This past September, when Franzen was reading from Purity in Houston, he said that to him, the novel is basically a series of interlinked novellas, that he doesn’t know any other way to do it at this point, because he’s no longer satisfied with just one character, one perspective. While I certainly appreciate the sentiment, this glaring break-from-plot is pretty much going to undermine any possibility of positive reinforcement for his side of the argument, since it’s way too obvious that an argument is what’s being presented. Strong Motion, if I remember correctly, has a character rant for several pages about the antifeminist evils of the pro-life movement. Franzen succeeds in upending expectations (among my criteria for good literature): in the end, it’s the least responsible-seeming of the three who winds up coming through while the other two supposedly more responsible siblings fall apart.įranzen’s first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, were elaborately structured plots of political intrigue largely amounting to moral soapboxes that didn’t conceal their identity as such adequately to this reader, at least. The long saga(s) of what’s happened to each of the kids up to the point of the “last Christmas” is all an extended jockeying for the position of who will (not) be the caretaker. Centered around the Midwestern Lambert family, the three grown children of which have migrated to the East Coast, the plot of the novel is ex plicitly driven by (the acute tension) the question of whether the whole nuclear family will be able to gather for “one last Christmas” (it is supposedly the last Christmas before the house the kids were raised in is sold, the decrepit state of which is a stand-in for the decrepit state of the family itself), while im plicitly being driven by (the chronic tension) the question of which of the grown kids will ultimately be responsible for caring for the ailing parents in their old age.
Even disregarding the whole Oprah thing, I have not personally come across a more polarizing novel than his 2001 National-Book-Award-winning The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen is one fairly controversial middle-aged upper-middle-class white dude.
Characters’ tragic flaws generating plot
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