![]() ![]() ![]() He didn’t write it for his mother, who he says “became a full, amazing person in the last years of her life,” exactly, but he’s taken a significant departure with it-keeping an eye on the sort of story she might have enjoyed by taking a kinder tack toward his characters. His upcoming novel, Crossroads, is meant to be different. The anger he’s long harbored, manifested in everything from his self-admitted road rage to his vocal hatred of social media, informed his five previous novels, from his 1988 debut, The Twenty-Seventh City, to 2015’s Purity, he says. A homemaker who died of cancer in 1999, his mother, Irene, continues to be influential in the author’s life. “You must have observed the person carefully and you must have identified what’s likely to hurt the most, and then there’s the rhetorical challenge of delivering the painful blow without having your fingerprints on it,” he says. “It requires a high level of subtlety,” says the 62-year-old novelist from his home in Santa Cruz, California. His new novel, Crossroads, the first in a projected trilogy entitled (with typical Franzenian grandiosity) A Key to All Mythologies, has all the same elements of his previous books, yet it. Jonathan Franzen’s mother knew how to wound him in just the right way. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |