One review will note that he is “widely regarded as the leading novelist of his generation,” another that he is a George Eliot for our time, spawning a thousand outraged reactions and hot takes-note the glee with which the Los Angeles Times asked “Is Jonathan Franzen too big to fail?” Because you know Jonathan Franzen has half a dozen unfinished manuscripts about a mediocre white guy in 2008 who works for a bank that was too big to fail. Like Halley’s Comet, Jonathan Franzen draws great attention on the rare if regular occasion a new novel appears. (I am almost certain I have used that phrase correctly.) Love him or hate him, Franzen gets the clicks, as the kids say these days. You’ve seen it on the subway or the bus, tucked under an arm or ostentatiously on display you’ve seen it in the airport, piled up in a ziggurat in front of a thousand bookstores that only sell three books you haven’t opened up a major newspaper or literary journal (including this one) without seeing a review, a reflection, a brief notice: It is Crossroads, the latest notice that Jonathan Franzen Is Officially Back.
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