Assessing the Promise of Jonathan Franzen's First Three Novels: A Rejection of "Refuge"

This article attempts a broad-canvassed reading of the three novels Jonathan Franzen has published to date, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Strong Motion (1992), and The Corrections (2001). By analyzing these novels alongside Franzen's extensive non-fiction efforts in the genres of the literary essay and personal narrative, the article uncovers a central and paralytic contradiction in Franzen's thinking about the American "social novel." Franzen's aesthetics suggest that for him the American social novel is to serve as a forum wherein writers and readers consider the intersection of individual lives and the social forces that prevent individuals from establishing community in contemporary American life. At the same time, both Franzen's nonfiction work and his novels undermine the prospect of community by characterizing global capitalism in overwhelmingly deterministic terms.