Understanding Jonathan Franzen

Understanding Jonathan Franzen Synopsis

The first comprehensive study to address Franzen's work to date, including his latest novel, Crossroads.

Jonathan Franzen—novelist and essayist—is a critical darling, commercial success, and magnet for controversy. His third novel, The Corrections (2000), was selected for Oprah's book club, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the National Book Award. Franzen has been featured on the cover of Time and in an episode of The Simpsons. Love him or hate him, the publication of each new novel is a literary event.

In Understanding Jonathan Franzen, Timothy Galow studies Franzen's first five novels plus his most recent, Crossroads, which was published to much fanfare in 2021. He opens with the Oprah controversy—Franzen, it seems, did not want his books to be popular—and goes on to unpack the author's ambivalent relationship to his status within the "Theory Generation" of 1980s college graduates turned writers and the postmodern threads that run throughout his work. For Franzen, the social and individual are inseparable. Galow examines why Franzen's stories of (white, bourgeois) American life have inspired and provoked readers for over two decades.