Jonathan Franzen

The slow but steady dying of the little river city of St. Louis, MO is stopped all of a sudden when a new sheriff comes to the city. The sheriff is S. Jammu — a young woman of Indian descent sporting impressing charisma. Shortly after her installation, the heads of the St. Louis administration get dragged into a masterpiece political conspiracy turning the American Dream taken within the limits of one community into an ironical and scary swirl of events. Get it all and more on the pages of The Twenty—Seventh City — a recognized contemporary fiction bestseller.

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen is an autobiography telling how this prominent author of the late twentieth century grew from a fundamentally ridiculous person, which is how he refers to himself in his early years, into an adult with objectionable preferences and passions. Franzen turns out to be overwhelmingly interested by the world around him — by the potential of Christian youth organizations in the 1970s, by the impact produced by the works of Franz Kafka on the peculiarities of his loss of virginity, on all the petty interconnections between his enviably absorbing marriage, the behavior of birds and the global warming. The Discomfort Zone is a brilliant work of literary art — intelligent, stylish and filled with humor.

The work that follows Franzen´s widely noticed debut novel of 1988 called The Twenty—Seventh City. Love set against the background of an environmental catastrophe looks absolutely amazing in separate scenes even though it turns out to be self—destroying in the novel taken as a whole. The action described takes place in Boston while it´s living through an earthquake damaging and killing many of its citizens, among whom is the rich grandmother of the story´s protagonist Louis Holland. Louis´s family inherits a huge fortune but the young man himself gets nothing — even after he gets fired from the local radio station he used to work at. The only thing that colors up his rather grey life is the presence of his girlfriend Rene Seichek — a Harvard seismologist researching the nature and the causes of the earthquake. The abnormal seismic activity seems to be the result of extended dumping of toxic waste into an underground depository located under the local chemical plant. Rene´s activity turns out to be fairly risky — she gets assaulted, which results in a critical wounding. Louis finds her and nurses her to good health even in spite of their breakup and Rene´s abortion that preceded the assault. His tender love and care are opposed to the ravaging nature — the continuing series of shocks destroys the chemical plant and causes widespread damage in its vicinity. In spite of the justice being established in the background, the bright dichotomy between the romance and the environmental catastrophe in the front is left unresolved. The same with Louis´s conflict with his family, himself and the world around him — the fact that it remains open turns him into a protagonist who´s rather detached from the reader. A very ambitious work that, unfortunately, seems to overreach itself in the end.

The worst thing about life is the fact that every person has his or her own reasons. This is how Octave was putting it in her dialogue with Marquis in Rules of the Game by Renoir. Looks like this could be used as a prescription to a whole lot of contemporary novelists. Jonathan Franzen doesn´t seem to be the case though — in his novels he prefers creating fully alive characters with incredibly complex minds and patterns of behavior to creating those characters that could be liked by the readers. This is even more than just observable in his fourth novel titled Freedom — the one that was preceded with 9 years of silence after the publishing of The Corrections. Freedom is not any worse than the abovementioned book, by the way. It dwells upon the lives of Patty and Walter Berglund — a cute jock crazy about sports and a phlegmatic yet promising lawyer who meet each other and melt into a seemingly typical Midwestern family who build their life together, slowly but surely losing track of each other along the way. The steady flow of their story is often interrupted by the Big Issues — rock´n´roll, war profiteering, mountain—top mining — and often merges with them inseparably. Still, what matters most here are the characters themselves — as you read the novel, you actually learn to love them even though they often lack that boring model charm or goodness. You love them because they have their own reasons, which are no longer a secret for you.

The Corrections is a mesmerizing novel by Jonathan Franzen focusing on the life of a rather eccentric family (Midwestern again) and describing it in a unique mixture of bitterness and humor. There´s a set of promisingly good Christmas homecomings gone terribly wrong in this story — all of them happening with the Lamberts, who are the family in the focus of attention. Alfred Lambert, the elderly paterfamilias, is slowly but surely giving in to Parkinson´s disease. Ironically, one of the global pharmaceutical corporations is in the process of developing a treatment of Parkinson´s based on one of Alfred´s inventions. His tragedy is far not the only one in the family though — his wife´s stubbornness and his children´s problems often outshine it. The mature couple´s daughter, Denise, is constantly in trouble — both at her work as chic chef and in her personal life. One of her brothers, Chip, loses his job in college for hooking it up with a student and switches on to experimenting with his potential skill in screenwriting — with hardly any success though. The second brother, Gary, is balancing on the verge of going insane in his unhappy marriage. Franzen´s bitter satire regularly makes the lives of all five of them evoke smiles in readers, even though the whole storyline is just drenched with sorrow.

Being a really intelligent yet a really insolent writer, the author of the renowned The Corrections Jonathan Franzen makes a perfect social critic but a terrible brother—in—law. His book titled How to Be Alone comprises 14 essays, most previously published in numerous different editions, among which there are The New Yorker, Harper´s and others. Those essays cover a wide variety of problems — the peculiarities of American novel (“Why Bother?”), tobacco industry, the Big Apple, public obsession with privacy, new penal institutions, etc. The description of the ordinary world in Franzen´s “My Father´s Brain” where he tells about his dad and his fight against Alzheimer´s becomes totally mesmerizing. However, it should be said that it´s not always that easy to discern Franzen´s own point of view on this or that problem as he often reflects the ideas of the opposing sides of an argument in his speculations. Ambiguous thoughts on privacy and tobacco industry might obfuscate the reader but the perception of small—town America of the past as the true cradle of privacy is obviously true and highly topical. His unique style is vivid in his works — take that quote about the “hydraulics of insincere smiles”, for instance. Meanwhile, some of his shorter works seem to be performing the filler function in How to Be Alone. There´s one thing you can tell for sure: the angrier Franzen gets in his writing, the brighter he shines — this is what you will definitely be able to understand in “The Reader in Exile”.

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