There are three human institutions that I have long argued are holding back human development; religion, the nation and the family. On the first two it is relatively easy to make a fairly persuasive case and gain a sympathetic hearing, but when it comes to ‘the family’ far fewer people are prepared to entertain its demise. Yes, there are numerous psycho-therapeutic texts outlining the typical neuroses of the family and how best to come to grips with the life long guilt, the buried resentments, the sibling rivalries and the silent Freudian tensions, but very few conclude that the institution of family is fundamentally and irreparably flawed. Psychologists, sociologists and novelists tell us how to comprehend and eventually survive the family, but rarely suggest a model beyond.

Unlike the daring Bolshevik women in the heady days immediately following the Russian revolution, women who called into question anything and everything from the old order, from monogamy and patriarchal dominance to the very institution of marriage and the family itself, most theorists and commentators content themselves with simply trying to unravel the mess that is the modern family, accepting that for all its limitations and neuroses we are essentially stuck with it. Jonathan Franzen, the hugely successful American novelist, seems to be no exception.
A great literary fuss has been made of Franzen’s latest novel, ‘Freedom’, variously described as the first great American novel of the 21st century, equalling earlier giants such as Roth, Updike, and even Tolstoy. Freedom has won numerous literary awards and has variously been described as a masterpiece and ‘a work of art’, so I thought I would use the Christmas holiday period to take a break from matters sporting and find out what all the noise was about. Only, being a little perverse, I opted initially for an earlier work by Franzen, The Corrections, written a decade earlier, to get a sense of where Franzen was coming from and where he might be taking his readers in his latest work.

The Corrections proved to be a absorbing read, tracing the tensions, frustrated aspirations and bitter resentments found in any typical middle-class American family. In fact, on reflection, I would suggest deleting the words ‘middle-class’ and ‘American’ and simply settle for any family of any class and of any nation at any time. The tortured relationships between children and their parents is immediately recognisable even in this age where the nuclear family has significantly crumbled and any number of new permutations has stepped in to the vacuum. What makes Franzen’s story particularly poignant and alive is his willingness and skill in weaving in the broader socio-economic stresses of the day that every family must cope with in addition to those of the micro world of the family.

Two slices of our harsh modern world impose themselves on Franzens central family in particularly dramatic fashion. The first is the takeover of a once proud and successful local railway company by a much larger and ruthless corporation who, in time honoured capitalist fashion, proceed to asset strip the original company destroying hundreds of individual lives and entire communities in the process.

Of course capitalism no longer simply operates within national borders, its rapacious reach is inevitably international. And so it is to Lithuania that Franzen takes his readers as one of his central characters abandons his socialist pretensions and seeks to make a quick killing at the expense of gullible American investors and the newly ‘liberated’ Lithuanian citizens. Franzen writes with vicious clarity: ‘Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America. In both counties, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fuelled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury. (In Vilnius, by November of that dismal autumn, five criminal oligarchs were responsible for employing thousands of carpenters, bricklayers, craftsmen, cooks, prostitutes, barkeeps, auto mechanics and bodyguards.) The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.’ P511

Franzen provides many wonderfully explicit denunciations of capitalism in its various guises; its global IMF and World Bank form, its national American rapacious corporate form, and its local Lithuanian gangsterist form, and the interpenetration of the three. All this corporate skulduggery forms a great backdrop to the unravelling of the central family as they each, in their turn, are revealed as victims of an alienating and dehumanising world where individual dreams seem doomed by uncaring and untouchable forces. If ‘The Corrections’ is typical of what Franzen has to offer, I can’t wait to get stuck into his newest instalment of contemporary family life.

Sport gets only the briefest of passing mentions throughout the six hundred and fifty odd pages but there is a sort of sporting dimension if one includes the repeated imagery of the Ping Pong table. It’s introduced immediately on page one and then crops up on numerous other occasions. Either Franzen is a ping pong enthusiast, amateur or otherwise, and just wanted to give his favourite hobby a plug, or table tennis has some deeper symbolic significance, perhaps representing the endless combative nature of people’s lives, backwards and forwards in some endless bizarre ritual until finally, after numerous corrections, the game is up.

Franzen leaves his readers with a bleak, but paradoxically, optimistic ending. The central characters are left atomised by their respective experiences yet each in their own way finds the strength to carry on. The family unit is mercilessly but realistically disassembled by Franzen but no hint of something better is offered. Is it beyond our imaginations to imagine a world where our children are collectively and socially reared? Are we doomed to raise successive generations of children in the cauldron of family neurosis where each new generation must spend a lifetime trying to shake off the constraints and warped expectations of their parents? Can we not dream of something less stultifying than the nuclear family where we, as parents, are so preoccupied with the success of our own children that we fail to see or care for the welfare of the larger community? Or is it that such a liberating step can only occur when we have the means and the will to socialise our economy?

At the risk of sounding trite, it is possible to glimpse something more collective, more social, more inclusive than the suffocating family unit; that of the humble sports club. Here we can witness countless atomised individuals finding a home, a family, a social network that can allow each to grow and experiment at their own pace and without the usual oppressive expectations that parents invariable load onto their kids. On too many occasions it becomes obvious that youngsters would rather be at their club than at their home. At the sports club, the individual can experiment with different personas without incurring the wroth of parental disapproval. On the other hand the social collective is far less likely to tolerate tantrums and overly egoistic behaviour. Individual behaviour is moderated by a wider social norm, which of course, can also be oppressive in its own way.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that a sports club can in anyway be a direct replacement for the existing family unit that would indeed be simplistic. But it could, along with other collectives educational, residential and vocational slowly replace much of the authority vested in the nuclear family. That is anathema to most parents. In fact, there is a strong argument to suggest that this transformation is already well underway and the traditional family is slowly but surely becoming marginalised, the process being magnified by the proliferation of online social networking where parents are most definitely persona non-grata.

Seen in this light, the supposedly immutable family unit, like its religious counterpart, is suddenly looking a little venerable, a little crumbly around the edges. Paradoxically, as capitalism continues its relentless drive to turn all seven billion of us into atomised consumers, so the institutions that have for so long supported this process, start to morph into something different, something more secular and socially collective. Interesting.