ABSTRACT
Even during the heights of postmodernism’s imperial reign, it’s clear that the American novel retained an interest in the family. Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that the postmodern novel’s internal clock — its typical temporal rhythm — ablates the scope of the family’s involvement. While the opening paragraphs are clearly designed to function contrapuntally, this is not a rigid, mechanical distinction, and there are, of course, moments where we find Jonathan Franzen’s treatment of the family overlaps. The smallness of a family situation in the context of natural systems lies at the core of this shift: while The Corrections is content to see the family as a mirror of nature, with each competing sibling occupying an ‘adaptive niche in the family ecosystem’. Like a diagram of a family tree, flowing from the narrow point of the first ancestors down to the broad fan of the many descendants, Freedom’s architectural logic is governed by a genealogical pattern of repetition and expansion.
