” In 1996, Franzen made a reckless public vow. He did it in the pages of Harper’s, in a bitter, eloquent, intensely personal essay titled “Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels.” The big socially engaged novel was dead, he declared, killed off by TV. Serious postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo were doomed to irrelevance. Contemporary readers wanted entertainment, not news, engaging stories, not ideology. This knowledge filled him with despair.
But he did more than just diagnose the problem. He implied that he could solve it…
His novel is as clever as those of the brainy postmodernists he admires but infinitely more accessible. Like DeLillo and Gaddis, he dazzles the reader with trenchant riffs on contemporary life — everything from mood-enhancing pharmaceuticals to bisexuality to cruise-ship culture. But rather than relay his thoughts about the world through chilly rhetorical pyrotechnics or plots of mind-boggling complication, Franzen embeds them in the lives of affecting human characters.”
Review and preview of The Corrections. New York Times
