About the book:
Franzen's second novel, before The Corrections made him a household name.
Earthquakes in Boston as backdrop to a family unravelling and a young man's affair with a seismologist twice his confidence.
Less polished than his later work, but you can watch him sharpening the instruments he'd use later.
Worth having for completists and for readers who want Franzen before he became Franzen.
Condition:
Great secondhand condition.
Age related tanning to pages.
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About the author:
Jonathan Franzen (1959 Present)
Born in the suburbs of Chicago and raised outside St. Louis, Franzen has spent his career doing something unfashionable and difficult: defending the big, ambitious, socially engaged literary novel at a moment when the culture has made sustained attention progressively harder to sustain. He is its most visible champion and, at times, its most awkward ambassador.
His first two novels arrived quietly. The Corrections (2001) did not, it won the National Book Award, became a cultural flashpoint, and generated the most discussed literary controversy of the decade when he made snobbish comments about Oprah's Book Club selection, fretted publicly about the novel's readership, and was disinvited as a result. The episode calcified his public image as a defender of literary difficulty against mass culture, a role he has occupied with varying degrees of grace since. Freedom (2010) sold enormously, landed him on the cover of Time as "Great American Novelist," and reignited the same arguments about who the serious novel is for and who gets to be taken seriously writing it.
The novels themselves are better than the controversies. He uses the American family its dysfunction, its love, its failure to protect its members from history as a prism for examining what the United States actually is: its consumerism, its ecological catastrophe, its confusion of freedom with selfishness. The Midwest is his home territory in the way Newark was Roth's. He is funnier than he is given credit for.
His influences are Tolstoy and Dickens in ambition and scope, Flaubert in prose precision, and the experimental American tradition of William Gaddis, whose difficulty Franzen has written about seriously. Don DeLillo and Philip Roth are the immediate predecessors; he is consciously working in their line. His essays collected in How to Be Alone and Farther Away are essential reading on literature, technology, and ecological grief, and include one of the most devastating pieces written about David Foster Wallace, his friend and generational foil, after Wallace's death in 2008.
His influence is still working itself out he's a recent enough figure that the writers shaped by him are only beginning to be visible. What's clear is that he has kept a certain idea of the novel alive through a period that did its best to declare it obsolete.
