How Franzen's “Freedom” was almost a great novel

I finally read Jonathan Franzen's long novel “Freedom,” five years after it was published. I don't read many modern novels because I usually find them intellectually arrogant, merely pornographic, and always modern-liberal.

Franzen is of course a modern-liberal but he is also a literary genius, and because he is a genius he very effectively holds his mirror up to modern liberalism, that is, environmentalism, overpopulation, sustainable agriculture, and so on, and so on, which are important, but massive government programs are not the way to resolve these issues---to his credit Franzen does ridicule neoconservativism.

But Franzen's beautiful mirror of nature leads to becoming unintentionally a striking condemnation of the wasteland of modern-liberalism with no way out other than individualistic love between lost people. Love is of course important but divorced from a larger religious sensibility it can become sterile. Religion has had answers to what purpose we are born, although I think traditional religion limits life's purposes to experiencing the ascetic Inward Path to the God or Father Within, which secondarily points to Franzen's love as the answer, and that is not enough.

The universe is orderly and meaningful, material life evolves to supermaterial Godhood, with starts and stops along the way, which is the real purpose of life and religion. Art and religion can both affirm this meaning and purpose. The material and the supermaterial are as one. To change T.S. Eliot, this is not a dead land, this is not a cactus land, only the Inward Path requires the blocking of all material desires to experience the God Within. Art can affirm the sacred Outward Path with evolutionary realism, as life evolves toward outward Godhood.

So for those reasons I think the novel was “almost” a great novel. I could have defined it as great if Franzen had retained his genius paean to modern-liberalism but then at the end, with the denouement, his characters had discovered paleoconservatism, or better yet, affirmed the ethnopluralism hypothesis as the way out of the devastation of modern liberalism. And deeper than that would be an affirmation of theological materialism for the lost world of modern philosophy. But then it might not have found a publisher.