Understanding Jonathan Franzen

"Jonathan Franzen, novelist and essayist, is a critical darling, commercial success, and magnate for controversy. In 2001 and 2002, his third novel, The Corrections, was selected for Oprah's book club, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the National Book Award. Franzen has been feature 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. Timothy Galow's Understanding Jonathan is the most comprehensive study of the author's work to date. (Monographs dating to 2008 and 2009 miss the three most recent novels, and a critical biography from 2015 misses two and is more biographical.) Galow opens the book 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 and the postmodern threads that run throughout his work. Subsequent chapters cover his first five novels, and a coda addresses his most recent, Crossroads, which was published to much fanfare in 2021"--