The Corrections (2001), the book that launched him to celebrity, centers on the fictional midwestern suburb of St. Louis but in the unassuming suburb of Webster Groves, where Franzen himself grew up. The protagonist of his debut, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), languishes not in the eponymous city of St. His characters don’t hail from New York or Los Angeles, or even Boston or Minneapolis, but from the margins of already marginal cities. Yet his fiction is typically set in claustrophobic enclaves. This may sound like a curious characterization of a writer who has sweated to position himself as an encyclopedic chronicler of wide-scale cultural change in each of his five fat novels to date, the shortest of them clocking in at 517 pages. J onathan Franzen writes big books about small lives.
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