Understanding Jonathan Franzen

The first comprehensive study to address Franzen's work to date

Jonathan Franzen 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. Love him or hate him, the publication of each new novel is a literary event. In Understanding Jonathan Franzen, Timothy W. 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 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. Galow examines why Franzen's stories of (white, bourgeois) American life have inspired and provoked readers for over two decades.