Why Read Jonathan Franzen?
Apparently, Jonathan Franzen is a polarizing figure – both in real life and with his fiction. I know few readers who have read more than two of his BIG critically acclaimed novels. I know quite a few who have read none and despite my enthusiastic endorsements, may never. While maybe he is a prickly pear in person, his books aren’t. Each book has gotten better, from the first snarky predictable family dysfunction world of Corrections to his most recent and most compassionate effort, Crossroads. I think he is a great writer though I have a hard time pinning down why. One thing for sure is that with each book, you are reading sparkling prose and perfectly pitched dialogue from a writer just beginning to reach his peak. I could not wait for Crossroads and eagerly anticipate the second installment of this emerging trilogy. Given the gestation periods of his previous works, the wait may be long. Thus, my unexpected dive into his third BIG novel, Purity.
Immersed in searing heat somewhere in Mexico, I ran out of books. The absentee owner of the house had a beat-up hardback edition of Purity. A week later I had finished its almost 600 pages and resolved that I will never miss another Franzen novel. His writing and his subjects have a Victorian relationship to scope and detail. The prosaic feels important, almost profound. Add a similar gift for philosophical digression, and Franzen begins to reincarnate George Eliot (particularly in Middlemarch). Not all that much happens but it all seems to matter. Each character is flawed but in an ordinary sort of way. The quotidian nature of our lives MATTER. I think this is his genius. He is not elevating his characters and the internal and external dialogues into anything obviously transcendental or even instructive; rather, it is their realness and Franzen’s gift of transparency that makes his works unlike any other writer alive today. He does not require literary tricks or melodrama. His social agendas are apparent but always secondary. His is a sincere world of thought and words that produces profound empathy and awareness.
Okay … I have tried. Below is my current ranking of the BIG FOUR. Go at it … please.
CROSSROADS
PURITY
FREEDOM
CORRECTIONS
