Jonathan Franzen knows his Pynchon, but he loves Dickens, too. Half brainiac hipster (like Brown classmates Rick Moody and Donald Antrim, he spins clued-in riffs almost without thinking), half social anatomist, Franzen finds the minor rivalries and major calamities of stay-at-home moms and workaday dads as dramatically compelling as the tides of multinational finance. In its mostly successful attempt to encompass the personal reverberations of the... More >>>