![]() ![]() Like Norman Podhoretz, Lena Dunham, and Donald Trump, Franzen in the past two decades has been the sort of white who’s seemingly predestined to command attention (cringing condescension) through egregious error. Slick millennials and zoomer nihilists concur: he’s kind of a dork. For those under a certain age, confessing proudly to a taste for Franzen’s novels just isn’t done. His loyal yet aging audience, his millions, and his National Book Award for The Corrections (2001) are scant protection from the indifference of newer readers and critics that sank the postwar phallocrats, and today’s newer readers and critics have not seen much in Franzen. It’s a fate that Franzen, whose prominence is as close a thing as fiction in this time can offer up to equal Updike’s or Mailer’s Cold War stature, seems eager to acknowledge and avoid. They can’t imagine how much they will lose. It’s 1972 the dinosaurs still stamp and bellow. WHEN, LATE IN JONATHAN FRANZEN’S NEW NOVEL CROSSROADS, a woman, reuniting with an ex-flame after thirty-one years, notes “recent Mailer, recent Updike” on his shelves, the shock of the old is both soft and profound. ![]()
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