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As the plot traverses the last wretched decade – it is, very precisely, a novel of our time – communications technology keeps updating, with a daughter telling the older characters that young people text, they don't email, and blogs becoming part of the comedy.

Elsewhere, a mother and son argue about the qualities of Married With Children. In fact, War and Peace is the only "high" reference point in a novel whose inhabitants mostly speak and think in terms of popular culture – one character even comes from Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of Bob Dylan, and he and his friends are conscious of this connection, sharing a love of the film Don't Look Back. This book, too, is an intimate and profoundly realistic novel of family life and close relationships, with a triangle of characters at its heart who compare themselves with the characters in Tolstoy's War and Peace. It is an extraordinary work, which develops and deepens the immense talent so evident in The Corrections in a way that is at first troubling, then addictive – and then, with mounting satisfaction, convinces you this is simply on a different plane from other contemporary fiction.įreedom has the same seductive narrative impulse that made Franzen's previous family drama so engaging. His hit The Corrections won him an army of readers, then he published a set of provocative cultural essays – and this autumn, Freedom, his first novel since The Corrections, will be finally be published. But there is no excuse for pessimism about the future of serious fiction when a writer such as Franzen is coming into his prime. Only recently, a critic was lamenting the decline of the American novel, the passing of the age of Updike, Roth and Bellow. Jonathan Franzen is the great American novelist reborn, a literary genius for our time. Freedom, like The Corrections, is a microscopically close inspection of a loving but flawed Midwestern family.