Jonathan Franzen has, for the second time in a decade, created an irresistible portrait of a family and helped define the absurd world we live in. "Freedom," his new book, and "The Corrections," its predecessor, are at the same time engrossing sagas and scathing satires, and both books are funny, sad, cranky, revelatory, hugely ambitious, deeply human and, at times, truly disturbing.

Together, they provide a striking and quite possibly enduring portrait of America in the years on either side of the turn of the 21st century.

Franzen, who turned 50 last year, is advancing the time frame of his novels as he grows older. "The Corrections," which won the 2001 National Book Award, was about the Lambert family; father, mother and three grown children. The parents live in a suburb much like Webster Groves, where Franzen grew up. They are the age of Franzen's parents.

"Freedom" is about the Berglund family of St. Paul. This time, the parents are Franzen's age.

Franzen seems driven by the ambition to define his generation and, while he's at it, the generation that came before his and the one that comes after. Although "Freedom" reaches as far back as the 19th century to trace the lineage — and probes for the inherited characteristics — of the book's complicated characters, the main focus is upon "the Bush years," the nomenclature signifying for Franzen not just a specific eight-year stretch of time at the beginning of the century but a period of astonishing greed and corruption. (Although he only appears in asides, then Vice President Dick Cheney, with his ties to energy conglomerates and military contractors, both of which play major roles in the plot, hovers scowling over the narrative.)

"Freedom" is, on one level, social satire, satire that in some of its scenes of fearless, take-no-prisoners lampooning can be reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Kurt Vonnegut. When one character takes time off from college to enmesh himself in a Byzantine get-rich-quick scheme that would supply defective trucks for the war in Iraq, it's hard not to think of Joseph Heller.

But Franzen is interested in his characters as much more than satirical puppets, and we get to know the Berglunds very well, although they remain to some extent mysterious — in other words, they seem like human beings.

The Berglunds are sometimes unpleasant, and unpleasant things happen to them, but Franzen also gives us surprising moments of grace, as in a scene of the triumphant renunciation of evil that could have come straight out of a Frank Capra movie. The ending is also graceful.

When we meet the Berglunds — Walter and Patty and their children Joey and Jessica — they are moderately happy, solidly anchored in a restored home in a gentrifying area of St. Paul, perplexed by the usual quandaries of liberal urban pioneers: "How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood? … Was it better to offer panhandlers food, or nothing?"

Walter, a lawyer whose "most salient quality" is "his niceness," works in corporate giving for 3M, a comfortable finesse between doing good and doing well. And Patty is a unifying force in the neighborhood, "a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen."

The only intruder into the liberal bourgeois beehive is a neighbor named Carol Monaghan, a single mother who flicks her cigarette butts from a second-floor window into a neighbor's kiddie pool and whose trashy live-in boyfriend is intent on denuding the property of trees with his ear-busting chainsaw.

Walter and Patty are coping until young Joey begins sleeping with Carol's daughter. Patty is enraged and for a time is so obsessed with the situation that she becomes dysfunctional.

Things fly apart, and within a couple of years, the Berglunds have moved to Washington, where Walter now works for a giant energy company. He is promoting a clearly fraudulent scheme that depends upon the premise that strip-mining is good for the environment.

Patty is attracted to Walter's best friend, a folk-rock musician. Walter contains his lust for his beautiful young East Indian assistant and becomes ever more deeply involved in justifying his strip-mining scam as a means of saving the Earth.

There are several ways in which "Freedom" is about what its title says it is. One is its darkly comic dissection of the excesses of free-market capitalism. The book is also about sexual freedom and its pitfalls, and about people trying to free themselves of the legacies of their genetic heritage and their upbringing. And it reflects on the American concept of personal and political freedom. Discussing Joey and his heritage as the descendant of immigrants, Franzen observes:

"The American experiment of self-government (was) an experiment statistically skewed because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others. … The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage."

Franzen has been accused by more than one critic of overwriting, and it is true that at times he simply wears you out as he digs deeper and deeper into a character without revealing anything new. But when Franzen gets on a roll, his writing is so gorgeous, it's hard to wish he would stop.

Franzen is one of those exceptional writers whose works define an era and a generation, and his books demand to be read.

Harper Barnes is the author of "Never Been a Time," a history of the 1917 race riot in East St. Louis.