Before he finishes a single sentence, he can take for granted that there will be a wide audience for it. In this world, he has the time, money, and freedom to do nothing but write what he pleases. His publicist has not been too embarrassed to say that he is ‘universally regarded as the leading novelist of his generation’. In the actual world, however, Franzen’s face has been captioned ‘Great American Novelist’ on the cover of Time.

Aside from his anxiety about how much time teaching and administrative duties take away from his ‘real work’ as a novelist, whether his diminishing royalty checks will be enough to cover his mortgage and his adopted son’s college tuition, and whether it would be wise to keep flirting with the sole female member of his small group of student acolytes, the greatest drama in his life occurs when he periodically becomes the main character on Twitter for saying something hopelessly out of touch – pile-ons he less-than-discreetly attributes to other writers’ envy for his hard-won success. Despite his misgivings about the effect of social media on print culture, he also has a Facebook page, which he uses to promote his readings and share photos of his outings with the local birding society, and a Twitter account, which he uses to retweet positive reviews and post about Julian Assange. He still has his bylines at the New Yorker and Harper’s (in fact, he writes for them more frequently) he still has his books (even if they’re all a bit shorter, one of them is a collection of short stories, and his translation of Spring Awakening lives with his unpublished notes on Karl Kraus in the Amish-made drawer of his ‘archive’) he still has his awards (except his NBA is now an NEA).

There is a world, not too dissimilar from our own, in which Jonathan Franzen is a professor of creative writing at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest.

Crossroads franzen review