The portions of The Corrections that follow the Lambert brood of Baby Boomers in their anxious adulthood take place in the late 1990s, but much of the novel dips back into the ’70s of their youth, before the advent of the internet afforded them the sort of global perspective we now take for granted.įranzen also locates the Hildebrandts, the clan at the core of Crossroads, in the ’70s-and they, too, live in strained and stifling circumstances. Detritus accumulates, canned food succumbs to rot, and Alfred, who suffers from Parkinson’s, has been urinating in stray coffee cans. For all Enid’s attempts at cheerful decoration, the once-tidy rooms of the Lambert residence are in revolt against her fantasy of order.
In The Corrections, the winner of the 2001 National Book Award, his subjects were Alfred Lambert, a retired railroad engineer, and Enid Lambert, a disaffected housewife intent on enticing her three unhappy offspring home for Christmas. His true territory is the quietly disintegrating household-and his most consuming interest is the existential distress that so often molders within it. In fact, the real province of Franzen’s work is even more narrowly circumscribed.
In keeping with his commitment to the local, his latest novel, Crossroads-which is nearly 600 pages long and is only the first installment of a trilogy, the rather grandiosely titled A Key to All Mythologies-unfolds in the township of New Prospect, outside Chicago proper.
The Corrections (2001), the book that launched him to celebrity, centers on the fictional midwestern suburb of St. Louis but in the unassuming suburb of Webster Groves, where Franzen himself grew up. The protagonist of his debut, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), languishes not in the eponymous city of St.
His characters don’t hail from New York or Los Angeles, or even Boston or Minneapolis, but from the margins of already marginal cities. Yet his fiction is typically set in claustrophobic enclaves. This may sound like a curious characterization of a writer who has sweated to position himself as an encyclopedic chronicler of wide-scale cultural change in each of his five fat novels to date, the shortest of them clocking in at 517 pages. J onathan Franzen writes big books about small lives.
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