On August 17, 1959, American novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen was born. An accomplished author with quite a few novels and nonfiction works under his belt, Franzen has won numerous awards including the National Book Award in 2001 for The Corrections and the Thomas Mann Prize in 2022.
Franzen tends to write multilayered works, often centered around familial relationships and their daily American lives. He’s a divisive author: some call him contrived, others praise everything he publishes.
If you’re curious to see what all the chatter is about, here are a few works to try:
A small Midwestern town during the height of the Vietnam era is the setting for Franzen’s masterful, Tolstoyan saga of an unhappy family. Members of the dysfunctional Hildebrandt clan are deeply flawed, insecure, cringe-inducingly self-destructive, and, in Franzen’s psychologically astute rendering, entirely authentic and human. This masterpiece of social realism vividly captures each character’s internal conflicts as a response to and a reflection of societal expectations, while Franzen expertly explores the fissions of domestic life, mining the rich mineral beneath the sediments of familial discord.
The End of the End of the Earth (2018)
A compulsive need to find order, and a love of birding, represent two of the central threads of this stimulating collection of previously published essays from novelist Franzen. Throughout the essays that follow, Franzen muses about writing, Edith Wharton, climate change, Antarctica, the photographs of Sarah Stolfa, and birds, always birds. Whether observing the eerie beauty of Antarctica or dispensing “Ten Rules for the Novelist,” Franzen makes for an entertaining, sometimes prickly, but always quotable companion.
Pip (Purity) Tyler is burdened with college debt, a minimum-wage job, and a needy yet withholding mother who lives as a recluse under an assumed name. The identity of Pip’s father is a taboo subject. Enter the shadowy, Julian Assange-like CEO of the Sunlight Project, Andreas Wolf, purveyor of all the Internet’s hidden truths. With less than pure objectives, Wolf offers Pip a researcher position at his South American headquarters. The cathartic power of tennis; the debilitating effects of jealousy; the fickle, fleeting nature of fame; and the slow death of youthful idealism are all beautifully captured.
“Use Well Thy Freedom”: this motto, etched in stone on a college campus, hints at the moral of Franzen’s sprawling, darkly comic new novel. The nature of personal freedom, the fluidity of good and evil, the moral relativism of nearly everything—Franzen takes on these thorny issues via the lives of Walter and Patty Berglund of St. Paul. Granola moms, raging Republicans, war profiteers, crooked environmentalists, privileged offspring, and poverty-bred rednecks each enjoy the uniquely American freedom to make disastrous choices and continually reinvent themselves. Franzen reveals a penchant for smart, deceptively simple, and culturally astute writing.
Ferociously detailed, gratifyingly mind-expanding, and daringly complex and unhurried, Franzen’s novel aligns the spectacular dysfunctions of one Midwest family with the explosive malfunctions of society-at-large. At once miniaturistic and panoramic, Franzen’s prodigious comedic saga renders family life on an epic scale and captures the decadence of the dot-com era. Each cleverly choreographed fiasco stands as a correction to the delusions that precipitated it, and each step back from the brink of catastrophe becomes a move toward hope, integrity, and love.
And if you already enjoy Jonathan Franzen, here are some read-a-likes:
Joyce Carol Oates
In this collection of macabre short stories, Oates extends the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson in her own unique arias performed by characters assailed by mental illness and intent on destruction.
After her husband comes down with a mysterious illness, Michaela contemplates widowhood at age 37 and refuses to surrender her love. Fecund with fear and anguish, and driven by raw, breathless narration, this hallucinatory tale will not disappoint.
David Foster Wallace
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
In his startling and singular new short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. Venturing inside minds and landscapes that are at once recognizable and utterly strange, these stories reaffirm Wallace’s reputation as one of his generation’s pre-eminent talents, expanding our ides and pleasures fiction can afford.
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
Partially written before his death, author David Foster Wallace presents a fictitious version of himself as the protagonist in his final novel. When Wallace arrives for training at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, everything appears normal. However, as Wallace quickly learns, normal just isn’t the case. From the bizarre boredom-survival training to the wild personalities among his co-workers, Wallace is convinced the IRS is determined to dehumanize and humiliate him.
Anne Tyler
In the Garrett family, each person is an island, mysterious and self-contained, yet, as Tyler reveals so deftly, all are inextricably connected. Her latest Baltimore-anchored, lushly imagined, psychologically intricate, virtually inhalable novel is a stepping-stone tale, with each finely composed section jumping forward in time, generation by generation. It’s a characteristically homely, resonant metaphor from a writer who understands that the domestic world can contain the universe.
Redhead by the Side of the Road
A fastidious everyman weathers a spate of relationship stresses in this compassionate, perceptive novel from Tyler. Her warmly comedic, quickly read tale, a perfect stress antidote, will delight her fans and provides an excellent “first” for readers new to this master of subtle and sublime brilliance.
-Linnea
Read it or Weep 