The risk of the state-of-the-union novel is that it dates quickly. If The Corrections was a blockbuster despite Enid Lambert proclaiming that disasters “no longer seemed to befall the United States”, ...

This new book by Jonathan Franzen, sigh, is terrific. In fact, “Crossroads” is one of his best, overflowing with family crisis, morality, mundanity — a nearly 19th century potboiler of ordinariness, ...

Few American writers regularly earn as much conversation as Jonathan Franzen. When advance copies of the 62-year-old’s new novel, Crossroads, began making the rounds, literary Twitter fixated on a bit ...

For some readers, Jonathan Franzen's one-word novel titles signal that he is a storyteller who wants to handle big themes. For readers who already find him aloof and arrogant, even bombastic, the ...

Jonathan Franzen’s mother knew how to wound him in just the right way. “It requires a high level of subtlety,” says the 62-year-old novelist from his home in Santa Cruz, California. “You must have ...

Just about everybody in Jonathan Franzen’s superb domestic epic “Crossroads” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 592 pages, ★★★★ out of four) is dealing with a serious spiritual crisis. Russ, a pastor in the ...

Franzen’s follow-up to The Corrections, published in 2010, was another breeze block of social realism. Freedom returns to the Midwest, its author’s psychic terrain, if no longer his home (he lives in ...

It centres on five members of the dysfunctional Hildebrandt family: Russ, a “liberal Christian pastor”; Marion, his downtrodden wife; college student Clem; and his teenage siblings Becky and Perry.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Then, of course, “The Corrections” happened. Then “Freedom.” “Purity” sold less than an eighth of the previous two novels but ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Just about everybody in Jonathan Franzen’s superb domestic epic “Crossroads” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 592 pages, ★★★★ out of ...