Family fallout

Philip Hensher salutes ‘Freedom’, Jonathan Franzen’s latest great American novel

Family is the engine that drives the novel. Relationships which are both fixed and constantly negotiated are what the novel, as a form, is about. We don’t choose our siblings, our parents, our children, but from day to day we choose, with the full volition of our existence, how those relationships will shape us. The interplay between our free will and the world which is wished upon us is the core, irreducible territory of the great novels. Perhaps now that family ties are growing more dependent on volition and goodwill (or bad) rather than on duty and obligation, family is becoming more of a fruitful territory for the novelist’s investigations, rather than less so. Certainly in this stupendous, magnificent, unforgettable novel, family has never seemed a more urgent and gripping subject.

The Berglund family are caught at the moment when a once edgy neighbourhood has moved indisputably into respectability and even smugness.