7/1/2023 0 Comments Franzen trilogy![]() ![]() In a quiet and uncanny fashion it is entirely adequate: a prosaic causeway coursing through the swamp at night. Unpolished and unsloppy, difficult to quote or fault, his free indirect style sticks to the contours of consciousness and attempts not one thing else. The Corrections was a masterpiece, but Crossroads is his finest novel yet. In playing to his strengths so inordinately he has unlocked a new, late style, distinct from the well-hewn blocks of prose poetry typical of his first three novels or the mashed-potatoes-and-gravy consistency of his last two. To set a novel half a century in the past, as he now does, is something like dealing oneself a full house. In dreams, as a once-famed tale from the Depression had it, begin responsibilities. Giving up, for now, in Crossroads, on representing present youth, Franzen has doubled down on representing the white ones’ parents and grandparents as the impressionable, inquisitive, and dynamically flawed young men and women that they once had been. ![]()
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