"I don't think they've figured out yet how to live," a neighbor says of the Berglunds, the family at the center of Jonathan Franzen's new novel. If the publication of Freedom feels like an Event--the author, bespectacled and melancholy, gazing out at the nation from the cover of Time--it is because novelists left behind the question of "how to live" when the Modernists turned away from morality to the mystery of consciousness. In his realist style, Mr. Franzen presents readers with a comprehensive instruction manual for day-to-day living. Like Dickens, Tolstoy and Dreiser before him, Mr. Franzen seeks to represent contemporary life and at the same time interpret it. That his novel, which is a triumph, has received such a triumphant reception is a sign that we are now less interested in books that show us what it is like to be alive than books that point toward what we should do with our lives.

Mr. Franzen opens Freedom with an epigram from The Winter's Tale. It is a play anomalous even among Shakespeare's "late comedies" in that it portrays the ruin of a marriage--when a man suspects his wife of bearing his best friend's child--followed by halted attempts at restoring the old order, only to discover the solution in a new generation. This is eventually accomplished by divine intervention--an oracle brings to life a statue of the man's departed wife, and they are reunited in love, leaving their children to start their lives anew, mindful of their parents' mistakes.

Mr. Franzen's novel holds a mirror to Shakespeare's tragicomedy: By the third act, Freedom's feckless patriarch, Walter Berglund, failing to see his own fault in the matter, loses his wife, son and best friend, not to mention the daughter that has always been absent from his life. He feels betrayed by them all. All the characters, meanwhile, are trapped in their own failings, working up to the moment when they can be released from the concrete shell of disappointment and discover how to live.

Freedom begins with a kind of simulacrum of itself--the novel's events distilled to 30 pages of objective prose set in gentrified St. Paul. The first paragraph tells us, in part, what the novel will be working up to: "a long and unflattering story in the Times" about Walter. Indeed, this first section reads like a New York Times profile of a troubled family's history, the information delivered as if through quotations from neighbors peering through the windows for years.

Walter, a friendly, levelheaded liberal, takes a job at a conservancy in Washington. The neighbors are confused as to why The Times calls him "the fiend of Washington." Meanwhile, his beautiful wife, Patty--a fallen Midwestern college basketball star--is having a nervous breakdown. Instead of greeting the neighborhood with celebratory cupcakes, she drinks a bottle of white wine in the middle of the day and slashes the tires of her Republican neighbor's SUV. Their teenage son, Joey, has moved into the house next door with his girlfriend and her high-maintenance mother who--surprise, surprise--lives with the neighbor who had his tires slashed.

Through the lens of this typical middle-class family--typical because of all the skeletons piled up in the closet--Mr. Franzen explores the last decade in America. But, a testament to Mr. Franzen's ruthless talent, he also uses the last decade in America to make sense of his fictional family. "How to live?" and "What happened to the Berglunds?" are questions of equal weight in the reality of the novel.

The book travels from St. Paul to the University of Virginia, to a secluded family cabin on "Nameless Lake," to the warehouse of a South American arms dealer, across the entire country, back to the past and into the present, throughout the history of the family and the 21st century. At its center is the love triangle between Patty, Walter and Walter's best friend (and the novel's best character), Richard Katz, a struggling punk rocker with a striking resemblance to Muammar el-Qaddafi, who makes good late in life, only to betray Walter and find his success utterly empty. The focus moves from character to character, the events of the past decade chugging along unapologetically as everyone's lives collapse, and the pieces delicately glued back together.

A sizable fraction of the novel is taken up by the "autobiography" of Patty Berglund ("Composed at Her Therapist's Suggestion"), titled "Mistakes Were Made." (Again, are we talking about one family or America?) Tongue firmly in cheek, Mr. Franzen retells the history of the family from Patty's more knowledgeable perspective. Her voice is indistinguishable from Mr. Franzen's own. "Funny how the trick works," the "autobiographer" writes in a self-conscious moment, "the transfusion of confidence through simple words." She is an allegory for the real-life cranky Mr. Franzen, the author's stand-in, acting out his critique of the upper middle class. Whereas Mr. Franzen's political viewpoints have, in the past, felt overwrought and intrusive, here they are Patty's viewpoints rather than the novelist's cagey attempts at making an appearance in his own book. 

And so, even for all of its involvement in contemporary society, what Mr. Franzen has composed is a marriage drama in the sense of a Victorian novel: The romance goes on in spite of the catalog of social life being compiled around it; nothing can derail the marriage narrative--not affairs, not war, not history--until the happily-ever-after, or the death or remarriage of one of its members. The relationship of Patty and Walter is less a metaphor for contemporary society, as was arguably the case with the deterioration (both physical and symbolic) of Enid and Alfred in The Corrections ("Something terrible was about to happen," he wrote at the beginning of that novel, talking about the crumbling bodies of his central couple, but really referring to the end of the so-called American Century), than contemporary society is a metaphor for Patty and Walter's marriage. "It's kind of a bottomless pit, once you get into it," Patty says after a particularly torrid indiscretion with Richard, speaking in general about her marriage, her class status, even commenting, vaguely, on the stupendous depths of Mr. Franzen's characterizations.

The book's one glaring flaw is that it loses sight of the romance's importance in the last third, refocusing instead on Patty's foil and Walter's much younger mistress (and co-worker at the conservancy), Lalitha, easily the most thoughtless character here, a vapid representation of "young people and their capacity to do good in the world." Frustratingly, the book's final image is of Lalitha's face, leaving a sour aftertaste.

This is, however, a minor complaint, especially for a novel that is such a pleasure to read yet so intricately structured. Mr. Franzen points to the promise of a new generation discovering how to live as a result of their parents' mistakes. Herein lies the meaning of the novel's title. The past is freed from its burdens through the future's forgiving eye (it is no mistake that the setting of Freedom is slightly deferred to not-quite-present day, around the middle of the past decade, allowing us to wallow in the failures of recent history, but also, one hopes, at the benefit of not making the same mistakes twice). And yet, in spite of hope and promise, of the old throwing down its shackles and giving way to the new, this younger generation is, in part, tragic for its remaining focus on the shards of the past. At what cost is order re
stored? Mistakes were made and they will be made again. As Enid in The Corrections discovers only in the last act of her life that she will make a change, how late is too late to learn how to live? This question goes unanswered, but that is also the point. It is only fitting that a book that begins with questions ends with questions that are even more difficult to answer. By some miracle, the center can hold, but does anyone really know how to live?

mmiller@observer.com