Recommended by Dr Hudson
While not quite reaching the stratospheric heights of this writer’s The Corrections from 2001, the set pieces in this doorstep of a novel still manage to combine absurdity and grim humour in just the right amounts for this reader – I will not soon forget such scenes as the tense but comic events one night in an East German dacha or the involved shenanigans with a nuclear warhead, for instance: I can say no more without spoilers. It’s a vast, sprawling modern-day epic with plenty of post-modern self-reference – the number of Jonathans whose books regularly feature in the review section of the New York Times, say, or references to Julian Assange alongside a character clearly based on the WikiLeaks founder.
Franzen casts a cynical eye on relationships in the USA and Europe over
the past fifty years and he particularly seems to have it in for parents
(arguably, especially mothers), which led one critic to compare it with Larkin’s
‘This Be the Verse’. I can see the connection, not least in the black comedy of
both. It’s fiercely well-researched – especially perhaps the sections centring
on the collapse of the Berlin Wall – and entertainingly imagined. Some
longeurs, perhaps, but overall a thoroughly engaging and impressive piece of
work. I laughed out loud several times.
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