcile the two irreconcilable positions. Franzen’s plot may lack subtlety and credibility at this point but it does give the author a chance to lay his ecological cards on the table. And he does so with great effect. Walter pontificates: And now that you’ve got these jobs at this body-armour plant you too can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa and South America! You too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they’re not turned on! But that’s OK, because that’s why we threw you out of your homes in the first place, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It’s a perfect world, isn’t it? It’s a perfect system, because as long as you’ve got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don’t have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch ‘Survivor: Indonesia’ till there’s no more Indonesia!’ P483

A third big ‘American theme’ that Franzen toys with is that of impending economic collapse, a theme still happily playing itself out across the globe. Franzen brings in economic matters late in the story but it is effective and cleverly done nevertheless. Franzen writes: The country had stumbles into deep economic recession, the stock market was in the toilet, and it seemed almost obscene of him to be still obsessed with songbirds. Even the retired couples on Canterbridge Court were hurting the deflation of their investments had forced several of them to cancel their annual winter retreats to Florida or Arizona and two of the younger families on the street had fallen behind on their mortgage payments and seemed likely to lose their homes.’ P546

The Iraq War, ecological catastrophe and financial ruin all loom large, making ‘Freedom’ truly a contemporary novel but it is the human angst that permeates each of the central characters that really makes this a novel for our times.