![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Clem’s unsettling attachment to his sister Becky colors his every decision, and her rejection of him leads ultimately to a rejection of her family. Marion sees signs of her own youthful downfall in Perry’s increasingly drugged-out behavior. The family’s frustrations and fears are deeply interwoven. In a time when Americans are reading less-and even fewer read literary fiction-Franzen stands alone as a writer whose novels are treated as events. ![]() The children aren’t doing any better: Their son Perry becomes convinced of his own damnation, daughter Becky is trying to get dreamy folk-rocker Tanner to break up with his girlfriend, and the college student Clem declines the student draft deferment because he believes it has made him as weak as his father. His frustrated wife, Marion, wants either to lose some weight or her crippling need for self-control. The patriarch of the family is Russ, a local pastor at First Reformed Church who longs to regain his edge-and in the process to sleep with his congregation’s most eligible divorcee. It is two days before Christmas 1971, and the novel follows the fates of the Hildebrandt family, each on a quest for ill-conceived self-fulfillment. The story opens in New Prospect, a fictional Chicago suburb much like the one in which Franzen was born. Following 2015’s techno-paranoiac misfire Purity, Franzen’s sixth novel marks a return to the Midwestern realism of his National Book Award-winning novel, The Corrections. ![]()
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