Understanding Jonathan Franzen

By Timothy W. Galow

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 career took off with the publication of The Corrections (2000), which won a National Book Award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His follow-up, Freedom (2009), received so much attention that it started a debate over the politics of critical attention. Love him or hate him, Franzen has proven to be a crucial figure in twenty-first century American letters, and the publication of each new novel has been a major literary event.

In Understanding Jonathan Franzen, Timothy W. Galow studies Franzen's first five novels and surveys his most recent, Crossroads, which was published to much fanfare in 2021. He traces Franzen's work from its roots in late twentieth-century literary theory and experimental postmodernism through the socially conscious family novels for which the author is best known. This careful analysis provides a new lens for viewing each of the works and demonstrates why Franzen's stories of (white, bourgeois) American life have inspired and provoked readers for over two decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781643363721

Timothy W. Galow

Timothy W. Galow is an assistant professor of English at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He has published widely on American literature, modern celebrity culture, film, and contemporary rhetoric. Galow’s most recent work is Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-Fashioning

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CHAPTER 1

Understanding Jonathan Franzen

There are about 20 great American novelists in the generations that follow me. The greatest is Jonathan Franzen.

—Phillip Roth, endorsement for Franzen’s second essay collection, Farther Away (2012)

In the fall of 2001, Jonathan Franzen’s career took a dramatic turn after his third novel, The Corrections, was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club. His second book, Strong Motion (1992), had been published nearly a decade earlier to mixed reviews and modest sales. Winfrey’s imprimatur, however, opened up new publicity mechanisms and nearly guaranteed financial success. (When she recommended Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a 125-year-old, and nearly 1,000-page, Russian novel that revolves around the titular character’s suicide, Penguin increased its press run by 800,000 [Wyatt].) Franzen’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, immediately ordered an additional 500,000 copies of The Corrections.

Despite the impending windfall, Franzen publicly expressed some ambivalence about the selection. In an interview with the Portland Oregonian, he mused about his place in the high-art literary tradition (Campbell), especially when compared with some of what he would later call the schmaltzy, one-dimensional works chosen by the club (Weich). Just a few weeks later, in an interview on NPR, he complained that the selection might discourage men from picking up the book and imagined that they themselves over there at the Oprah show … they have no idea how they are going to arrange the show because they have never done a book like this (Gross). (Winfrey had previously chosen difficult novels by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and even filmed one episode at Princeton, positioning the author as an academic guide through the complexities of the text.) As Franzen’s comments began to accumulate, Winfrey declined to have the author on her show, though she did not pull her recommendation of his work.

The controversy was covered by news and entertainment outlets around the country. The conflict between a popular Black woman on television and a privileged white man of letters offered a distracting spectacle of loose talk mixed with serious concerns about race, gender, privilege, and media at the turn of the twenty-first century (Green 79). While major news organizations were preoccupied by the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and their aftermath, this entertaining buzz kept Franzen’s name in the press as glowing reviews of his work continued to accumulate.

By the time he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize the following year, his position seemed all but assured. Each of his subsequent three novels has been treated as a major event in the literary world and his follow-up, Freedom (2010), again grabbed broader cultural attention, appearing everywhere from President Barack Obama’s reading list to an episode of the popular television show Parks and Recreation. The book, which spent ten weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list, landed Franzen on the cover of Time magazine next to the headline, Great American Author.

This positive attention, however, has been paired with a seemingly equal amount of controversy. Ira Wells, in a review of Franzen’s novel, Purity (2015), notes that Jonathan Franzen has become—with the possible exception of Kanye West—the most bitched about artist in America. He has drawn the ire of female authors and feminists for his privileged position in what many have described as an insular male literary culture, his fictional treatments of female characters, and comments about women. He suggests, for instance, that Edith Wharton punished Lily Bart, the main character in her novel The House of Mirth, because she possessed the good looks and feminine charms that the author lacked (The End 114). Many have taken issue with Franzen’s dismissive comments about technoconsumerism and the intellectual limitations of social media. He also remains outspoken about literature, speaking provocatively about the book industry (Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen.); book clubs (which, in his youth, he thought treated literature like a cruciferous vegetable that could be choked down only with a spoonful of socializing); and other authors (He chastises John Updike for regularly writing as much as three pages a day!) (What’s Wrong; How to Be 88; Kraus Project 216).

Entire articles have been written tracking Franzen’s controversies and the often-intense criticism that seems to follow him (e.g., Grady, Self). A quick survey of Twitter might make it seem like people purchased Purity simply for the fun of lampooning passages and characters. Less conspicuously, but no less subtly, the URL ciswhitemale.com redirects browsers to Jonathan Franzen’s Facebook page. It is surprising to see so much vitriol aimed at any novelist in this digital age, much less an author whose work, described broadly, seems quite traditional. All of Franzen’s novels revolve around dysfunctional families and their members’ struggles for, among other things, material success, personal fulfillment, and a sense of belonging amidst the vagaries of life. In these terms, Franzen’s books echo the interests of many writers from the twentieth century, perhaps none more closely than that giant of American letters, John Updike. Updike famously described the focus of his work in a 1966 interview with Jane Howard: My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules (Howard).

Franzen’s fiction, too, focuses on white bourgeois (usually midwestern) families, and it revels in the ironies and contradictions that beset their lives. He often likes to introduce characters with a superficial survey that makes them seem Rockwellian. Of course, these images of Good Neighbors, to cite the opening chapter title in Freedom (2010), quickly break down amidst the stresses of everyday life and the unfulfilled desires that beset a superficially ideal existence.

If a certain degree of traditionalism helps to make Franzen’s sprawling novels more accessible, it also, ironically, is part of what makes him seem, as the ciswhitemale joke suggests, a bit out of touch. Following the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, scholars intensified their interrogation of classic book lists populated largely by white men, many of whom wrote about white characters from backgrounds that echo the authors’ personal experience. As a result, American literature curricula have slowly expanded to incorporate a range of new voices, and students have been increasingly exposed to works that provide diverse perspectives on experiences of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, to name just a few of the more prominent categories.

Viewed broadly in such a framework, Franzen’s novels can seem far from novel, and his connections to white male authors of the previous generation, men whose writing has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, is potentially problematic. Novelist David Foster Wallace, Franzen’s friend and rival, refers scathingly to the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar American fiction, a group that includes Updike, Saul Bellow, and the controversial figure whose blurb serves as the epigraph for this chapter, Philip Roth. Some of the men who populate Franzen’s novels, characters such as Chip Lambert (The Corrections) and Andreas Wolf (Purity), are certainly descendants of figures like Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, intelligent but troubled men who wrestle with their desires volubly and flamboyantly (Blair).

Such animated struggles against conformity and complacency constitute something of a countertradition to another version of masculinity depicted perhaps most famously in the early twentieth century by Ernest Hemingway. His heroes were reserved, stoic men portrayed in a terse style that elided reflection for action and dialogue. Yet, by the end of the twentieth century, this reaction to Hemingway’s version of masculinity can also be seen as problematic. Wallace, for instance, argues that the Great Male Narcissists suffer from a radical self-absorption that might once have felt redemptive and even heroic but that has coalesced into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. It is a vision, in other words, woefully out of step with the complex gender dynamics being described by second- and third-wave feminists.¹

Franzen has had his own spats with feminists, and several of his later works have, it would seem deliberately, elements that are more provocatively misogynist. Freedom pits Walter Berglund, a hand-wringing liberal who is practically paralyzed by self-consciousness, against a womanizing punk rocker named Richard Katz. (Richard is often driven by his dick, the subject of several monologues in the work, and cats figure symbolically as instinctive predators.) In Purity, college feminists are, collectively, militant soldiers in bib-overall uniforms, and one of the novel’s potentially more complex characters, billionaire heiress Anabel Laird, is primarily described from her husband’s point of view as a castrating neurotic threatening to swallow his identity. Yet, in Franzen’s books, these depictions are never simple or straightforward.

Stylistic Complexity and Theoretical Complications

On a narrative level, Franzen draws from the work of William Faulkner, dividing his narratives into sections told from the point of view of different characters. Early in his career, Franzen had a tendency to connect these views with an omniscient narrative perspective and clear polemical targets, thus providing a larger perspective that cannot be aligned with any one individual character in a text. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, describes the struggles of the Probst family from the point of view of each of its three members, but all of their stories, to give just one example, clearly reinforce the novel’s broader critique of bourgeois complacency. Their attitudes are in turn generalized after the election at the climax of the book. The low turnout for a momentous and much publicized vote leads the narrator to conclude, The only thing anybody could say had carried by a landslide was apathy (502).

In his more mature works, the narrator intrudes less directly in the narrative and allows a broader range of tensions to develop. Freedom clearly reflects Franzen’s disgust with the Bush administration and its handling of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, but the narrative unfolds through the perspective of four main characters who each embody distinct political perspectives. From this group, no one point of view is ultimately treated as unproblematic. Franzen instead favors a complex interaction of voices as characters struggle with each other and with difficult choices that will transform their relationships. Both approaches prevent the perspective of Martin Probst or Richard Katz from being easily conflated with the views of the author, and they allow competing and often contradictory visions to receive significant attention in the text. The latter works, however, provide less overt interpretive guidance, leaving the author’s attitudes to be inferred from the densely layered plots.

To make matters more complex, Franzen’s novels, which can sound quite dramatic in brief synopses, are full of dark humor and loosely developed satire. As Franzen notes in an interview with journalist Christopher Lydon, his works prior to Crossroads (2021) were often motivated by a desire to be funny at all costs, and even extreme instances of psychological violence ultimately help to get some humor out of bleak events. The often-subtle shifts in tone throughout Franzen’s work can easily complicate literal readings of proclamations, events, and even entire character arcs. Walter Berglund might be, like Franzen himself, a deeply reflective liberal with grave concerns about the environment, but the comedy that the author wrests from his incessant worrying and the ironies that beset his desires to motivate collective action should prevent anyone from treating him as the dominant voice in the text, much less a direct mouthpiece for the author’s political views.

Beyond style, the representational politics of Franzen’s novels are complicated by his own educational background. Nicholas Dames writes about a group whom he calls the theory generation, authors who were college graduates of the late 1970s or 1980s. English departments at the time were devoting significant attention to philosophical texts by feminists, Marxists, psychoanalysts, and, perhaps most prominently, a group of French thinkers often lumped under the broad heading of poststructuralism (159). Franzen has discussed the influence that these texts had on him as a young man, but he has also been relatively dismissive of their subsequent impact. He tends to link them with his less commercially successful early novels and what he often describes as a misguided effort to write books steeped in social critique: In college, I’d admired Derrida and the Marxist and feminist critics, people whose job was to find fault with the modern world. I thought that maybe now I, too, could become socially useful by writing fault-finding fiction (How to Be 246). In The Corrections, Chip Lambert, an assistant professor of textual artifacts at an elite college in Connecticut, similarly believes that his academic dissections of American culture serve an important social function. Such intellectual pursuits, however, are often quite removed from the pressing problems of everyday life, and Chip’s analytic savvy does not seem to help him much as he struggles to make difficult choices. So after losing his job, Chip raises money by selling off his theory collection one piece at a time (92).

Some critics, such as Trevor-Cribben Merrill and Robert Rebein, have elaborated on Franzen’s comments and draw a clear line between his first two works, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, and his first major commercial success, The Corrections. Longer studies of Franzen’s fiction, however, have begun to unsettle such a simple dichotomy, including the two monographs published after The Corrections—Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008) by Stephen J. Burn and The Return of the Real in the Works of Jonathan Franzen (2009) by Sibylle Freitag—and Philip Weinstein’s literary biography released contemporaneously with Purity, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage (2015). These studies are more nuanced in their discussions of Franzen’s development, and this book builds on their insights. It surveys Franzen’s novels and examines how each work redeploys elements from the preceding texts. Unlike works by American authors such as Colson Whitehead or Jennifer Egan, writers who often significantly alter their form from text to text, Franzen’s novels remain, in some striking respects, quite consistent.

Beyond the few key elements of content and style noted above, it is also worth mentioning a few philosophical tendencies that seem to have had a formative influence on his thinking and, subsequently, his fiction. These conceptions are often associated with particular theorists, but they are also prominent in postmodern thought and aesthetics more generally. First, Franzen seems to have been strongly influenced by late twentieth-century approaches to history, particularly the work of Michel Foucault. (The French thinker is mentioned several times in The Corrections and is listed as one of Chip’s beloved cultural historians, the last group of theorists that he sells.) Foucault’s analyses are less concerned with more traditional forms of historical work, detailing events or the actions of significant individuals, and instead explore how discourses and institutions shape thought and agency. These studies situate individuals within larger systems that define choices and circumscribe thinking. Schools, for instance, are not just places where children develop cognitive capacities that help them navigate the world; they are also institutions that inculcate standardized modes of thought and indoctrinate the young into a larger social order. In his inaugural lecture after being appointed to a position at the Collège de France in 1970, Foucault asked, What is an education system, after all, if not a ritualization of the word; if not a qualification of some fixing of roles for speakers; if not the constitution of a (diffuse) doctrinal group; if not a distribution and an appropriation of discourse, with all its learning and its powers? (Archaeology, 227).

Foucault’s emphasis on discourse and speech in this quote echoes a tendency in twentieth-century philosophical thought to view language itself similarly, as a larger system that defines the limits of thought. The argument is perhaps most commonly referred to in literary circles today through Fredric Jameson’s book, The Prison-House of Language. Jameson takes this title from a poetic translation of an aphorism by Friedrich Nietzsche: We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit (i).²

Like many authors across Western history, Franzen is fascinated by the ability of language and narrative to shape perceptions of reality, but his interest often echoes these concerns with constraint and imprisonment common among thinkers in the late twentieth century. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, plays with the paranoid fear, prevalent in a range of postmodern literature, that characters’ thoughts and actions are being controlled by forces just beyond the boundaries of perception. Foucault argues that the larger historical structures constraining individuals tend to develop beyond the control or planning of even the most powerful individuals (A History, 94–5). In Franzen’s comic version, however, the masterminds are revealed to be a cadre of Indian Marxists who have infiltrated the police force in St. Louis. General Norris, one of the few characters in the novel crazy enough to believe that the local police chief, Susan Jammu, is successfully controlling major figures in government, industry, and the media, worries about how easily she manipulates public perceptions: ’Course the way she’s drawn the lines, you may see [her action] as making sense, but that don’t make it right. I can’t stop thinking about Adolph Hitler. The way he drew the lines, total war made sense (295). The power and limitations of language itself become even more explicit when an Indian agent attempts to psychologically manipulate the protagonist’s imprisoned wife by subjecting her to an ongoing fictionalized account of her own life.

If language and narrative are, from one perspective, crucial for the construction of human realities, they are also just one example of the systems and institutions that structure life. All of Franzen’s novels carefully embed characters within complex social frameworks that both directly and indirectly shape more immediate conflicts in the plot. On the broadest scale, most of Franzen’s novels are set roughly during the time periods in which they were written and incorporate major social developments from the period into the narrative. The Corrections involves the globalization of capital in the late twentieth century and refers to the market collapse before the turn of the century. Purity considers the impact of the internet by integrating a Dickensian narrative of family secrets and hidden identities with the story of a WikiLeaks-style organization whose founder conceals his troubled past even as he builds a global reputation for championing transparency. (The one exception is Crossroads, which explores the early 1970s suburbia of Franzen’s late childhood and teenage years. Yet, this book is only the first part of a larger trilogy and, if the past is any guide, subsequent books will likely carry the series forward into the more recent past.)

Within this larger historical framework, Franzen’s novels create a sense of depth in part by carefully positioning characters in a larger matrix of institutions and discourses. People engage with families and neighborhoods, jobs and corporations, religion and politics. Each of these sites of interaction is in turn inflected by prevailing attitudes about gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, and age. Franzen’s explicit attention to his characters’ intersectionality creates a degree of tension in his works, independent of literal struggles in the plot, because it underscores forces that unconsciously influence and constrain individuals as they strive to make positive changes in their lives. Andreas Wolf, the Julian Assange-like character in Purity, rails against his mother even as he bemoans her formative influence on his personality and his own lingering attachment to her. No matter how mentally ill she is or how damaged by the Communist system in East Germany, the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories … Your consciousness opened its little eyes for the first time and discovered that you were headlong in love with your mom (108). Long after Chip has sold off his theory, Franzen continues to imagine characters trapped by inherited conditions, conditions that in part define what it is possible for them to think and feel. They struggle to make corrections but are always tied to complex histories that they only partially understand. As a result, each positive change is, from the reader’s perspective, beset by ironies and complications that at least partially undercut any sense of progress.

If Franzen’s novels problematize notions of development or change, they are also highly critical of characters who refuse the hard, if often