You will never feel the same way about people named Patty or Walter again. They seem like simple names, don't they? And yet in this novel they stand for an immense amount of yearnings (of sex, money, goodness, obligation...) carried through the generations. Which is the way Franzen works: family impacts who we become in the most surprising ways.
In the introduction to "Infinite Jest," Dave Eggers makes this comparison: that we can read both David Foster Wallace but also Franzen (and in fact, Wallace and Franzen were good friends), and they fulfill different things in us. In his categorization, he puts Franzen as the mass market read, the breezy social drama - which, I don't know. Franzen's fiction concerns itself with social networks/capital, but that's nothing new in the literary world. What makes Franzen so addicting (not to mention so hipster and elitist friendly)? Maybe it's because ultimately his fiction is humbling. His characters are hapless (but not harmless unfortunately) and built on miscommunication. You want them to succeed and to recognize their faults, whose consequences are so much larger and grow so much more tragic than anyone could have thought possible.
All right, I have a bunch of Times' crossword puzzles I've been ignoring...
xo t
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