Where to Start with Jonathan Franzen: A Reading Guide

Jonathan Franzen (born 1959) is the most celebrated — and most contentious — American novelist of his generation, whose two major novels The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010) are among the most discussed works in contemporary American fiction. His subject is the American family as the site where social, political, and individual forces meet and conflict; his method is the nineteenth-century social novel, adapted for an America defined by consumer culture, political polarization, and the gap between American ideals and American reality. His prose is controlled, his psychology is acute, and his ambition is among the largest in American letters.

Where to Start: The Corrections (2001)

The essential Franzen — and one of the defining American novels of its decade. The Lambert family: Alfred, a retired railroad engineer whose Parkinson’s disease is advancing and whose emotional unavailability has shaped his children’s lives; Enid, his wife, who has spent her marriage managing Alfred’s bleakness and now wants one final family Christmas in St. Jude, Missouri; Chip, the failed academic in New York; Gary, the depressed Philadelphia banker waging psychological warfare with his wife; and Denise, the celebrated chef whose personal life is in ruins.

The novel is a complete portrait of an American family — its loves, failures, resentments, and the ways children are damaged by parents who meant well and could not deliver. Franzen’s comedy is dark but very funny; his psychological precision is extraordinary; his account of Alfred’s mental deterioration is one of the most difficult and most honest accounts of dementia in American fiction.

Freedom (2010)

Franzen’s second major novel — larger in scope than The Corrections, spanning three decades and engaging more directly with the political landscape of post-9/11 America. Walter Berglund, an idealistic Minnesota environmentalist who goes to work for a coal company as a means of funding bird conservation; Patty, his wife, a former college basketball star whose limited suburban life is suffused with unfulfilled desire; their son Joey, who breaks away and makes his own moral compromises; and Richard Katz, the rock musician whose presence disrupts the Berglund marriage.

The novel is narrated partly through Patty’s own memoir — a formal device Franzen uses to create distance and irony between how Patty presents herself and how she actually behaved — and its 640 pages encompass war profiteering, environmental catastrophe, and the full range of failures that a generation of liberal Americans made with their freedom. A magnificent novel.

Purity (2015)

Franzen’s most recent major novel — more plotty and more globally ambitious than its predecessors, following Pip Tyler, a young American woman burdened by student debt and ignorance of her father’s identity, who becomes involved with a Julian Assange-like figure running an online transparency organisation in Bolivia. The novel’s multiple narratives span Cold War East Germany, contemporary Bolivia, and the American Midwest, and its themes — secrecy, idealism, the ethics of transparency — are Franzen’s most explicitly political. Less focused than The Corrections but more ambitious in scope; the best Franzen for readers who want something genuinely global.

Reading Jonathan Franzen

Franzen’s novels are long, dense, and richly rewarding — he is a writer who believes that fiction can do what the nineteenth-century novel did, which is to map a society’s contradictions through the intimate experience of families. His comedy is sharp and his psychology is precise; his political awareness is significant but never overwhelms the human stories at the centre. Begin with The Corrections: it is his most perfectly controlled novel and the best demonstration of his particular gifts. Continue with Freedom for the larger canvas; continue with Purity for the most international perspective.