Jonathan Franzen

Author

• Born: August 17, 1959
• Place of Birth: Western Springs, Illinois

AMERICAN NOVELIST

Biography

After attaining a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1981, Jonathan Franzen constructed a writing career. Born in a suburb of Chicago, Franzen claims a midwestern middle-class ethos as his base. His father, Earl T. Franzen, was a civil engineer, and his mother, Irene (née Super), was a homemaker. After a year on a Fulbright Fellowship at the Free University of Berlin, Franzen married Valerie Cornell, a fiction writer, on October 2, 1982. From 1983 to 1987, Franzen worked as a research assistant in earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. He wrote his first novel during the 1980s, earning a fellowship as a Massachusetts Artist in 1986 and the Whiting Writers’ Award in 1988 for The Twenty-seventh City (1988).

The Twenty-seventh City presents the subtle attack of a Marxist terrorist cell against the dowdy and middling city of St. Louis. S. Jammu, the new police commissioner, is an East Indian in league with a handful of recent émigrés seeking to undermine the placid mediocrity of the city’s rich and powerful. The saboteurs engage in several tawdry and nefarious plots, including a bombing downtown. They are blocked by Martin Probst, a contractor famous for constructing the Gateway Arch, a man who is more public-spirited than greedy. Jammu’s counterpart, Singh, seduces and then kidnaps Probst’s wife in an elaborate plan to demolish Probst’s resilience. Throughout the novel, the sense of midwestern values is assaulted and made ironic, though the Indian menace has its share of bumbling and arbitrary success.

In his second novel, Franzen shifts the setting to the environs north of Boston, where unexpected earthquakes lend the book its title, Strong Motion (1992). The protagonist, Louis Holland, is ousted from his job in radio when an antiabortion group buys out the radio station’s owner. Coincidentally, Louis’s loony aunt has just died in an earthquake, leaving his mother in possession of a house sporting a giant New Age pyramid atop its structure. Louis, quick to alienate his mother and his callously selfish sister, chances upon a seismologist, Renee Seitchek, with whom he develops a relationship. She theorizes that the local chemical industry, in which her new beau’s mother is deeply vested through the inheritance, has been using a deep well for dumping toxic wastes, which is the incipient cause of the earthquakes. Renee is shot upon leaving an abortion clinic, and Louis nurses her back to health. Wrongs are later righted when a large quake causes enough damage to reveal the corporation’s culpability in environmental crime.

Franzen became notorious in September 2001 when he expressed ambivalence over having his third novel, The Corrections (2001), included in a book club list promoted by media maven and talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. The novel earned the National Book Award that year. Franzen’s propensity to include a range of social issues is even more noticeable in The Corrections, the story of the Lambert family in decline and fragmentation. At about mid-book, the reader learns that the main plot is the simple attempt of the mother, Enid, to bring all the family together for a last Christmas before the father dissipates in dotage. She is trying to correct a flaw, just as the three children deal with their own corrections.

The Corrections introduces Chip, a former professor of literature and culture who was dismissed for stalking a female student. Barely surviving in New York City, he submits a screenplay that he quickly realizes needs serious corrections. When the project flops, his girlfriend’s ex-lover enmeshes Chip in an Internet promotion scam in gangster-ruled Lithuania. Meanwhile, his sister, Denise, a trend-setting chef, spends a good deal of her life learning her happiness is not in union with a man but in a lesbian relationship—a lifestyle correction. The eldest child, Gary, is caught in a marriage that he cannot correct while he struggles against clinical depression. Instead, as a financial manager, he attempts to correct a missed opportunity his father signed away decades earlier. The father, Alfred, is a cold-fish patriarch, an engineer who married by design and duty, and, in his later years, a victim of age, incontinence, and his stubborn refusal to share emotional attachment with anyone. Nonetheless, the children show up for Christmas, albeit in ironic contradiction of the kind of cheery warmth and goodwill that the season symbolizes. Alfred sinks into dementia and is exiled to a nursing home, where Enid constantly corrects him as a form of revenge for his stinginess. After Alfred’s death, Enid’s vapid determination to begin anew at age seventy-five caps a novel predicated on frustration, dark comedy, and social critique.

In 2010, Franzen released Freedom, a fiction novel that centers around love, a crumbling marriage, and familial dysfunction through the characters' varying perspectives, which Franzen structures as separate yet overlapping narratives throughout different sections of the book. Freedom received favorable critical reception and praise upon its release. In addition to the novel's critical acclaim, Freedom became a commercial success and held a spot on the New York Times Best Seller list for ten weeks in 2010. That same year, Franzen appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Franzen's Time feature marked the first time the magazine honored a living American author on its cover since 2000, when Time featured American horror novelist Stephen King. By 2018, Freedom sold over one million copies.

Franzen released his next novel, Purity, in 2015. Purity follows the story of Purity "Pip" Tyler, a young college graduate who, amid her erratic post-college life, sets out to uncover more information about her biological father. Like The Corrections and Freedom, Franzen structured the plot of Purity through various alternating perspectives among the novel's characters. While The Corrections and Freedom enjoyed commercial success and widespread critical acclaim, Purity debuted with mixed critical reception and lackluster sales when compared to The Corrections and Freedom, with approximately 255,476 copies of Purity sold between 2015 and 2018.

In 2021, Franzen published Crossroads, the first book in the A Key to All Mythologies series. Like several of Franzen's works, Crossroads centers on a family in the American Midwest and establishes the plot of the story through each character's individual narrative. In Crossroads, the Hildebrandts face familial dysfunction and a string of troubling circumstances that test their faith and morality. The novel received generally favorable reviews upon its release.

Franzen is a skilled author who will not allow readers to become too comfortable with his protagonists. Moreover, he plays the role of an author who attempts serious comment in an age that he believes is uninterested in intellectual vigor. His nonfiction articles are mostly concerned with the ethos of being a writer. A reader might laugh out loud while passing through the bizarre and recognizable lives Franzen portrays, but the laughter is tempered by the sheer perversity of the world the author writes about.

Bibliography

"About." jonathanfranzen.com/about. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Brodesser-Akner, Taffy. "Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It." New York Times, 26 June 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/magazine/jonathan-franzen-is-fine-with-all-of-it.html. Accessed 20 June 2024.

Eakin, Emily. “Jonathan Franzen’s Big Book.” New York Times, 2 Sept. 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/magazine/jonathan-franzen-s-big-book.html. Accessed 20 June 2024.

Garner, Dwight. "Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, a Mellow, ’70s-Era Heartbreaker That Starts a Trilogy." New York Times, 27 Sept. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/books/review-jonathan-franzen-crossroads.html. Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.

Grossman, Lev. "Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist." New York Times, 12 Aug. 2010, content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2010185-1,00.html. Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.

"The Problem of Nature Writing." New York Times, 12 Aug. 2023, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-problem-of-nature-writing. Accessed 20 July 2024.